Bwcabus is running on a set of golden wheels. It’s picked up its third national award in as many months.
At the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport’s glittering awards ceremony in London in the presence of their patron, HRH the Princess Royal, Carmarthenshire Council’s head of engineering and transport Trevor Sage received the only excellence award presented to a Welsh service.
In the transport policy and planning category other entries included big players like Transport for London.
County executive board member for transport, Cllr Philip Hughes, said: “Revolutionary Bwcabus is running on a set of golden wheels collecting awards and being upheld at the model solution for rural transport issues.
“This third award for Bwcabus is hugely satisfying by highlighting its outstanding performance and showing it to be a leader in its field.
“It is a huge source of pride that Bwcabus continues to be recognised as the most innovative transport project nationally in the last 15 months.”
Bwcabus has 775 registered users who made more than a third more journeys in its first year. This exceeded all expectations. There have been 12,765 Bwcabus journeys to October increasing public transport use in the area by more than 40per cent.
The goals of Bwcabus are to improve access to key services for rural communities while addressing the continual decline in patronage of rural bus services whiles providing a flexible and more feasible public transport services to areas with limited or no bus provision.
Cllr Hughes said: ”People are not only using Bwcabus to get to the shops, doctor’s surgeries or hospitals but crucially to link up with other transport services to get to work.”
Bwcabus received almost £500k from the EU’s Convergence European Development Fund to help transform transport in the Teifi Valley.
In July it won ‘Most Innovative Transport project’ category at the National Transport Awards in Manchester in July beating off a UK-wide strong field of National and regional initiatives. It has also won ‘best partnership’ Category from the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Cymru.
