THERE is a desperate need for an integrated transport network for East Lancashire, as outlined in David Higgerson's article about the planned new bus and rail links (LET, April 10).

Last summer, Burnley and Pendle Travel, one of the area's major bus companies, turned the Marsden Park Circular routes in Nelson over to Northern Blue Buses. Initially, the timetable remained the same and fares did not alter, but, importantly, the £9.20 weekly tickets sold by Burnley and Pendle Travel could then no longer be bought or used on the buses round Marsden park.

Consider how this then affected someone living on the Marsden Park routes and working, for example, at Burnley General Hospital.

Instead of paying a one-off £9.30 for a week's travel to and from work and for leisure journeys, this person had to pay £1.40 a day for a journey from home to Nelson bus station and back, and then £1.80 to Burnley and Pendle for a return journey from Nelson to the hospital. the cost of a week's travel immediately rose by 75 per cent from £9.20 to £16, just because a bus route changed hands.

How, in the name of reason, can the public transport industry justify this treatment of its passengers?

Five daily return journeys from home to work at the hospital now cost £17. But someone living in, say, Worsthorne, or the Ightenhill district of Burnley, with about the same length of journey and a change of buses in Burnley, will pay no more than £10 for a Burnley and Pendle Travel weekly ticket, because buses of the same company can be used throughout. And that ticket is also available for weekend and evening leisure journeys.

Quality bus routes and new bus stations are welcome, but they are only cosmetic measures. Until the six or seven different bus companies serving the area between Padiham and Barnoldswick can stop messing their passengers around by swapping routes, until they can work together and offer an integrated network and, just as important, a ticket system which genuinely covers all journeys from doorstep to destination, then public transport is a failing industry which is failing its customers.

The current system is all wrong, as Marsden Park area passengers who use public transport to get to work have found, to their cost.

ROGER SIDDALL, Walton Lane, Nelson.