Have you noticed how hubs are taking over the commercial world?

A word scarcely used in a business sense 30 years ago is now attached to anything that has a sort of managerial connection with anything else. In my days in computers (or ‘information technology’, as we learned to call it), a ‘hub’ was a computer or a communication device that controlled other computers to which it was connected. Computers that were not attached to anything else were ‘stand alone’. With the advent of the internet everything became connected to everything else, so hubs became a sort of central information/management resource that provided services and information to subservient ‘client’ computers. But the word has now become generally used in business as a central source of information and resources.

As with the Gloucester and Cheltenham ‘Transport Hubs’.

Our visits to Gloucester and Cheltenham General Hospitals are inevitably getting more frequent. As a commuter from the Forest to Cheltenham for around 20 years, I had no problem with parking, as my visits would be exclusively either to my place of work, where there was parking available, or to the Everyman Theatre, which has great parking facilities. But now Cheltenham General Hospital is my most likely Cheltenham destination.

Gloucester and Cheltenham General Hospitals have their own expensive over-subscribed hospital car parks, and there is some limited and also often over-subscribed street parking which usually (but not always) is available, but when feeding the parking meter we probably will not know if our hospital visit will be for one hour or ten hours. Street parking will often involve hasty and often highly inconvenient visits from the hospital to feed a remote meter every couple of hours when the visit is longer than expected, as it usually is.

The new Gloucester bus station is designated a ‘Transport Hub’. It’s close to the railway station, but with no convenient provision for parking. It is only a bus station, not a car-friendly Park and Ride. Parking in Gloucester is limited, with the Longsmith Street car park still not restored to full capacity.

After some scepticism, we made our first visit to the Cheltenham ‘Arle Court Park and Ride’ facility, on the outskirts of the town on the Forest side. This new bus station is a true high-capacity modern Transport hub. You don’t have to be a motorist to use its facilities. After only a couple of months in operation, cyclists, motorists and walkers can commute from there to their places of work or other destinations using local bus services to Gloucester or Cheltenham, including their hospitals. If you do use the local Park & Ride buses, you park at ‘Park and Ride’ for free. There will soon be national coach services to major cities in England, as well as to Glasgow and Cardiff. It’s electrical vehicle friendly, you will be able to hire an electric (EV) scooter, and there’s lots of space at the site. The staff at the help desk and around the venue are friendly, helpful and proud of their new place of work. There will be a café there, and its position close to the M5 will be a great asset for the site and the county. You can show your bus passes to use the park and ride buses, as we did on the way to and from Cheltenham General Hospital. There’s a parcel collection service. I tried to think of any disadvantages, and all that I could come up with is that to link to the train network at Cheltenham Spa station, there is a 10 minute walk from the designated ‘Park and Ride’ bus stop at Granley Road, Benhall.

That’s why it’s a real hub, not just a Park and Ride.