Mark Spencer MP: Public transport challenge for Sherwood

Here’s Mark’s report of his challenge which first appeared in the Hucknall Dispatch here.

“On Friday I embarked on a journey around the entire Sherwood constituency using only public transport. I bumped into a lot of you on the way so thanks to everyone who said hello! Also thank you to all of you who followed my progress on Facebook and Twitter!

I started this trip at my home in Lambley, took the bus to Nottingham, then got the tram to Hucknall, jumped onto the train to Mansfield, then took the bus to Ollerton via Clipstone and Edwinstowe. From there I took another Bus to Bilsthorpe where a timetable error led me to have a pint at the Copper Beech Pub! How unfortunate!

I then took another bus back to Nottingham and then ANOTHER bus back out to Lambley, then 61 miles, six hours and £22 later we finally reached home again.

The purpose of this trip is to produce a report for ‘Dods’ about the state of public transport in my constituency. Dods produces parliamentary communications and political information and are seeking to produce a report on the state of public transport in various areas. As many of you will know I don’t do ‘Faffing’ so I thought the best way to test the public transport is to spend the entire day using it! I was fairly impressed with the transport. I think it ran fairly well and fairly efficiently despite the fact that the weather was quite poor.

We managed to complete the journey without too many issues and I was really quite impressed with the public transport, one thing I will say is that it dramatically improves the nearer you get to Nottingham. In the north of the constituency in areas such as Edwinstowe and Ollerton it is not quite as frequent, especially on Sundays.

The feedback from all of you has so far been brilliant so please do keep commenting and letting me know your thoughts on the public transport and how you think it could be improved. Your feedback is important for me to gauge other people’s experiences with the transport system as well as my own.

We decided for a bit of fun to video the entire dayso that people could see exactly what we did, this can be viewed by visiting www.markspencermp.co.ukand clicking the link, there are also links to my Facebook and Twitter feed there so you can join the debate.

I hope to meet more of you as I continue to door knock across the Constituency over the coming weeks.”

This article first appeared in the Hucknall Dispatch here .