Avonmouth will soon be reconnected to neighbouring areas after the community came together to launch a new WESTlocal bus service.
It was a community-wide effort with organisations working together including Avonmouth Community Centre Association, Ambition Lawrence Weston, Bristol North West Foodbank, Pioneer Medical Group, SevernNet, St Andrew’s Church and St Bede’s Catholic College.
The new service is not a direct replacement for the number 3 bus that lost the Avonmouth section of its route in April but will offer vital access to important services for people living in some of the poorest communities of Bristol.
Kate Royston, Director of SevernNet, and Peter Evans, Board Director and Transport Lead at SevernNet, took the lead on the group’s bid for funding.
The new WESTlocal 40 service, operated by The Big Lemon, has been dubbed the ‘Yellow LAB’ to denote the letters of some of the areas (Lawrence Weston, Avonmouth and Brentry) that it will connect from 2 September 2024.
It will offer a roughly hourly service on weekdays from Crow Lane, on the boundary of Henbury and Brentry, to St Andrew’s Church in Avonmouth, with the first and last south-bound services at 7:50am and 6:00pm, respectively.
To support the school run at the end of the school day, the bus will also stop at St Bede’s Catholic College in Lawrence Weston at 3:30pm and make a one-off journey to Cribbs Causeway. This followed input from the headteacher to the working group about the problems his students were facing with not enough capacity on existing buses to get them home safely.
WESTlocal is a fund from the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority, in partnership with North Somerset Council. Funding for the scheme comes from the Department for Transport’s Bus Service Improvement Plan. The West of England Mayoral Combined Authority secured the second highest settlement per head nationwide from government of this fund.
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