Park and ride woe

Their only fault was that they, like me, were naive enough to think that it would be properly organised and run by the council.

How does Mr Lynn get to the conclusion that it was the customers’ parking to blame for the fiasco, as he was not there? Nor, for that matter, were any staff from the council, or the police, or anyone else in an organisational capacity.

An eight-year-old could figure out, as mine did, that the buses should come in one end of the site and leave by the other end, as eventually one leaving would come head-to-head with one arriving, which is exactly what happened.

If any of us waiting had known that there were only four small buses for the thousands of people there, then we wouldn’t have wasted our time going there in the first place. There obviously needed to be three or four times as many to make the scheme truly successful.

After about an hour and a half it was clear that people joining the queue would not make it to Arundel and should have been turned away, but there was no one there to turn them away.

The final tipping point in the fiasco was when the buses started taking people from the back of the line, leaving stranded the ones who had waited an hour and a half to get to the front! This, not surprisingly, almost started a riot.

The traffic on the edge of Arundel was not bad, Mr Lynn – I know. Like many others at Ford, we jumped in our cars and drove up there. If the buses had dropped off in the obvious place (on the edge of the town) they would not have been held up in any traffic.

Mr Lynn, please don’t blame people for following your advice.

P. Read

Downsway

Angmering