New buses for pupils at Bournville Schools

Secretary of State for Transport, Lord Adonis came to Birmingham to launch our own high-tech version of America's Yellow School Buses, which have taken to the road for pupils at two Bournville schools.

At Centro, we have teamed up with The Green Bus, Dame Elizabeth Cadbury Technology College and Bournville School and Sixth Form Centre to provide each school with two bespoke state-of-the-art bus services.

It means pupils can now travel to classes at the south Birmingham schools with their fellow students using safe, environmentally friendly, congestion busting transport and without having to rely on lifts from family or friends.

The new services use the latest technology to provide reassurance to parents and a state-of-the-art service for pupils.

Each service has a specially designed route, created using input from parents and staff to ensure stops are within close walking distance of pupils' homes while also aiming to reduce the number of cars on congested corridors during the school run.

Parents can see the exact location of all services using a live tracking tool on The Green Bus' interactive website so they can be safe in the knowledge of knowing exactly where their child's bus is.

Additionally, a free instant text message service is provided for students, parents and teachers to keep them informed of any delays or diversions.

Each high-tech service also has its own dedicated driver and a free WiFi service on board, allowing pupils to access the internet when travelling to and from school.

Rt Hon Lord Adonis, Secretary of State for Transport, said: "With a billion car trips a year being made exclusively for the school run, providing safe, attractive and reliable transport for pupils has real potential to free up our roads and reduce our carbon emissions.

"These new services from Centro and The Green Bus go even further by embracing new technology to reassure parents and giving students state-of-the-art incentives to travel sustainably."

The new services have been developed under Centro's Transforming Bus Travel strategy, which aims to make bus travel easier and more attractive for people in the West Midlands.

Centro teamed up with The Green Bus, a Birmingham-based firm set up by a teacher, to enable parents to leave cars at home by providing their children with attractive, bespoke bus services to school.

The services use buses painted in a striking green livery and will complement existing bus services that serve the school.

They accept all valid nnetwork and nbus tickets, which children will also be able to use on any other bus service in the West Midlands at any time.

Ian Mack, Managing Director of The Green Bus concluded: "The Green Bus removes huge numbers of unnecessary car journeys from the roads in the West Midlands every day.

"Centro has worked with us to create a visionary scheme to enable many more pupils to get to school easily and quickly by bus. The Green Bus is a cost-effective antidote to the Yellow School Bus, offering affordable transport to parents and helping to reduce climate change at the same time.

"The beauty of our model is that it can be funded in a variety of ways, from fully-funded by parents to partly-funded or wholly-funded by other bodies, such as Centro."

The new services follow the introduction of pilot schemes at Wolverhampton Girls' High School and St Paul's School for Girls, where four new bus routes were launched in September 2009.

These four services alone have proved to be a huge success, carrying around 300 pupils every day and taking hundreds of car journeys off the regions road's every week.