Winge in the paper

THAT'S IT, WE'RE OFF THE BUSES
11:00 - 29 May 2008
We have finally given up on the buses altogether.It's a long and sorry tale, which seems all the more crazy when you consider that my two teenage daughters were paying Stagecoach nearly £10 a day between them to catch buses from our Torquay home.Now my elder daughter has found somebody to give her a lift, after being told that the number 85 was being cancelled.When she inquired she was told by the bus information service that there would be no bus to Teignmouth in the morning to get her to work on time after the new timetables were introduced.I didn't believe her when she told me, and phoned the bus information line myself, only to be given exactly the same information.The first bus to Teignmouth from Torquay would not arrive in Teignmouth until 9.20am, I was told.So she found a lift share, thanks to the kindness of somebody prepared to double back and pick her up every day.It was only after I wrote about the madness of the new timetables in this column that Torbay Council told me the information service was wrong. There would be a new service running earlier buses to Teignmouth every day.But it was too late, by then she had made her own arrangements for fear of losing her job.Then, in the same round of reorganisation, Stagecoach announced it was going to reduce the frequency of the number 12 service along the congested Newton Road.Again, it was a final straw moment.My younger daughter goes to sixth form college in Newton Abbot because when we moved to Torquay three years ago from Teignbridge, she was happy and well-established at her school. With all the other changes going on around her after our divorce, I agreed with her decision not to move to a new school in Torquay.It turned out to be the right decision, she has done well academically and is now loving sixth form and has a great crowd of nice friends.But the number 12 bus has turned out to be the bane of her life.Even when she first started getting the bus from the harbourside she needed to be leaving home at 7.30am in order to have any chance to getting to school by 9am.The bus has become her nemesis. She hates it with a passion.For her Stagecoach became slow coach. Hours of wasted time, week after week, staring out of the window of the number 12 as it inched its way like a snail along the ever more congested Newton Road, stopping and starting to pick up passengers as the traffic in front of it built up and brought it to a standstill.She curses the fact she is one of the youngest in her year, and still too young to drive.Our only alternative would have been for me to also leave home at 7.30am and drive her to Torquay railway station so she could get the only train to Newton Abbot which would have got her to school on time.I would have happily done that, but it seemed unfair on my youngest child, who was only four at the time. He also would have had to be up, and dressed, and out of the house by 7.30am every day.So she got the bus. And being a teenage girl, with hair straighteners and make-up and showering to worry about, that meant getting up ridiculously early every morning.However, being a teenager, mornings are not her best time. In fact, mornings became our worst time.I had a choice. Leave her to her own devices, knowing she would get out of the front door eventually, looking perfectly beautiful but also knowing she would be 10 minutes late for school, or try to get her up on time.Every parent of teenagers knows what a thankless task that is. I'm sure everybody has tried different tacks.There's the softly-softly, when you are in a good mood on a sunny morning when you gently tiptoe in and open the curtains with a smile and a drink.Or there is the fun and tickling approach, when you try to tease them awake in a good mood by tickling their toes under the duvet.Or you can bang in loudly, throwing back curtains and covers and poke them until they growl and swear at you.I have even tried ringing her on her mobile phone, knowing the one thing teenagers react to is a phone call.But the problem with all of these tactics is that, as soon as you leave the room, your teenagers will heave a sigh of relief, roll over and go back to sleep.Especially when, in the back of their mind, they know there will be another number 12 coming along in 10 more minutes.The only foolproof way is to stay in the room until they are up and out of bed and in the shower. This can take anything up to 15 minutes.And when you are the only adult in the house, with other children to sort and get breakfast for, it's not exactly a viable option.But the news that the number 12 was going to be running even less frequently was the final straw and I am now driving her to Torquay railway station every morning, so that she can have the pleasure of getting on the cattle truck full of schoolchildren.The train takes less than 15 minutes, but now she is getting to Newton nearly an hour earlier than necessary.But strangely, now that she knows there is only one train, she is getting up on time every day.And it seems we have escaped the pleasures of daily bus journeys just in the nick of time. Because last week, along with the confusion of the new timetables, Stagecoach introduced new ticketing machines.These, according to my bus travelling colleague, are the reason that all the buses in South Devon appear to be travelling in threes at the moment.It's no wonder too many of us drive cars rather than rely on public transport. It's no wonder older people try to hang on to their cars.I once had a very elderly neighbour who used to wait anxiously outside the house whenever her husband went out in the car alone.One day she confided: "It's all right when we're both in the car. But he can't see very well now and I have to tell him if there are any cars coming."We were living in a rural area with no bus service and when he eventually gave up driving after a bit of a crash at 90, their lives changed drastically for the worse.And for everyone who relies on the buses, being at the mercy of a nameless, faceless institution which appears to be trying everything in its power to annoy rather than help its poor customers every day, is enough to make you feel like a moaning, whinging wreck.