Help us launch our new cheap & regular community bus service between Bridport & West Bay
We can apply for a £5k grant from Dorset Council, but we need to raise £5k in match funding. £10k would let us pilot our new community bus service every weekend for ~6 months.
Please also share the link to this page https://ud.coop/fundthebus far and wide. The sooner we raise the money the sooner we can get started.
You can also support our efforts on our ongoing basis by becoming a Member of United Diversity Bridport for £5+/mo (which also gives free entry to our weekly film and food events and discounted entry to our Best of Bridport fundraising gigs)
Why do we want to create our new community between Bridport and West Bay?
In short, because the existing bus services that run between Bridport and West Bay:
Aren't cheap enough (even with the existing £2 price cap it costs a family of four £8 each way)
Aren't regular enough (every 2-3 hours most of the year, and even in the summer only 1 bus an hour)
Don't run late enough (the last bus is about 6pm)
The plan for our initial pilot is to charge £1 (with kids going free), run every 30 minutes all weekend, and run to at least 10pm (possibly later).
Of course, another big reason we want to start a our new community bus service is help reduce green house gas emissions from so many cars driving back and forth between Bridport & West Bay.
It should also help to alleviate pressure on parking both in West Bay and the town centre.
How will it work?
For our initial pilot we'll be partnering with Dorset Community Transport (DCT), a well established charity set-up in 2011 to run community buses in Dorset. They mostly run school buses for Dorset Council and so they have loads of minibuses that aren't doing anything on the weekends. For our first trial we'll simply pay DCT to run the bus every weekend. They'll provide the minibus, the drivers and all the necessary insurances etc.
Once we've run our pilot and have some data on how well used the bus is we'll explore getting our own (ideally electric) bus to run the service, and perhaps create a new bus driver job while we're at it too.
What will the route be?
Start at Bripdort Bus Station, go up West Street, down South Street to Groves and The Crown, continue down West Bay Road, then up to Parkdean Holiday Park and The George in West Bay and back again. On the way back up from West Bay, hang a left down Gundry Lane, past Rockburn, Bridport Youth and Community Centre and St Michael's and then back to the Bus Station.
Share
Goal £5,000GBP
Amount raised
£797.88GBP
Still to contribute
£4,202.12GBP
Share
2 individuals and 1 organization have contributed to this goal
