How can we keep things moving ?

Transport is such an important issue for business that this month we devoted our entire quarterly Initiative meeting to that single topic.

We heard about the broad strategy being pursued by Bath and North East Somerset Council, from the Managing Director of First, who explained about the challenges in running bus services and from campaigners who are arguing the case for improvements on the railways.

There was an inevitable concentration on the all important A4 corridor between Bath and Bristol, which is becoming ever more essential, not only for staff getting into Bath, but also for people who need to move between a company’s offices in the two cities. No one wants to spend half the day in a traffic jam trying to get to a 60-minute meeting.

One element to improve matters would be to create bus lanes which would speed up and make services more reliable. The downside to that is it would reduce the width of the roadway for cars and increase congestion, though that might persuade people to get on the bus. It’s a knotty problem.

In addition there was discussion about what happens in the rest of the district, in particular how improvements could be made in the Somer Valley to ensure that the most can be made of the forthcoming Enterprise Zone.

There was broad agreement that how staff get to work and where they were parking was a regular item at most management meetings. And there was a confession that someone living only three miles from their office drove a car because it was just a bit too far to travel by any other method – that’s the real world for you.

Sometimes bus routes or timetables don’t fit the needs of would-be passengers and whilst the fast train service only takes a few minutes to run from Bath to Temple Meads, it might take quite a while to get to the station at one end and then to your final destination at the other.

Wessex Water was so concerned about helping their staff get into and out of the office that they have gone to the fairly considerable expense of putting on a bus service. That would be out of the question for smaller businesses, but it’s possible they could get together to arrange things like car sharing schemes which would help to reduce congestion. We’ll carry on talking about this subject although I don’t expect we’ll find a complete solution. But we’ll see what creative contributions we can make, and as a wise man once said: “every little helps” !