Ceredigion Green Party members have undertaken a day of action to highlight the number of bus services lost in the county since the pandemic began.

Members travelled on the T5 and T1 services on Wednesday, 17 November to place ‘timetables’ on many shelters “in order to show the many services which have been lost since the start of the pandemic.”

Several services have had routes scaled back following the pandemic, with driver shortages also claiming some journeys on major bus routes in and out of Ceredigion.

Elly Foster, one of the members from the Ceredigion party who joined the action, said: “Many passengers on the bus were relating stories of hours spent waiting for a non-existent service.

“They were all very happy to distribute the ‘timetables’ to destinations along the route and praised us for taking action.

“In Cardigan we met two ladies who were desperate to share their stories.

“Julia Deli told us, ‘I’m a 56 year old woman, have never driven, I rely on the bus to go to work but I’ve lost jobs because of these cuts.

“‘I’ve now also lost my NHS dentist because I can’t get there as it involves using both the T1 and the T5 which is just about impossible right now.’

“Anne Davies used to have a car until her knees went bad.

“‘Until you stop driving, you don’t realise how difficult it is on the bus,’ she told us.

“‘How do they expect people to get to the new health centre if they are disabled and don’t drive?

“‘And the Covid vaccination centre is in the middle of nowhere.’”

Elly said that as the members went along the routes the “complaints came in thick and fast.”

“We didn’t get everybody’s name but the message is clear,” she said.

“Passengers want to have the services back as soon as possible and they want them all back, not just the two or three lost due to the shortage of drivers. Until such time, they want accurate information both on-line and at all bus stops.

“We took some photographs to highlight the misinformation that is out there.

“These show old timetables in Aberystwyth train station dating back to 2015, a timetable for The Little Blue Bus, which stopped running in October 2015, missing information on the electronic timetables, inexplicable information on another electronic timetable, but most of all, timetables in many shelters that still show buses that are simply not running at the moment.

“These are mainly in the smaller settlements but also in places like Aberaeron.”

Elly said that “there is a real fear out there” that services may not return to pre-pandemic levels.

“We cannot let that happen,” she said.