Editor's Opinion - South Wales Evening Post - 9 December 2006
Let's put this as kindly as we can. Swansea Council has a public relations problem with its Metro bus.
All the work done on The Kingsway to get the city centre ready for the bendy bus had already left the project more than slightly overdrawn at the bank of public opinion. It won't help that there is such a big gap between the preparation and the delivery - the first Metros will not run before 2008. That's a long time for people to grumble without the benefit of discovering if the thing actually works.
The bus went on a trial run this week, and the hostile reaction on our website showed what an uphill struggle the council faces to win people round in the meantime.
Not even the old PR ploy of celebrity endorsements worked: a couple of Ospreys players had a free ride from the Liberty Stadium to County Hall: "The only time any of the Ospreys will ever be seen on public transport" according to Jaxx, while Peter wondered why the buses needed publicity stunts if they were such a great idea.
In town, they may turn out to be very good at moving large numbers of people around comparatively quickly. But I suspect there are growing doubts, even in the corridors of County Hall, about the wisdom of extending the route as far west as Mumbles.
Leave aside the ongoing argument about when it gets to Oystermouth, whether it can turn around to come back again, which strikes me as a more or less fundamental requirement for a circular service. It now turns out that, to get there in the first place, it will need a dedicated bus lane along the grassy foreshore to West Cross. A couple of brave people have suggested that, if it reduces traffic congestion on the Mumbles Road, it will be an environmental outrage worth paying. The rest has been uproar.
And still there would be the problem of getting the bus along the rest of the route to Oystermouth, along a particularly narrow and winding part of Mumbles Road. Just as well this bus is bendy.
All of which leads me to suspect that sometime soon there will be an announcement that journey's end for the Metro will be a lot closer to the city. The problem with that, of course, is that a project designed to reduce traffic congestion is a bit limited if it does not go to where a large part of the city's population lives.
