Station stop

If you live in Kemp Town you can either wait in the station for the No 7 or 27.

However, if you want to catch the No 712 or 14, you have to risk your life running across the street, through the taxis racing into the station, and then 50 yards down Queens Road.

Why not put the Kemp Town buses at one bus stop and the Western Road buses at another? There, Mr French, it's easy.

Ken Paul, Marine Gate, Brighton

-* Roger French, managing director of Brighton and Hove Bus and Coach Company, replies: There is simply not enough room outside Brighton station for all the buses to be accommodated. Brighton and Hove City Council has recently added another bus stop in Queens Road but we need even more space to really provide the facilities. We have recently reorganised the stops in response to passenger suggestions and will be keeping this under review, including this correspondent's idea. Was it just a coincidence the comments from Sheila Kent (Letters, November 27), understandably frustrated at the difficulties we have had in keeping service 81 running reliably through Queens Park, appeared directly below the excellent letter from David Gray criticising the farcical Lewes Road/Elm Grove/ Union Road roadworks that have brought that area of the city to almost permanent gridlock and particularly affecting the reliability of bus service 81? It's time the city got its own "Road Holes Czar" to make sure such roadworks do not drag on for months and cause misery for so many. Correspondents complaining about the lack of a daytime bus service between Mile Oak and Downs Park along Fox Way have a valid point, as there is no service. We withdrew it last year due to lack of use and after Sainsbury's pulled the plug on its funding to encourage people to travel to its supermarket. When bus routes were opened up to the free market in 1986, the Government envisaged private bus companies providing services where a commercial market existed and local authorities providing the funding required for additional routes where people were left isolated. Our success has been in providing a network of bus routes such that the funding required by the council to fill any gaps is minimal, representing about one per cent of our turnover. There must be few cities in the world with such a comprehensive bus network and so little public funding, which, for some years, has been frozen. I hope some of the surpluses raised from the successful decriminalised parking scheme can be put back into public transport, as originally promised, to support bus links of the kind these correspondents suggest. We cannot possibly provide a service to meet everyone's individual travel needs, otherwise we might as well be in the taxi business. We are reviewing the reintroduction of the link from Mile Oak to Downs Park for the new year. This will cost us in excess of £50,000 a year so we look forward to all 700 people who signed the petition and the 100 people quoted as walking to school along Fox Way hopping back on the bus.