A PETITION has been launched by disgruntled Barrhead residents after changes were made to a major bus route.

McGill's 101 service is no longer running from Barrhead to Braehead - it instead terminates in Paisley.

Passengers are now required to take two buses to the popular shopping centre - a route which many people use to get to work.

Now a petition has been launched which calls on McGill's to re-instate the original route and has so far been signed by almost 400 people.

However the bus company says that it only took the decision after customers indicated that they would not be affected by the change in a questionnaire.

Donna Gillan of Barrhead wrote: "We always had the 101 straight to Braehead,why change something that worked.

"Just think about mothers with young children in prams it's hard enough getting on one bus never mind two and there's a lot of older people who also use the bus"

Another, Laura Kidd, added: "McGill's have the responsibility of providing a service to the community of Barrhead and beyond which they had been doing until recently.

"For them not to reinstate the previous service not only causes an inconvenience for residents but could deter people from using public transport altogether.

"This company already have a monopoly on the towns transport service and perhaps another company should be allowed to take on the service that McGill's won't."

However the company has defended its decision, saying that a majority of customers said the splitting of the service would not affect them.

It claimed that 90 per cent of their customers said the splitting of the service had not affected them, and the decision was made to make it a permanent change.

The change came after the road closure at Barrhead Train Station, which allowed for the £1 million renovation of the ageing steel bridge.

McGill's also claimed that it was given very little notice of the road closure.

Isabelle Murray, spokeswoman for the company, said: "During the period of the road closure we noted that the reliability of the split services greatly improved as buses being held up at Braehead due to intermittent and unpredictable traffic congestion no longer impacted on customers waiting at Paisley to go to Barrhead.

"We thought that this merited further analysis and carried out a large on bus passenger survey last month.

"Based on this unambiguous customer feedback and an improved reliability of services, the decision was taken to continue to operate the route as two separate services with the Barrhead to Paisley section renumbered to its original service 51 from May 9.

"Both the 51 and 101 will continue to provide a bus every ten minutes and Barrhead customers heading to Braehead will wait no longer than four minutes for a connecting service in Paisley.

"They will be able to choose from a number of services, the 21, 26 and 101 that operate between Paisley and Braehead ; fourteen buses per hour that many of our customers already take advantage of connecting from places like Neilston, Foxbar, Dykebar, Ferguslie Park or Johnstone.”

“McGill’s received very little notice around the closure of the road for the bridge repairs, and similarly, less than one week’s notice of the re-opening of the road. Based on the short timelines imposed on us, our own customer feedback, operational considerations including vehicle type availability and the improvements to reliability for our Barrhead customers, we believe that the decision to operate the route as two services is the correct one for the greater number of our customers.”