I’VE given up. I have tried to be as green as I can, walking my children to school most days for years, recycling religiously, and getting the bus to and from work for four-and-a-half years.

But I’ve given up on getting the bus to work. Today, I take possession of my own car – and it will give me two things the buses never could: consistency and time.

Time is something that has become more important to me over the past couple of years, because I have become increasingly short of it. My part-time hours have been arranged with my bosses so that I arrive home as my children come home from school – and the one thing I hoped to avoid was to turn them into latchkey kids. I want to be there for them.

But recently, late and never-arriving buses have forced my children to become exactly what I planned against, because I cannot get home in time. It has been taking me between an hour-and-a-half and two hours to complete my journey home, a journey that takes 15 minutes in a car. My commute both to and from work is outside the rush hours and so in theory buses should be more punctual and more consistent. But they’re not.

Perhaps part of the problem is that in order to get to work, I have to go into town and back out again, and so I have to get two buses each way. But at the bus stop just a two-minute walk from my home, the buses, which are supposed to arrive every seven minutes, do not. Often there are 20-minute gaps, then three arrive at once.

The bus stop does not have one of those electronic arrival boards, so I’m permanently in a state of panic about getting to work on time because I simply do not know when the next bus is coming and if it will get me into town on time to get the next one. The bus company urges me to “get the app”, but I’m not tempted to, because it will just mean I will have a better idea of how late the bus is going to be. Knowing that I’m going to be late for work does not actually reduce my stress.

Similarly, my journey home is just as traumatic. Again, the bus stop has no electronic arrival board, and so day after day I stand there, with pensioners and young parents with babies and toddlers and bags of shopping, waiting for a bus that is scheduled to arrive... but never does.

Sometimes I wait 40 minutes, and once I asked a driver why her bus had arrived 25 minutes late. She simply shrugged her shoulders and said it had arrived back at the depot late, forcing her to set off late on her route.

So I’m getting a car – not actually my choice, as an extremely generous relative has bought me one as a gift (I couldn’t afford to buy a car). Nevertheless, for ecological reasons, I make the move from bus to car reluctantly... and yet now I’m close to taking possession of it, it’s also with the anticipated joy of no more waiting for buses that never arrive, no more taxi fares when I need to get home in a hurry (it costs me £14 plus tip for a journey between home and office, and that’s on top of a Day Saver bus ticket costing £4.70) and significantly reduced stress.

“Bus travel in Brighton & Hove is easy and convenient,” says Brighton and Hove City Council on its Travel, Transport and Road Safety web page. “Buses run every few minutes on main routes...”

And the Brighton and Hove Green Party, which runs the city council, says: “We’ve been extremely successful in attracting over £8 million of external funding to the city for transport improvements at little or no cost to residents... we are working to make our major arterial roads more bus-friendly”.

So why am I still left waiting at bus stops for buses? It’s simply not good enough.

While I appreciate many city bus services are efficient and on time, I have felt angry and stressed as a result of the failings on my particular journeys, and I am sorry for those people who simply have no option but to rely on public transport, including me until today.

Why aren’t bus services in Brighton and Hove more efficient and reliable? I do understand that roadworks, the weather and unforeseen circumstances affect buses, but my experience is happening on a regular basis and I feel I can only rely on them being unreliable.

I’d love to hear answers from the bus company and the council – and if I do, I’ll faithfully report in my next column.

If a dictator can make the trains run on time, why can’t a democracy make the buses run on time? Lessons need to be learnt.