Madam,

In these times of austerity when schools are being closed, leisure centre hours reduced and other public services cut I find it amazing that Ceredigion County Council is giving priority to a public transport interchange at Bow Street, to include a park and ride and re-opening of the rail station in the village.

Having visited the Information Day and spoken to council experts I remain totally unconvinced that the facility will be used enough to justify the reported £5m cost, though Network Rail will pay a share of this.

There are two examples of similar recently-developed projects in other more populous areas that have been shown to be a total waste of public money.

The Liverpool Echo reported in 2013 that drivers are shunning a park and ride facility at a Merseyside station built with millions of pounds of European funding.

A friend from Aberystwyth, who now lives on the outskirts of Manchester, has also told me that he regularly passes a similar scheme there and only a handful of the 265 spaces are occupied daily.

Across the country billions of pounds are being spent, or are proposed to be spent, on speeding up rail journeys. Providing another station within three miles of two others will have the opposite effect and slow down the already slow journey between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury.

If the council is convinced that a park and ride scheme at Bow Street will be extensively used then why not just provide an area close to the main road where cars can be parked and drivers and passengers can catch the public service buses that pass through the village.

A new station is totally unnecessary. There is hardly ever any congestion on the roads coming into Aberystwyth from the north and east at

peak times, so wouldn’t it make more sense to have a park and ride south of the town where there are queues of traffic from before 8am each morning?

Instead of developing this transport interchange at Bow Street it would make more sense for the council to invest the money in a multi-storey car park in Aberystwyth, which would pay for itself in time and benefit all motorists coming into town.

There is ample land available for it within a short distance of Aberystwyth railway station.

Yours etc,

Roy Hancock,

Llangorwen,

Aberystwyth.

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