People power our businesses
There’s an old saying in business that your most precious assets walk out of the door at the end of their working day. In other words, the most valuable bits of a company are the people who work for it, regardless of how flexible that work is.
That’s certainly true for many of our members, who have built up their teams over the years and now have experience and local knowledge to call upon for the benefit of their customers.
We have a wide variety of businesses within the membership of our Chamber of Commerce and we are keen to represent their interests in whichever way we can. Often there is no quick fix for their concerns and it takes time and consistent raising of those issues before anything happens.
There are often times when you feel frustrated that nothing will change, but then there are moments when we seem to make some progress and we have recently been pleased to hear about one example. We have regularly made the case that the Chew Valley needs an improved public transport system, to allow workers and customers to access businesses, to help residents and visitors move around and to give young people the chance to go for a night out without paying a small fortune for a taxi from Bristol.
New bus services have been announced which will be a much-needed step in the right direction. The X91 will help people go to work in Bristol without the need to use a car whilst the 99 Chew Valley Cat service will link up our villages during the day, but crucially also provide a late-night link on Fridays and Saturday with the main bus routes out of Bristol. Hopefully some links can be made into and out of Bath as well.
Funding for the new services is currently only in place for 18 months, which is not long for people to change their habits and move out of their cars and onto the bus. Many will need time to be persuaded to make the switch and to build up confidence in the reliability of an alternative service.
At the same time the numbers need to stack up, so getting enough passengers onto the buses will be the acid test to ensure that the services continue. It will be interesting to see how popular the new routes will turn out to be, but at least it shows that if you carry on saying the same thing over again, sometimes things change for the better.
Comments