Gloucestershire village residents say they will be left 'stranded' when Stagecoach bus route is axed

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People in a Gloucestershire village fear that they will be left completely stranded after their local bus route is axed later this month.

Hundreds of people have signed a petition to save the E bus which connects Woodmancote with Cheltenham.

It's part of more than a dozen cuts across the county that Stagecoach West announced in October.

Derek Thorpe is a local resident - he is blind and relies on the E-service to get to nearby Bishop's Cleeve or Cheltenham for hospital appointments.

The bus cut will see Derek unable to make it to his hospital appointments

Along with his guide dog Jasper, Derek manages to get about but all of that will change once the E bus service is given the chop.

"If I get a taxi from Cheltenham to come and pick me up and take me back into Cheltenham it's around £34 for the return trip, which has a huge impact.

"I can't pop into town two or three times a week and spend £100 a week on taxis just to get into town", he says.

But he is not alone, Viviene Paxford lives just down the road.

She suffers from arthritis and has trouble getting around on her own. She relies on the buses like many other elderly people in the village do.

She said: "I can't walk down to the village because I have arthritis.

"If I did manage to walk down I wouldn't be able to walk back up with shopping, so effectively it's cut me off from going to the doctors, the grocery shop, Tesco's, the chemist, anywhere really."

Viviene is amongst the many residents worried about what happens when the bus service is axed later this month

Another resident Glyn Taylor worries about what this cut means for the locals.

He said: "It's going to leave us virtually totally isolated, so I'm not very happy about it because the majority of people here are pensioners who can't drive like I can.

"I've had to let my car go because of cataracts, and I'm totally dependent on this one bus."

Stagecoach says that the route has become financially unsustainable because of low passenger numbers.

In a statement, it said: "We have worked hard to ensure that the majority of customers will retain a bus service through changes to Service D, which will now serve a wider area of Bishop's Cleeve."