Issue - meetings

The attached report sets out the options available to the Council to renew the contract to run the bus services between the Park & Ride sites and Bath city centre.  This is due to the expiry of the existing contract in August 2022 that commenced in 2012.

Cllr Manda Rigby introduced the report, moved the officer recommendations, and made the following statement:

“The last time we undertook a process for awarding a park and ride contract was 12 years ago, and the world certainly in terms of park and ride provision was completely different. We believe that we had one of the, if not the, most advantageous contract in the country as we were fortunate in hitting the very high spot of the market.

Indeed, we tried to extend this contract, to give the market time to recover. But this was just not possible. To be clear, a nationwide lack of drivers, spiralling fuel costs, post pandemic patronage levels, the need for investment in new buses, is creating the perfect storm for all bus service providers.

I need to thank Cllr Richard Samuel and his team for helping us to continue a park and ride provision at all given the tender responses we received as right now, we are at the assumed bottom of the market.

We had lots of aspirations for enhancements to the service...different hours of operation, differential pricing, new routes, and I don't want to limit our ambition. The only way to do this is by doing as we are asking you to agree in this paper, i.e. having a gross cost contract. Basically, we take the risk, but we gain both flexibility and control. We fund the service but keep the fares.

To begin with, we will keep the service as is, with the exception of bringing weekend rates in line with weekdays whilst we anticipate, as does the market, that patronage will continue to get back to pre-pandemic levels even without us doing further promotion.

As performance improves, we can invest in further enhancements.

Traditionally the major usage of our park and rides is leisure rather than commuting so as a starter for 10, here's a largely untapped market.

As large employers move towards more hybrid ways of working for some staff, rather than funding workplace parking assuming as in the past all employees come in daily...

We can work with them to provide a flexible park and ride solution instead.

We can work with Bath rugby to stop the gridlock home matches cause by having a joint match/park and ride ticket.

We can work with the festivals likewise, indeed any large event can be encouraged to keep cars from unnecessarily coming to the centre.

We can trial different pricing. Price per car rather than per person, £1 flat fee at certain times, as examples.

We can alter hours of operation to make park and rides better for those attending theatre or evening hospitality.

We can look at how buggies and wheelchairs are catered for, how bikes may be transported, the possibilities are endless.

Ultimately what we want is a service which people choose as it's convenient, runs the hours they want, to the places they need to get to AND is the economically best choice rather than driving into the city  ...  view the full minutes text for item 70