Hello Goodbye

Thursday 20th February 2025

Hello

A new bus station opened in Gosport last October and I finally got round to paying a visit last Friday to take a look.

It’s been built alongside the old site which, after 52 years, had definitely seen better days, and, like its predecessor, is conveniently located next to the pier used by the Gosport to Portsmouth ferry.

The old site is now boarded up awaiting demolition before becoming the first stage in Gosport Borough Council’s grand plans for a “People’s Park” which will “create a new multi-million-pound waterside development with shops and a bandstand area.” 

The new bus station is on the site of the former taxi rank at Falkland Gardens…

… and reportedly cost £5.9 million funded by a contribution from Gosport Borough Council and the previous Government’s Transforming Cities Fund which saw nearly £56 million jointly awarded to Hampshire County Council, Portsmouth City Council and the Isle of Wight Council.

Talk of a new bus station as part of a major scheme to “boost Gosport’s waterfront off the High Street” dates back as far as 2012 so it’s good to see something finally delivered on the ground.

There are six departure bays which is more than enough for First’s five bus routes on the peninsula which all operate to Fareham. High profile Eclipse branded routes E1 and E2, which use the busway, depart from A and B respectively; route 9 departs from D, route 5 is on E and route 11 leaves from F. Stand C is currently bus departure less.

A real time information board on the outside at one end of the large bus shelter shows upcoming departures, with another display at both ends inside the shelter.

There’s a bespoke display above each stand too, which was difficult to photograph in the bright sunshine….

… and there are printed departure listings for each stand

As you can see, facilities for passengers are pretty limited with…

… a basic narrow bench style seat along the back panel…

… and a small perch on the other panel by each stand.

The manoeuvring area for buses, as they pull away from the stands, is quite generous and looks like it could accommodate some ‘laying over’ space but I doubt it would ever be needed.

Interestingly, First Bus had been paying £16,300 annual rent to Gosport Borough Council for a lease giving use of the parking and manoeuvring area of the old bus station as well as “rights” for passengers “to use defined areas within the adjacent bus station building”. As most of the land at the new site has public highway status a tripartite agreement has been made between the Borough Council, First Bus and Hampshire County Council that instead of having a lease, First will pay departure charges to the extent the annual income to Gosport will continue at £16,300.

It might have been better to just put six (or perhaps, five) nice bus shelters along the roadside and First could have saved itself 16 grand and a good proportion of the £5.9 million used on something else.

Goodbye 1

Hot on the heels of TfL squeezing nine buses out of bus provision between Elephant & Castle, Camberwell Green, Brixton and Morden (it’s 45/59/118 scheme introduced on 1st February) comes another reduction in service provision this Saturday, when route 414 is withdrawn without replacement. It runs between Putney Bridge and Marble Arch supplementing long standing route 14 over the same section of route via Fulham, South Kensington and Knightsbridge as far as Hyde Park Corner with the short stretch up Park Lane to Marble Arch covered by a multitude of other routes.

Introduced in 2002 in the Ken Livingstone congestion charge/bus expansion era, route 414 originally continued via Edgware Road and Warwick Avenue to terminate at Maida Vale but was cut back to Marble Arch in a previous round of Central London bus service reductions in 2021.

Now its 16 buses, which provide an eight minute frequency on the five mile route, will be withdrawn with a few being deployed to improve route 14s frequency from every 10 to every eight minutes.

Goodbye 2

Stagecoach’s route AB1 disappeared last weekend. It was heralded as a “world first” when introduced back in May 2023 using autonomous buses between Edinburgh Park and the Ferrytoll Park and Ride site. Now, it would seem, there’s no longer a need for such an innovative, “global leading” trial. The service had been reduced to an unattractive hourly frequency last October with a five minute turnaround at each end.

Blog reader Roy told me he took a ride on Tuesday of last week (see above photos) and the bus was in manual mode, with no autonmous driving, so only one member of staff (the driver) was on board. Five passengers were on the journey Roy took at 13:30 and he adds there was no timetable on display at Edinburgh Park. One isn’t needed any more.

More autonomous trials are set to start in Sunderland in the next few weeks by the same consortium that ran the road-sweeper lookalike contraption in Milton Keynes in November 2023. But this time I understand the idea is for the vehicle to be truly driver-less and for the vehicle to be under the control of a remote control centre, which will be interesting. There are also plans to trial “up to 13 self-driving shuttle buses around the West Cambridge Innovation District as part of a new sustainable transport pilot scheme supported by the University of Cambridge” and costing £17.4 million.

Roger French

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