Julia Buckley

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard (Alex Mayer) on the securing the first of two stimulating Westminster Hall debates. On the really important topic of national standards, I want to discuss a new species of bus stop—the famous floating bus stop. For the uninitiated, floating bus stops are small alighting platforms in between lines of traffic and cycle lanes. Members may already be able to guess the issue I am going to raise. In my constituency of Shrewsbury, we had a new floating bus stop installed outside our railway stations as part of our gyratory road system. Due to an error, the width of the pavement was less than the minimum 1.5 metre standard requirement. There has been a 12-month campaign, with protest, public outcry and a petition. The council will now be removing the bus stop because we have had congestion chaos in the town centre and it has blocked access to our important railway station. What should have been a transport interchange—the important road between our bus station and our railway station—has in fact become congested by losing a line of traffic and having a floating bus stop that was too complicated and confusing for people to understand, all because we did not have a simple, single standard. In terms of lessons learned, we need to make sure that Shrewsbury’s story is fed into the ongoing assessment. It exposes a wider issue. Floating bus stops improve cyclist safety, but they transfer the interaction from bus and cyclist to pedestrian and cyclist. For blind and partially sighted passengers, it is quite a serious concern. The Department for Transport’s guidance recognises the difficulty in detecting a passing cyclist, but the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s research found that 59% of users with sight loss had stopped using bus stops and 55% had changed routes to ensure they felt safe on the road. The case for a single standard is strong, as long as we ensure accessibility, address geometry and are careful about the relationship between pedestrians and cyclists. I hope that, as the DFT looks at the guidance at the start of next year, it will bring forward the lessons learned from Shrewsbury. We need people to access not just our buses, but trains and, of course, our beautiful town centre.