Last night I attended a small meeting which a fellow parishioner organised with our neighbour the local independent Royal Hospital School (RHS), Holbrook. The meeting comprised; the Bursar of the school, and 3 parishioners (Ed, Sue and me) of the village of Stutton. Ed and Sue had spoken together to discuss tackling the number of buses and coaches going through our village and the reason for them. Ed then heard about my petition and thought it a good idea to include me in the group. Ed and Sue's main concerns were: Numbers of buses/coaches, some with many empty seats on them; noise and air pollution; safety of parishioners/walkers/cyclists due to high speeds/clumsy overtaking. Ed had counted 9 buses going through the village, one way on one day. A parish councillor had recently counted 16. Personally I am concerned about the number of cars leaving the school with only 1 or 2 children in them making a very rural village a very noisy and busy one, sometimes making it impossible to cross the road for 15 minutes or more. A meeting was arranged with the Bursar of the RHS school to discuss it in detail.
In short; it was recognised that only 6 buses had routes through our village, the others may have been for other schools in the area, something Ed will need to look into and perhaps meeting with other schools; the Bursar agreed if there were better, more frequent public transport links much of the traffic would be more manageable (there is a bus stop at the centre of the school),; Ed and Sue tried to push for linking buses or children using bikes but the Bursar said the collection points were from such dispersed areas it wouldn't be feasible and that he is planning to end one of the bus contracts replacing it with their own smaller fleet in the next term; the school would welcome more public transport, linking Manningtree train station to the bus route (which isn't currently!!) and, interestingly he used to run Ipswich Buses and believes a bus stopping every 20 minutes is the only way to ensure usage by the public, believing that more modern, economic and small buses were the way ahead (although cynically and quite rightly stating it's very unlikely to happen with Boris at the forefront of politics....or, in my personal opinion, anyone in the tory party, hey ho). The Bursar also interestingly said that the current law doesn't allow for independent school students and state school students to share school transport due to different Sections of the law and insurances. Why oh why are we so reluctant in moving forward GB?? Logic isn't a word banded about the 'power' tables of the public purse I guess. The Bursar promised to look at my petition...we'll see.