A NEW free shuttle bus being laid on to help people stranded by the closure of the A432 bridge over the M4 will provide a link from Emersons Green to Yate.
The half-hourly weekday service starts at 7am and was launched in September to ferry passengers along Badminton Road from Yate Park & Ride via Coalpit Heath to Cuckoo Lane, just north of the bridge.
From there pedestrians can walk across the bridge to reach the metrobus m3 stops on the Avon Ring Road by the Wick Wick roundabout in Downend.
This means that people from Lyde Green and Emersons Green can travel to Yate using the metrobus and the free YCL bus.
It is being paid for by National Highways, which closed the bridge in July after cracks were found in the concrete structure, and run by bus company Transpora under contract to South Gloucestershire Council.
Each journey is expected to take nine minutes, with the first buses of the day leaving Cuckoo Lane at 7am and the last one back from Yate leaving at 6.38pm.
Meanwhile parents are reporting that a school bus service from Emersons and Lyde Green to Winterbourne Academy is becoming “dangerously overcrowded” after another service was axed.
The 459 is now making its first pick-ups before 7am each day.
But a parent told the Voice it was arriving late at the school because children from Downend who used the axed 458 service have been getting on it.
Olympus Academy Trust, which runs Winterbourne Academy, is using its post-16 bus, which
usually transports sixth form students between secondary school sites during the day, to pick up some pupils who used the 458 last term.
But in a letter to parents, the school said it recognised the new service would not suit all pupils – and there have been reports of it running more than 30 minutes late in the mornings.