Rail & Bus for Herefordshire

Rail & Bus for Herefordshire Campaigning for a better future for Herefordshire's rail and bus passengers.

We are delighted to announce the publishing of our 2025 bus and train timetables for the Ledbury area! You can pick up a...
25/09/2025

We are delighted to announce the publishing of our 2025 bus and train timetables for the Ledbury area! You can pick up a physical copy for free at Ledbury Town Council's offices on Church Lane, Ledbury, or access a digital version on our website, here (https://rbfh.org.uk/ledbury-area-bus-train-times-2025/).

Now that we have a better idea of the route, we can make the timetable adjustments that could take advantage of it.Let's...
14/09/2025

Now that we have a better idea of the route, we can make the timetable adjustments that could take advantage of it.

Let's first take a strategic view of the 33 and the service it provides. It runs hourly with double decker buses - 10.5 metre long Alexander Dennis Enviro 400s. These have a seating capacity of 74, meaning that the pphpd (passengers per hour per direction, the general measure of a corridor's capacity) between Hereford and Ross (and beyond) is also 74.

This is tiny. In cities, pphpd can approach 100,000, but this would be a ridiculous comparison, so we'll stick to the other similar Herefordshire corridors. Hereford to Ledbury has an hourly bus (seating capacity of 43) and an hourly train (a 4 carriage unit, with 311 seats), giving a pphpd of 354. Hereford to Leominster is more complex, with many different train types used, but it averages 434.

Ross-on-Wye is the largest of these three towns! Admittedly, the trains that link the others continue elsewhere, but so does the 33, and Ross and Gloucester are most definitely underserved. In essence, we need to increase pphpd, both to enable more people to travel (supporting the local economy without adding to traffic congestion) but also to accommodate a 'modal shift' from space inefficient, expensive, relatively dangerous and polluting private automobiles to public transport. A good first step would be to double the frequency from one bus an hour to two, with the additional vehicle being the 'X33' we discussed last week, avoiding Mitcheldean and providing a competitive Hereford to Gloucester journey time of around 1 hour 25 minutes.

But how would you fill all those extra buses? Well, by sheer virtue of running half-hourly, you'd attract a lot of extra custom. A frequent service is a usable one, providing passengers with flexibility and freedom to live outside of the constraints of timetables. Furthermore, the half-hourly service would likely be more efficient to run, with the reduced journey times probably permitting it to be operated by seven buses, as opposed to four at the moment - more than doubling the service quality, without doubling the cost.

If we want to really drive modal shift, though, and keep the 33 commercially viable, then we need to speed it up even further, and, crucially, ensure reliability, so people can trust the timetable. We touched on this last week, but let's not beat around the bush - we're going to need bus priority. The main bottleneck is the arrival into Hereford along the Ross Road, and whilst one of the two inbound lanes could theoretically be converted into a bus lane, National Highways, who control the road, are realistically not going to consent to this. The only way to guarantee it would be to build an extra lane in the space that does exist (see below) - but this would cost money, of course.

Much cheaper would be to modify traffic lights, such that they can detect buses and let them through without interruption. This is a simple but effective way to increase bus reliability, and it would make perfect sense to install this functionality when traffic lights are being replaced. Unfortunately, Herefordshire Council is currently upgrading the traffic lights on Commercial and City Link Roads - which would be of great use to the 33 - with no bus priority at all. This should be changed.

Finally, a brief word on late buses. The last 33 at the moment leaves Hereford before 8 PM, even on Fridays and Saturdays, and this is not acceptable for such a trunk route. Herefordshire Council subsidises late night buses on Saturday, for example, the 476 to Ledbury, and this would be a good way to start, but, really, we need to be thinking about late buses every day of the week. Trains to Ledbury run up to midnight, and Leominster sees service into the early hours of the morning, so this premature severance on the 33 is an outlier, not an inevitability. If evening buses require some small council support, then so be it - it is well worth it to provide a robust public transport service to our largest town.

The changes listed here are perhaps more technical than last time, but they would nonetheless be of great importance. Of course, though, there are things beyond timetables that you need to do to attract people onto buses, and this is where things get creative. See you next week!

One of the biggest untapped opportunities for better public transport in Herefordshire is the 33 bus route between Heref...
07/09/2025

One of the biggest untapped opportunities for better public transport in Herefordshire is the 33 bus route between Hereford, Ross-on-Wye and Gloucester. Over the next few weeks, we'll be going over different aspects of the service in the hope of creating some sort of plan for its transformation and, today, we'll start with the most fundamental part of a bus service - the route itself!

The 33 is a high capacity, high importance, trunk route. It connects three major towns or cities and several large villages, and plugs a gap left unserved by rail. Indeed, it is a rail replacement bus - the former Hereford, Ross & Gloucester Railway wasn't a small line by any means, and its 1964 closure necessitated a fast and practical road alternative. The local authorities must recognise this - all other comparable pairs of towns in the county are linked by rail, as are most in the country at large. The 33 should not really be judged relative to Herefordshire's other buses, but rather its trains.

And, unfortunately, in this regard it does not stack up very well, for many reasons, but in particular for its speed. Hereford to Ross is a shorter distance than Hereford to Ledbury, but the former takes 53 minutes by public transport, compared to the latter's 13. Even factoring in a walk to and from the railway station at both ends in Ledbury's case, the 33 is still unusually slow - and the first map below shows its existing route, with the three major deviations from the main road explaining this tediousness.

Let's start in Hereford and work our way South. The 33 begins at the railway station (very good) and serves the Country Bus Station (also good) before somersaulting across the city centre and squeezing onto Broad Street until it heads out along the Ross Road. Such parkour, though, takes rather a long time, with services scheduled to take 18 minutes just to reach ASDA.

The problem here isn't so much the distance (though the route is convoluted) as it is the traffic. Buses run stop-start, and by the time they've got to ASDA, they've traversed 11 sets of traffic lights! Not only is this slow, it's also unpredictable, and buses can either find themselves waiting on time or many minutes late.

So, what's the solution? Well, there's an almost perfect corridor for buses to use that would allow them to cut straight through the city centre, saving time and improving reliability - the tiny East and West Streets (don't worry, buses can fit through: many already do, and lorries manage). Reversing the one way system (see the second image) and limiting traffic to just buses would allow for a convenient cut through - for all routes, not just the 33. You could even seize the opportunity to develop of a "mini bus station" by the Shire Hall, allowing for seamless connections within the city centre.

Right, now we're out of Hereford, we've not long got up to speed before the bus swerves up the hill to Kingsthorne. This is fine, though - the deviation only adds a couple of minutes and it's an important village to serve. Onwards!

The 33 runs fast to Ross hereafter, and swerves around a few back streets to get to the makeshift bus station that is Cantilupe road in front of the library - again, this is not a concern. What is concerning, however, is the 7 MINUTE deviation through Ross on the way out (image 3). As part of the St Mary's Garden Village development, Herefordshire Council opted to subsidise a re-routing of the 33 in an awkward spike around Ross. Now, don't misinterpret us, we absolutely support the provision of bus service to new developments, but surely this would be much better done by diverting some of the just as frequent 232 buses, which are required to run in that direction anyway, instead of compromising the county's only truly self-sufficient operation?

South of Ross, things get even messier. Where the railway once swept gracefully along the valley with a series of tunnels and viaducts, buses double back on themselves in Lea and trundle along slow country lanes to serve Mitcheldean, rejoining the main road some 13 minutes behind where they would be if they had simply followed it directly. In the ideal world, the Forest of Dean routes to Cinderford and Coleford would be reorganised to serve Mitcheldean, relieving the 33 of its tediousness, but in the meantime, one bus an hour (there would be two - don't worry, we'll cover frequency next time) could run direct on the main road. The X33, if you will.

From there, the route is direct and meanders - sensibly, this time, given Gloucester's extensive bus priority - through Gloucester city centre before terminating at the excellent and capacious Transport Hub, adjacent to the railway station.

The route adjustments listed here would only save a few minutes individually, but altogether, they'd create a much faster, more reliable and more competitve service, knocking about 25 minutes off the end to end journey time for no real reduction in provision. It seems an obvious choice when put like that, doesn't it?

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