DUNOON Community Council (DCC) is to explore the option of providing a temporary bus service in place of the Dunoon to Gourock CalMac ferry route.
But the plan has been branded dreadful by South Cowal Community Council (SCCC), which represents Innellan and Toward, whose members unanimously agreed it was an ill-considered proposal which could have dire consequences.
On Monday evening at the Queens Hall, Transport Lead for DCC, David Clough, explained to fellow community councillors that he is due to have a one-to-one meeting with Chris Wilcock, Transport Scotland’s director of ferries and ports, specifically to discuss how investigations could progress into replacing the existing CalMac service with a bus-based arrangement.
Dunoon Community Council recently conducted a ferry survey asking respondents to score six potential approaches to the Dunoon-Gourock crossing. The second-highest-scoring preferred option was a bus service.
Community councillor Clough said: “South Cowal Community Council contacted me, expressing concern about this idea of a bus service. They would not support it. They don’t want it mentioned because they think it would open the door to us never getting another ferry service back here again.
“Yet, I did go back and point out to them that their responsibility is to represent the views of their residents, and the views of their residents from our survey, is that number two on the list (of the survey), as it was with everybody else, was the bus service. So at the moment, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a viable option.”
Mr Clough then went on to add that he believed that the exploration of this option was the right thing to do and that it could be implemented rapidly.
Indicating from his previous meetings and discussions that local bus company West Coast Motors could be ready within 12 weeks, assuming the contract for the service was awarded directly to them from Transport Scotland.
Mr Clough then explained that a timetable for the bus service has already been drafted up.
He said: “The basic proviso is the bus will run from Dunoon ferry terminal to Buchanan Street every two hours, but in between that, every 20 minutes there will be a smaller bus which will run from the ferry terminal to Gourock train station, direct.
“You won’t have to get off. You just get on the bus and then you’ll get off in Gourock because a large proportion of the people who travel to Gourock then go onward travel by train to Glasgow.”
Dunoon ward councillor Ross Moreland brought up the fact that Western Ferries have been clear in the past that they could not guarantee the proposed bus service priority, ahead of other queuing vehicles.
Responding to this, Mr Clough said: “You need to remember that Gordon Ross (Managing Director of Western Ferries) is a very astute businessman and he will resist priority boarding until he gets something he wants. Gordon wants certain things… when I’m talking to Chris Wilcock (Transport Scotland), I’ll be saying what could we potentially give him to get priority boarding.”
Mr Clough then received unanimous approval from his fellow community councillors at DCC to progress with the bus service idea in his future meeting with Chris Wilcock.
But the bus service proposal has not gone down well with SCCC and secretary Michael Breslin doubled down on his disapproval.
In a statement issued to the Dunoon Observer this week, he explained: “We unanimously agreed this was a very bad idea. If we lose the town centre to town centre service, unreliable as it is, it will never return. They’re pursuing the return of the 907 bus service which took an age to get to Glasgow and which was ended, we understand, by Western Ferries.”
He added: “If this is resurrected, it will also damage the train service from Gourock and give Network Rail an open door to save money on maintaining the tunnel. Do the good people of Gourock really want to bus it to Greenock to catch the train? This is an ill-considered proposal with potentially dire consequences for Dunoon and Gourock.”
