I AM writing in response to Councillor MacIntyre's edict on the Kilcreggan Gourock Sunday service that we must 'use it or lose it'. How can we use it when with less than a week to go there is no timetable available and the SPT website doesn't mention it at all?
As our representative on the SPT Councillor MacIntyre will be well aware of the problems caused by SPT's management of this service over the past year; a tender document that didn't specify that the seats on a year round ferry should be inside, a new operator that promised them a new boat but turned up with a 16-year-old boat and then sailed without a properly certified skipper, a service which has on average at least one days disrupted sailings a week, a service without a certified backup boat. The reliability is such that many have given up on it - we see Coulport and Faslane workers from Inverclyde preferring a 90 minute bus ride to a 15 minute ferry crossing. Two sailings each way have been dropped from the weekday service since the service started in April, and the latest timetable no longer guarantees the ferry waiting on the last connecting train from Glasgow. Last summer the Sunday service was three boats a day each way, the first one after lunch. Kilcreggan folk do want to use the service, we do want to use it on a Sunday to access the amenities in Gourock and Greenock such as the leisure centre and Lido, but Councillor MacIntyre, surely you realise that a service is only a service if it is regular and reliable? We rarely used the Helensburgh route because SPT ran a timetable that was no more than a few token sailings. SPT then used the lack of numbers as justification for cutting it. The demand is there, lack of use is not the community failing, it is SPT failing to provide an adequate service. So Councillor MacIntyre, I would say to you that rather than being a mouth piece for SPT telling us to use it or lose it, be a mouth piece for your constituents and tell SPT that they need to provide a service that is fit for purpose.
Kerr Gardiner Kilcreggan
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