Dan Bowhay, a final-year student on BA (Hons) Photography at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), has made headlines up and down the country with his epic journey across the country to highlight the challenges faced by disabled bus pass users.
Dan, who is visually impaired, travelled for up to 10 hours a day, catching 26 buses over 10 days to cover the 850 miles from Land's End to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Starting his challenge at the end of January this year, Dan captured his travels on film to make a 10-hour ‘slow cinema’ style documentary about his trip, called Between These Times.
Explaining why he embarked on this adventure, Dan says, “I grew up in Bishops Waltham, a small market town in Hampshire with limited public transport options. As a child, I developed cataracts in both eyes leaving me with limited vision in one eye, which means lots of visits to Southampton Hospital which is pretty impossible from my hometown via public transport nowadays.
“And now, as I’m coming to the end of my degree in Bournemouth, and thinking about where to go next, I have to think about living where public transport can facilitate me getting to a place of work and also to an appropriate hospital. That means my hometown is not really an option as there’s no work there and I can’t get to the hospital; it’s just not a viable place for me to live which is pretty frustrating and limiting.
“As well as the lack of public transport services available, I also wanted to highlight the usage limitations with the disabled bus pass. In England, you can't use it to travel before 09.30 in the morning and then you can’t travel after 23.00, which is really restrictive, especially for work every day. And then there’s different unrestricted passes in Wales and Scotland, and you can’t use the English disabled bus pass, it’s just not suitable for the millions of people that need to use the service.”
“So, I went on this trip to gain an understanding of what these limitations really mean and what the service quality across the country was like. Originally, I wanted to go from Land’s End to John O’Groats but then realised I couldn’t get into Scotland, so headed to Berwick-upon-Tweed on the English-Scottish border instead.
“I wanted to show just how slow, painful and infrequent all these bus services really are. I spent hours waiting for connections at times, there wasn’t a day where it all went exactly to the timetable, and I spent a lot of time waiting for buses and talking to various people travelling on disabled and elderly concessionary passes about their experiences with the poor timetables and buses not showing up.
“There was a particularly horrible delay on the Cornwall and Devon border where I was waiting for a bus that was quite late, and it was very wet and very windy which was not a pleasant experience at all.”
During his trip, Dan said only three of the 26 buses had audio announcements, and one had visual announcements. “I had to spend a fair amount of time looking out the window and trying to work out where I actually was and where I need to get off.”
On the technicalities of the filming, Dan explains, “I've captured both film and photos. In terms of the film, I was wearing a GoPro on my chest, and I had another one with me along with a camera, so I was filming every moment of this journey. I've edited this together into a 10-hour-long extended take that shows just how slow and frustrating it is to travel by bus. These 10 days that I spent on buses traveling have been retold over 10 hours, which is approximately how long it takes you to drive the same route.
“I've also taken photos alongside the filming, which is a version of the typical road trip photography project. Except, where typically a lot of photographers would photograph from the places they're going to, I've done the inverse and I'm taking photographs from the mode of transport. It provides this strange look at the country out the window of the bus through the condensation and the dirt on the windows.
“I presented these images in a photo book that goes through the journey in linear order including all the strange sights I saw accompanied by a map and timetables of my journey highlighting what the scheduled route was versus what it actually turned out to be.”
Dan’s trip caught the attention of the UK media, with his story being featured in more than 500 different regional and national newspapers, as well as a flurry of broadcast interviews for local radio, BBC South Today and ITV. In total, his story has reached 1.9 million people.
When asked about the impact of his extensive media coverage, and if any of England’s bus companies had been in touch as a result, Dan reveals, “I've not seen anything from the buses, but I've seen a lot from various charities in the sector.
“I've seen that the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has reposted the story alongside a report they've done recently on blind and visually impaired people's experience with buses. Another charity, Transport for All, has reposted it too, and I've also had contact from someone at the Waterside Changemakers who's working on launching a campaign to remove the time limits of the disabled bus pass.
“My hope is that this trip, all the media coverage, and my subsequent documentary can start important conversations that lead to improving public transport services across the UK and increase understanding of the challenges faced by disabled people using public transport.”
Dan’s film, Between These Times, will be shown at AUB's Undergraduate Summer Shows from 10–21 July and at the Aberrations Collective's show at Copeland Gallery in London from 31 July to 3 August.
