Following months of campaigning and a successful residents meeting bus campaigners Rebecca Burnett and Councillor Don have welcomed the new Connexions service to Harlow Hill and Pannal Ash.
The announcement comes after Rebecca and local MP Andrew Jones met with Craig Temple, Managing Director of Connexions, to discuss the final details of the route.
Over 1200 people signed a petition calling for a more frequent service to be reinstated after Transdev reduced their service to every 40 minutes, and stopped all buses to Harlow Carr Gardens. Andrew has already written to all those who signed the petition to break the good news.
The new service will run from the town centre every 30 minutes and will alternate on two routes.
- X6 will travel up Cold Bath Road, Pannal Ash Road, up Harlow Avenue to the Green Hut, then continue along Beckwith Road, down Otley Road and to the bus station via Cold Bath Road.
- X6a will travel up Cold Bath Road, Pannal Ash Road to the roundabout, along Beckwith Road, to Beckwith Knowle and Harlow Carr, down Otley Road and to the bus station via Cold Bath Road.
This means that Harlow Carr Gardens will once again have a regular service, and that the Harlow Hill Community Centre ‘The Green Hut’ will be served by two buses an hour – one Transdev and one Connexions. The X6 bus also links into another service (X4) of which the next two stops are the Mowbray Medical Centre and Granby Corner near the Hospital.
Speaking about the new service Rebecca said: Buses are a lifeline for many local people and it is great to see Connexions listening to residents and putting on this vital service. Hopefully this will bring the ‘is it on or is it off’ saga of our bus services to a successful conclusion.
Don added: Harlow Carr is one of the main tourist attractions for our town and it is fantastic that it will once again have a bus service. This will also benefit my constituents in the Beckwith Knowle area who have felt isolated from town since Transdev cut the number six service. This is great news all round.
