The bus from Spalding to Peterborough is to be made an hourly service as part of a new bid to improve connectivity in Lincolnshire.
It’s to be implemented in June this year as outlined in Lincolnshire County Council’s new Lincolnshire Bus Service Improvement Plan that will go before the authority’s Transport and Highways Committee next week.
Buses from Spalding to its nearest city currently run every two hours.
The report highlights Spalding as an area with high growth in housing as somewhere to target more buses.
“700 houses (are being built) toward the north of the town,” the report states. “The planned relief road is progressing, albeit slowly.”
It says 12.9 per cent of the population of the district don’t have access to a car, the second lowest in Lincolnshire after North Kesteven’s 11.4 per cent.
However, other than the hourly service to Peterborough pledge, there’s not much mentioned about potential changes to services in South Holland itself.
There could be more frequent services for those in the north of the district, such as Donington, as Boston is one of three towns where the council is looking to enhance its Into Town Network.
Grantham and Gainsborough are two other towns that it is proposing to focus on.
The Into Town Network aim would be to make sure bus services to these locations would be hourly at a minimum.
Funding has also been allocated to enhance services into Skegness and Stamford.
Other county-wide proposals include capping the Call Connect fee at £2 until December 2024 and spending £1.3m on repairing bus stops including providing them with ‘real time’ displays.
The former chair of the recently defunct Spalding Transport Forum, George Scott said of the proposals: “They are an improvement on what we have now but I’m concerned on how many will use the buses.
“We have had some of these services reduced in the past so there needs to be an initial boost in highlighting these new services.”
The strategy outlines how bus services have been cut in the past 12 years.
In 2012-13 buses covered 12,375 million miles a year in Lincolnshire, but that figures was down to 8.92 million miles in the latest figures available for 2021-22.
The amount of that mileage funded by local authorities such was down by 85 per cent, from 6.5 million miles a year to ‘little more’ than one million miles’, the report states.
It does say that 89 per cent were satisfied with the service, though only 56 per cent thought it value for money.
It also claims that fares in the county are averagely priced compared to that across the United Kingdom.
The county council says it’s looking to increase usage by five per cent by March 2026, satisfaction percentage to 93 per cent and punctuality to 78 per cent by 2025-26.
