Wiltshire County Council are holding an open forum at which people get a chance to ask them about the submissions made to the local transport plan for the five years from 2006/07.

Notable in the travel plan is the County Council's desire to increase the use of the "Transwilts" line - they see it as a strategic development target to help relieve strain on the A350 and provide better access to West Wilts.  However, the review of comments that I receive more recently talks about them modifying their targets if the rail serviced are reduced.

Indeed so.   I'm not entirely sure if it's actually service users that they're targetting with this meeting - perhaps more they're targetting interested bodies and organisations.   To be honest, I'm not sure - I happened to find out about it through the Federation of Small Businessses rather than any of the more regular sources that I might have expected and I'm popping along to find out.

There was a series of meetings held in Town Halls and other such places across the county in October 2004 in consultation ready for this local transport plan - the one in Melksham was on a Wednesday evening and the poster stayed up so long after the event that I nearly turned up for it a year late.  Looking at the web review it was only attended by about a dozen people, including "the usual suspects" ... most of whom represented organisations rather than being individuals.

There seems to be something of a lack of an effective way of communicating with the actual users of these public transport services - there are times that I as a customer / user feel that I'm more of a nuisance when I ask questions than someone who pays money that helps to all their salaries.  But don't get me going on that one - last week I signed off some of the biggest cheques of my life for the taxman ....

I went to the local transport plan review meeting for Wiltshire this morning ... attended by around 20 interested parties other than the county council staff.

Although Wilts County Council seem to have set up their priories as
1. bus
2. bus
3. pedestrian
4. cyclist
5. bus
6. train
(sorry - but it's "we budget for this on bus stops" and "we budget for that on community bus" and "we budget for the other on bus lanes"), I was interested to notice that three of the 20 people there were specifically Melksham / train and that at my table of 8, two of the others were from Devizes but had a major concern in connecting into trains for long distance travel ... and another represented South West trains.  I didn't meet anyone (trains or buses) from First but I may be doing them a dis-service - they might have had an observer there.

We were asked to look at the transport budget and say if we thought that 29% on pedestrian schemes, 22% on bus infrastucture, etc, was about right - of which should be higher of lower.  Quite frankly, I'm simply not qualified to say which area I would like the money spent in, and in any case the areas merge into each other so much ... and I wasn't alone in that.  The group ending up taking most of the public transport areas and circling them together with the text asking "Is this enough for a co-ordinated, reliable, accessible public transport system".   

One of the points that our table did come up with was effective communications; I know that *I* would have like to have known about the issue with the train a long time before I happened to discover it ... and I know many other users would have liked that too.   But then it was pretty sad that less that 2 dozen folks had been able to make it along this morning.

Utterly agreed - indeed I cursed slightly and re-arranged my schedule to be able to go and I was VERY fortunate to be able to do so.   

But there's much more to it ... and that's actually reaching the people who would be interested.   Heck - I've been making a lot of noise about transport issues and I only happened across the meeting because the Federation of Small Business'es local chariman told me about it and asked if I would like the information.   I don't think the event was posted up at the stations of busstops was it? 

At an earlier part of the consultation process, an evening meeting was held at Melksham - a Wednesday in October 2004.  That was attended by a higher proportion of the population concerned ... in that case 12 people from the town.  When did I find out about that one? 11 moths later becaise the one sign was still up on the Town Hall notice board ... and I nearly ended up going along A YEAR LATE.

So I'm putting it partly down to the timing not suiting people, and partly down to lousy publicity.   This latter ... just might ... save the organisers and planners the awkwardness of having room fulls of the public asking them questions ... but alas I have my cynical hat on there again.  On the brighter side, a quiet meeting DOES mean that anyone who attends with a point to make gets heard more.