'Night Bus' Service To Cease At Gosport

 

The Night Bus, which operated between midnight and 3pm on Friday and Saturday nights, covered two routes and enabled people living between Gosport, Bridgemary and Fareham to get a late night bus home.

 

Set up by Gosport Borough Council, the service was funded through the Gosport Community Safety Partnership and introduced to try and reduce the number of incidents occurring at the taxi rank late at night through the lack of available taxis to get people home. 

 

The service was never used to its full capacity and in order to try and boost usage, the agreed routes were changed to include Lee on the Solent. Despite this, passenger journeys' have been very disappointing, now averaging around 14 on the Bridgemary/Fareham Service and just 1 on the Lee on Solent route per night during 2006.

 

“Sadly this clearly shows it is not financially viable to continue to operate the Night Bus Service,” said Amy Ford, Head of Community Safety at Gosport Borough Council. “It has become prohibitively expensive to operate the service for so few passengers. To continue now would not be a prudent use of public money, so the decision has been made to drop it. However, we feel with the recent changes made regards the delimitation of taxis, there should be more taxis available late at night to get people home safely.”