Your quick and easy route into Chelmsford!

From Friday 6th March 2026, Central Connect Park and Ride route 701 will be commercially operated. This means we’ll no longer be receiving a subsidy from Essex County Council to operate the route, and will instead be using the revenue we collect from passengers using the service to cover our operational costs. We’ll keep running the same great value, high-quality service which our passengers have enjoyed for the past four years, using our modern, British-built Low Carbon Emission certified buses. There are no changes to the route or timetable.

We’re aware that Essex County Council has chosen to enter into a contract with another bus operator to provide a bus service along the same route as route 701, with an identical timetable to our own. We’re surprised and disappointed that they have taken this decision, because they knew of our intention to continue running route 701 commercially before entering into that contract.

The County Council will be paying the new operator around £680,000 every year to run their bus service, and although some of that cost will be recouped through revenue collected on board, our estimates suggest that in excess of £1m of taxpayers money will be spent subsidising the other operator’s bus service over their four year contract. At a time when the County Council are reducing the level of service at the Chelmer Valley Park & Ride, and consulting on cutbacks to a range of other bus services across Essex, we believe that the money spent paying for another operator’s bus to run to and from Sandon Park & Ride could be better spent on investing in sustainable transport elsewhere in the County.

The County Council have confirmed that they will be funding the gap between fare revenue and operating cost for Chelmsford Park & Ride using Department for Transport (DfT) Bus Grant revenue funding. The Bus Grant is a consolidated grant for local transport authorities to maintain and improve bus services, comprising both capital and revenue funding. This means that money spent on Chelmsford Park & Ride is money which could otherwise have been spent on bus services elsewhere in Essex.

Central Connect, and our sister companies Simonds and Konectbuses, have a strong track record of delivering Park and Ride bus services commercially elsewhere, without requiring taxpayer subsidy. Other operators also successfully deliver commercial Park and Ride bus services in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. We would urge Essex County Council to reflect on these examples of best practice which can be observed in neighbouring local authorities, and change their approach, so that the taxpayers of Essex get maximum value from the money which has been assigned to the area by the Government for improving the local bus network.