We need a ring road Options

[Ziggy]

http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/News/Article...articleID=14945

Now I have no particular qualifications or expertise in town planning, but is this not rather shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? Ever since I have lived in the area, new housing and retail developments have been given the go-ahead with seemingly no strategic thinking whatsoever about roads or other infrastructure.

[Richard Garvie]

Bus services that are subsidised are paid money to keep running at a loss because it connects communities to public services. User23, show me a direct link to the exact amount we give Reading busses and how that figure is broken down. They obviously don't have it because I've been told that I can't have that level of detail. It's somewhere between £2m and £2.5m from what I can see, but why do different financial documents not add up to the same figure?

As I said before, Labour would propose a revised network of services and put it out to all companies to bid for. The level of service I believe we require would require 26 busses, so I accounted for four additional busses as cover. Based on a £25k salary for drivers and engineers, if Stagecoach ran that level of service elsewhere the subsidy level would be around £1.5m from a local authority. *Go on any bus lease site and the figures for leasing 30 busses would be around £300k a year.

The point is here, that to date West Berks refuse to provide any detailed financial information with regards to bus services or anything else, as to why we apparently have four cost centres for policy and scrutiny teams to the tune of around £1m and such like. Why don't you post direct links User23 (if they exist). I believe if the level of detail was available, the council would have supplied it weeks ago.