Your say / daniel farr
‘Why we need a people’s bus in Bristol’
Daniel Farr led an online campaign against bus fares in Bristol. He ultimately achieved a whole-scale review of fares across the city.
The Bristol People’s Bus is a public transport co-operative, owned and run by people living in the city. Unlike existing bus firms we will put local communities’ needs first before profits.
The core team behind The Bristol People’s Bus is a collective of five people, local to Bristol, each from a variety of backgrounds with different skills and current occupations.
However, we all share the aim of redefining local public transport.
We aim to work with different groups and individuals in the city to encourage active participation in creating an alternative public transport model, we also hope to set up a sustainable and affordable independent bus service so we can challenge the cities monopolistic bus system.
Ultimately we want to encourage more people to use public transport rather than cars and most importantly we want to be democratic, open and transparent.
So why is it the right time to launch a People’s Bus service?
Recent years have seen a total breakdown of trust in public transport in Bristol leading to the city becoming one of the most congested cities in the whole UK. We believe this is because existing public transport is too expensive and unreliable so we want to provide an affordable quality
alternative.
Our first step in February 2015 was to launch an online consultation to give people a say in what kind of service of they would like and where they want it to be provided. We found overwhelming support for our vision of a community bus service owned and run by people in the city.
The next step is to organise a public meeting to ensure we hear from a wide range of voices on how we move forward with this project, how will we make it happen financially this could include raising funds through a crowd-funding campaign and applying for grant funding from public bodies and co-operative organizations or sponsorship from local independent businesses.
We will then look to privately hire the bus (depends if we buy or hire the vehicle) and we will charge a small nominal fare per journey.
All our funding, accounts, advertising relationships will be regularly and openly published.
Whoever you are, no matter what your experience, we all have something to say and we want to hear your views about our project. So if you would like to get involved, or you want to find out more, please send us an email to [email protected]
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