Someone is being bit useless. I do not know whether it is our county council or Southern railway, or a bit of both, but there are some new local information maps at Crawley station.

These maps have the logos of Southern and West Sussex county council on them so I figure they are jointly responsible. The maps are in two parts, a street map of the town centre area and a bus map of all the routes in and around town.

The bus map is actually quite handy. It has colour-coded routes with main stops marked like stations and looks like the underground of tram map in an unfamiliar city. The only problem is that it misses out completely one of the three bus routes that go near where I live.

The route which is missing is the No. 20 Fastway route from Broadfield up to Horley via Gatwick and Three Bridges – a very useful route. How can they forget that one? Fastway is in the news every week for one reason or another and the roadworks to enable it have crippled the town’s traffic for years. Not only that, the county council somehow managed overspend on the project by £6 million and didn’t even notice (until just after they got re-elected).

You would have thought that, with all the attention and controversy, it might have occurred to someone to include the route on the map. Route 20 began its service in August last year, and the small print on these maps says “information correct as at January 2006”.

All I can say is “no it isn’t”.

(Of course, last week’s newspapers had a letter from someone saying that the mess the Tories in the county council have made of Fastway proves how useless the Labour borough council is. Its not even worth correcting anymore. If people haven’t understood it by now they never will.)