Autumn public transport promotion - seeking opinions on what we should market

[whole diary]

[grahame]

I have a decision to make in the next few days.  And that is how I help with marketing and promotion of public transport to, from and perhaps within Melksham for this autumn.   The following are all available:

* The Food and River festival on 2nd and 3rd September 2023 takes place in KGV park, and we can reach perhaps a thousand families over that weekend with timetable leaflets.

* Melksham ClimateFest takes place on 9th September where we reach hundreds more. The event runs from 13:00 to 17:00 in Melksham Assembly Hall and is free entry - all welcome with a program of speakers, an "Any Questions" session to ask an discuss environment issues with experts, and an environmental audit by a number

* Town wide distribution door to door during September for a further 3000 leaflets.

* More targetted distribution to existing departing passengers at the railway station and perhaps Town Centre bus stops - a few hundred more, but reaching the right people

* Availability in the Town Hall, the Melksham Without Parish office, and the Tourist and Town Information Centre

But the $64,000 question I have is "What if anything should I be marketing?"

* Our bus services are running remarkably reliably, and many people still don't think of using the bus where they could.  Their remain glaring gaps in service where it's not commercial sense, nor funded by the local authority, to provide service that allows people to change their lifestyle to be purely bus reliant.  Fares of £2 a trip - £2.50 from November - are a marketing encourgememt.

* Our train timetable remains thin but now well distributed through the day, with the last significant gap plugged from 16th September. However, the reliability of the service is awful with cancellations advised both a week ahead and on the day. The rail industry is consistently failing to provide the service it has signed up to, and this leaves people severely inconvenienced. When things go wrong, the ability to manage alternative arrangements is poor to absent.

* Interchange between bus and train in Melksham is absent.  The station is unstaffed (the busiest unstaffed station in the area), the cafe closed with weeds growing up where a year ago there was care, a big yellow sign threatening penalty fares if you don't have the right ticket but no practical way for people to establish what the right ticket IS.

Having expressed concerns - the systems ARE all usable much of the time and the rail staff typically helpful though short of information and tools themselves.  Real heroes working the system as best they can.

Back to my question - what should be informed, marketed, promoted this autumn?

[Mark A]

Think you've answered your own question. The buses. Particularly supporting the recent growth in passengers should it be knocked back by the fares increase in November. That will hopefully indirectly benefit the railway too. Regarding Melksham Station, better connectivity to it, but that's not really promotion, its land negotiation and spades in the ground, and presumably all tied up with what happens to the tyres site. Just moving that up the agenda will benefit awareness of the station and rail services even before something's in place. Regarding the railways, with SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) and GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) they now do not have the structure, the rolling stock, the staff and in some cases the infrastructure to cover the existing service let alone plan for growth and yes, there needs to be positive action on that.

Mark