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LIKE many green' initiatives, ensuring developers use some of their profits to provide a bus service on a new housing estates, seems like a great idea. Since the deregulation of bus services in the 1980s, many routes have been slashed because of the lack of a profit margin for operators.

In areas where there isn't a high use, Government and other grants have been used to subsidise public road transport. Developers, because of the huge profits involved in building houses, have quite rightly also been seen as a likely source of those subsidies.

Many developers are quite happy with the arrangement and as long as the shareholders are contented will willingly abide by conditions imposed as part of the process of achieving planning permission. What they don't like, however, is money being wasted by the imposition of conditions, which may sound good at the time but later prove to be completely impractical.

Unless more people are willing to give up their cars and use the bus service at High Royds, it will be seen by all as nothing more than an expensive white elephant. At the moment only eight people use the service from Chevin Park to Menston railway station and Guiseley - not what could be described as a massive take up among the 500 home development, even though for the first year it is free for residents.

The service will run, because it has to, to 2009 but unless patronisation increases dramatically, it is doomed as a failed experiment. Whether the people living at Chevin Park prefer the warmth and comfort of their own personal vehicle to the communal transport of a bus, remains to be seen, but the reason for its existence seems purely ideological. Perhaps we have moved beyond a time when public transport is an acceptable choice for commuters, only to be considered when other options are taken away.

5:12pm Thursday 6th December 2007

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