Sometimes petitioners to the Assembly don’t know what they are talking about.
This leaves the Assembly’s petitions committee with an awkward task – how to reject their case without being too blunt about it.
The committee has just had to deal with a petition from 335 people (presumably in Bargoed) asking for Assembly pressure to reinstate the Bargoed to Cardiff direct bus service.
The petition was long and colourfully worded. Seemingly from an intelligent female office worker in the capital who is fully aware of Assembly policies on transport. She gave all the political references (about the policy of “building a world-class 21st century transport system”), and added in the sob-story about a late-evening 90-minute wait for a connecting bus at Pontypridd.
The petitioner claimed to have come across someone from Slovakia who was horrified and “which has bus services until midnight”.
Well, having been to such countries, such midnight services do not exist.
The committee spent several meetings discussing what looked like a Welsh horror story, with the bus company Stagecoach the originators.
Fortunately, Tory Andrew Davies and Lib Dem Mike German both have touches of scepticism about them. Fortunate. For that discontinued bus was relatively new. It was run by Stagecoach as a competitor to the railway.
When the railway service was improved to become one of the best outer suburban services in Europe (every 15 minutes; far better than anyone in Slovakia could dream of), most of the bus passengers switched.
The petition has now been forwarded to Caerffili CBC. It’s a pity the petitioner wasn’t sent a train timetable !
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