Getting to the County town, even if it isn’t necessarily where you want to go...

A fellow Liberal Democrat colleague from the north-east of the County has made the point that, if you want to go to the County town by bus, you can’t, at least not directly. Indeed, you can’t even do it with a single change of bus, although there is a direct train service.

And, as I think about it, that’s true for a large chunk of the county - there’s no direct bus from Bury St Edmunds, or Newmarket, or Haverhill, to Ipswich, let alone Beccles or Lowestoft. So, unless you live within striking distance of a railway station, Ipswich becomes more remote and thus less useful.

And that matters because services are seldom provided on any basis other than countywide. If, for example, you wanted to engage with the National Citizen Service scheme, and you live in Haverhill, you have to get to Ipswich, regardless of the fact that there is a regular, reliable bus service to much nearer Cambridge. For Lowestoft, Norwich is a far more attractive destination than Ipswich is, and much easier to reach. Which, of course, is why we have “Travel to Work Areas”.

As someone who had previously paid little (alright, virtually no) attention to the minutiae of local government previously, becoming a Parish councillor introduced me to a whole new world of stuff, including the idea of a “desire path”. And public transport works like that. As a planner you might think that people want to go from A to B, but the reality is that they’d rather go to C, or D, or even E. County boundaries don’t necessarily reflect that, especially if a county is large, or the major conurbation is less than entirely central, as Ipswich is, for example.

And, if a bus route isn’t commercial, and the local authority either can’t, or won’t, fund it, it will inevitably be lost.

In truth, it would possibly be sensible to reconfigure local government to reflect the Travel to Work areas, although I can see the outrage if traditional counties were, effectively, abolished. People are strangely romantic about counties, even though they have less visible presence than they once did - perhaps cricket is the last obvious theatre where counties have a meaningful and dominant place. And I admit to sharing a sense that counties are important, as much as a source of identity as anything else, although even then, some counties have a more obvious identity than others.

Another element is time. Any bus journey from Lowestoft to Ipswich would take a while, unless there’s a significant demand for an express bus to match the one that exists to Norwich. And, even if there was, the A12 is hardly an express route, unlike the A47 across Norfolk which is much improved.

So, it seems likely that trains are going to be the major mid-distance public transport option going forward, and that the bus network will continue to reduce over the coming years.