The Red Rose Bus Service No 17: a challenge, a quiz, an appeal, and the quiz answers

Red Rose 17 bus service

TL;DR: Use it or, well… you know the saying

Are you aware that our village is lucky enough to have an excellent, regular, reasonably-priced bus service that connects the village to two of our nearby towns (Bicester and Aylesbury), each of which has many facilities, transport connections and entertainment options? If, as a village, we don’t use it then we will, in time, lose it!

The Quiz

Do you know of the following locations along, and near to, the route? Answers are at the end of this article:

 A choice of 4 main line railway stations from which London, Birmingham, and Oxford are a few of the destinations. [1]

 A theatre to rival the West End, with a range of restaurants just outside. [2]

Two cinemas - an Odeon Luxe if you like a little luxury, and a Vue - so between the two you should be able to find the film you want to see. [3]

Buckinghamshire’s largest business park and innovation centre, home to 80+ companies and 600+ jobs. [4]

The National Trust's 7th most popular property in the UK. [5]

Too many restaurants and pubs to mention where you can have a drink and not worry about driving over the limit, or the cost of a taxi home.

Other services such as schools, swimming pools, supermarkets, retail parks, industrial parks, a museum, car dealerships... and much more...

The work of a Parish Transport Representative

One of the village ‘hats’ I wear is as Parish Transport Representative(PTR) for Launton. I’m part of a wider group of PTRs for Oxfordshire who meet quarterly to represent and campaign for improvements on behalf of our parishes. From the conversations I listen to there, I feel lucky(amazed, actually) to have the service, both in regularity and options for connections, that we have in Launton, in comparison to most other parishes in the county. In some of those parishes, they didn’t use their services, so they lost them! Sadly, that is the prevailing picture throughout the UK now.

The No 17 bus service: the plan and how it has worked

The number 17 bus route, run by Red Rose (the updated timetable was printed in full in Launton Lines in September but is available on the Red Rose website under Timetables), passes through the village 12 times in each direction (approximately hourly) for over 12 hours per day Monday-Friday and 11 times (hourly) on Saturdays. We should use it, or we will lose it!

Some will remember previous services such as the S5 extension to Launton and the much less useful 28. There was even a school days route adjustment to the S5 to take schoolchildren to Cooper School. It didn’t get high enough usage to remain viable - we didn’t use them (enough) so we lost them! Langford Village used to have the 27 service into Bicester, it has now lost it too (just after the new shelters were installed…).

Our family have used the 17 daily since September 2021 and in over 230 return journeys it has let us down only four times (twice due to bad traffic, which is not really the bus company’s fault). It has also kept pretty good time throughout - even more so since the updated timetable in September 2022. Amazingly, given the traffic we’ve had through the village recently due to roadworks on the A41, it has been less than 5 minutes late on arrival in the morning for 93% of the time. Before the new service started, I successfully campaigned for the route to run via Launton (a possible alternative would have been via Langford / Graven Hill / Symmetry Park) we need to prove that we are using it, so we don’t lose it to those other areas of significant (and growing)populations.

On the subject of traffic, the old S5 used to take 1h 10m to get into Oxford in the morning rush hour - you can now do this in just 41 minutes from Launton by using the 17 plus a traffic-free train from Bicester Village, 14 minutes of that time allows for the walk between bus and train. Or you could swap to the X5 instead of the train, removing the walk too, and still be in Oxford in under an hour, subject to traffic. Either way, we’d thank you for using it so that we don’t lose it!

The Appeal to all users

If you’ve never used the 17 before, or not for a while, and need an excuse, what better reason than a new year’s resolution to try it? The route has around 4 years of funding in which to prove it is viable - it’s not just our village that needs to help make that happen, with fast-growing population areas along the route we should have some help. However, at the end of the funded period, all being well and with good passenger numbers, we will be able to say “We used it, and we kept it!”, and not feel like the many villages nearby who have lost their bus services, possibly for good.

Launton’s number 17 bus service: use it or lose it! (We may never get another one this good).

Jon Spinage

Red Rose 17 bus service: answers to the quiz

Here are the answers to the first five questions in the Quiz at the beginning of this article:

[1] The stations are Bicester North, Bicester Village, Aylesbury and Aylesbury Parkway, all run by Chiltern Railways [2] The theatre is Aylesbury Waterside Theatre [3] The cinemas are Odeon Luxe in Aylesbury, Vue Cinema in Bicester [4] The business park and innovation centre is at Westcott Venture Park [5] The popular National Trust property is Waddesdon Manor House and Gardens