6. Transport Committee
Transport Committee
The transport committee was keeping a watching brief on the West Yorkshire bus company in respect of fares and service and beginning to ask about concessionary fares for senior citizens. There had been suggestions that the former bus committee had no need to continue when the Hebble service was replaced, but as the transport committee its brief was widened to take in car parking and aspects of road safety and its members gave valuable service for several more years.
Even with the active support of Marcus Fox MP they made little headway with concessionary fares. Bingley UDC cited the difficulty they had in the matter because three different companies served the Bingley area – Halifax Corporation, Bradford City Transport and the West Yorkshire Road Car Company. Eventually a scheme was introduced allowing senior and disabled passengers tokens, which could be obtained from Royd House, to the value of £1-50 for use on the West Yorks. buses.
They managed to get the waiting places for timed stops changed to less congested parts of Main Street (from outside the New Inn and the bank to Ling Bob and Birchlands) but complaints continued about drivers not observing them, making stopping times in the village unreliable. From time to time buses missed completely, the company pleading shortages of drivers and spares.
As early as February 1972 the transport committee were told that their request for a bus shelter at Birchlands would be deferred for twelve months. In February 1973 Bingley council stated that they would take no action in this matter. In 1974 they lost no time in putting the same request to the Bradford District office of the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive. It was not until 1981 that the shelter appeared. WVS chairman Barbara Hopkinson and planning committee chairman Rodney Harrison decided that this ultimate success after nearly a decade of asking merited a champagne launch. This provoked an unpleasant letter to the press from a village resident. She claimed that a bus shelter was no big deal. A greater victory would have been keeping the village truly rural. People who chose to come to live in a village should adapt to it, rather than seeking to change it with things like bus shelters. In this she failed to grasp a number of issues. The champagne was a light hearted and ironic response, not an indication that anyone truly saw a bus shelter as a major victory. The on going requests for the shelter were because so many people using that bus stop had been asking for one for nearly ten years. As for the greater complaint about failing to keep the village as quiet and unchanged as it used to be, it is clear from the account of the planning committee’s activities just how many more 19th century streets would have been demolished, footpaths lost and large housing developments accepted without the Society’s efforts.
The transport committee made representations about obstructive parking near the Station Hotel and Ling Bob public house and contributed to opposition to a caravan site in Station Road on the grounds of traffic problems. They wrote about the dangerous Ling Bob/Haworth Road junction in the days before the present roundabout, and submitted their views on the two layouts of bollards and island that were tried.
They asked the West Yorks. Road Car Company to display fare tables in buses, after complaints that amounts charged sometimes varied from day to day. They also persuaded the bus company to put up a timetable display board in the village and to allow timetables to be sold at the post office. When a new timetable was introduced in late1973, it caused a lot of problems for Wilsden people getting to and from work. Committee members drew up a modified version with extra journeys at peak times and submitted it to the bus company. This was taken very seriously and three people from the West Yorks. Road Car Company came to meet the committee. They were Mr. Craven, assistant traffic manager, Mr. Davidson from the traffic department and Mr. Muff, area inspector. They went through all the proposed changes and agreed to accommodate them as far as possible.
Another useful victory concerned hospital visiting. Buses from Wilsden were missing the connection at Sandy Lane with a bus to Bradford Royal Infirmary by about two minutes and the Bradford authority agreed that their evening hospital buses would wait at Sandy Lane for the Wilsden bus to arrive.
One of the committee’s last successes was to get the County Council to agree to paint white lines on the Harden to Keighley road in 1975. In April that year the committee decided to merge with the planning committee, having brought about a number of small but useful changes that most people probably thought ‘just happened’.
To keep track of what was happening during the Village Society’s incredibly active period in the 1970s, it is helpful to record what the other sub-committees were doing during this time.
