THE Government is pumping cash into rural areas to help local authorities like Buckinghamshire County Council subsidise more buses in scattered and sparse communities, where people are lucky if they see one bus a week.

But there is no government fund for densely populated towns like High Wycombe where regular, frequent and reliable services would help far more people.

Perhaps the government assumes that urban bus services all make money. But they don't and bus companies are under no obligation to run them at a loss. That's why Arriva the Shires is proposing to 'rationalise' services in this area.

High Wycombe needs first class bus services, with routes serving housing estates - and that's even if you ignore the much vaunted aims of the district and county councils of getting more people to use public transport for environmental reasons.

People on large housing estates are less likely to have cars than people in posh villages. They need buses; they don't have a choice.

Older people and women with kids need buses close to their homes. Wycombe's hills mean they can't walk a mile to the nearest bus stop.

A bus service serving people's homes also means fewer people using cars to get to work, take kids to school or go shopping, with the result those people who need to drive are not driven crazy by congestion and can go about their business efficiently.

Ironically Arriva has blamed traffic congestion in the town as one of the reasons for the failure of some of its services. Buses can't run on time because of the jams and people won't use them as a result. So it's a vicious circle and it falls to the county council to get the company out of it by spending some more of its £1.7 million for bus subsidies on urban as well as rural services.

What we also need is an end to the everlasting road works in the town. If this could be sorted buses might start to run on time, more people might use them, and Arriva might no longer need the subsidies.