Hopper bus service to be extended

The service, which is subsidised by the town council, currently runs on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays between 9am and 2pm.

But the authority has now agreed to spend a further £70,000 in its next budget to extend the service to run on Mondays and Fridays as well and with an electric bus.

It hopes by doing so the number of bus users will increase, it will help to reduce Henley’s carbon footprint and better connect residents with the town centre shops and services.  

The council first commissioned the service in 2020 after Reading Buses ended its contract. It is now operated by TK Travel, of Reading, and is not-for-profit.

It covers three different routes in the town centre and all start and finish in Market Place. The annual cost for five days with an electric bus is £97,568. To keep the current diesel bus would cost £91,948.  

Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak said that the funding for the service comes from developer contributions.

He said: “For those of you who don't know, TK stands for Tony and Katie. It's a family-run business. It’s a very, very good deal for Henley, such that the electric bus is only going to cost us £20 a day more than the diesel bus would have cost us.  

“The bus they’re getting is a brand-new electric bus, not a second-hand one, and it’s coming from the same company as our existing bus so we know it’s reliable.

“It is going to be charged over at the TK travel depot, which is on the other side of Reading, and they are installing a fast charger and they are putting solar panels on the roof of their barns.”

The number of users of the service is growing. In the last financial year,  12,012 trips were recorded and between April and September  there has  been 6,212 trips.  

Cllr Gawrysiak said: “There are lots of vulnerable people in Henley that would be completely isolated if we didn’t provide this bus. This is a community service, rather like the skate park, like Townlands Memorial Hospital, like the 60+ Social Club.  

“I hope that the extended service will start from about March. There will be a two- or three-month delay because we have to log the new routes with the travel commissioners and that takes 12 weeks to do that process.”

He added that he would have liked to extend the operating hours of the service but there was not the funding available.  

Councillor Gill Dodds described the service as a “wonderful thing for the community.” She said: “We have done some extraordinary things over the last 20, 30 years and this is another one of these wonderful bold ideas. To fund the bus for people to use, it ticks all the boxes. We have the money, it’s green and it’s electric.”  

Councillor Rob Romans said that the service had come a long way since the council first took it over.  

He said: “If we cast our minds back to the heady days of 2020, when Reading Buses left us in a bit of a difficult situation, during very uncertain, unpredictable times, we had to come up with a solution to sort that out.”

Cllr Romans said that the council should look at making the service more profitable in future. He said: “I really do think we need to have a look at the data, to work out which stops are the most profitable.  

“At the end of the day, it’s a community asset. I do think we should be looking at the data to try and maximise where we can try and earn more revenue.”