Progress being made in addressing bus driver shortage, says First
Managing Director Doug Claringbold says he's confident cancelled routes will be reinstated by April
The man in charge of bus operator First West of England says he's confident driver shortages will be solved by April next year.
We've spoken to managing director Doug Claringbold after the group announced it was cancelling hundreds of weekly journeys in and around Bristol because of the issue.
It's led many people, including councillors in the city, to call for the bus network to be franchised, but Mr Claringbold tells us they are making progress in solving the problem.
"Over the last few weeks we have been running a campaign across various media, which has doubled and sometimes trebled our number of applicants, to the extent that we're actually getting in some additional training buses from January, to fill those places," he said.
"So we're hoping to have nine or 10 people starting per week from January/February onwards.
"It takes about six weeks to train a driver, so it will take a while to flow through."
It's thought the number of driver vacancies in the region currently sits at around 200, but West of England Mayor Dan Norris has also said that some progress is being made on addressing the issue.
It comes though with First set to start running a new Metrobus route in January, between Cribbs Causeway and Bristol Parkway.
Mr Claringbold insists that the service will not be impacted by the lack of drivers.
"There is a national shortage of drivers and we are really working hard to address that...so we're in a much more positive place than we were a few months ago," he said.
"We're confident that we can operate the m4 and the m3 and the Metrobus services, but we're clearly continuing to increase the number of drivers available to us because we want to run more services, we want to put services back that we've stopped operating and we're confident we can do that by April."
Mayor Norris is himself resisting calls to franchise the system and has previously told us that changing who runs the buses would not solve the problem of a lack of drivers.
The new m4 route is due to start operating on January 22.