(25 Nov 2015, 11:34 am)tyresmoke wrote The Marton Road crawl is a well known phenomenon both on a morning and evening, between Borough Road, Longlands, James Cook Hospital and Marton Shops. We already have a number of frequent bus services covering this stretch, our 28, 29 and 63 and Stagecoach's service 10. There needs to be a well thought out strategy for sorting the congestion and the road network needs to be able to cope with the ever increasing levels of traffic.

A Park & Ride scheme would be great for the area but it needs to ensure suitable levels of bus priority if it was to work efficiently - look at York's scheme as a good example. They carry huge amounts of people on a number of routes, indeed recently added to with the new Park & Ride site at Poppleton.

The first site they appear to have identified would appear to be in the Nunthorpe area, already partially served by my Sapphire service (every 15 minutes) and the 28 every 20 minutes, plus an hourly train service into town. It would ideally serve as a great base for people from east Cleveland, particularly neighbouring areas of Guisborough and beyond. it would need a high frequency bus service (or indeed trams?!) on dedicated infrastructure to avoid the congestion that it is supposed to be sorting, as at the moment Marton Road and indeed Cargo Fleet Lane are both rammed on a morning into town, and on an evening heading out of town, which would just hold up any dedicated Park & Ride bus.

It wouldn't be so bad if the 5's didnt stop every hundred yards (or so it seems!) from Swan's Corner, all the way down Ormesby bank and along Cargo Fleet lane, then Borough Road into the town. By the time you've got through all that, it's not exactly been an enjoyable journey.

Part of the reason I think the majority of people from say Loftus get the X4 rather than the 5 to go to Middlesbrough, although its actually a slightly longer journey, is the number of stops you've got heading into Middlesbrough. Psychologically its better to have routes which dont stop as often, especially on a long journey.
Bring back the X56 or a similar express service from East Cleveland!