ANNOYED Stefan Tobler has criticised Arriva after his wife Mandy was left standing out in the cold waiting for buses that never came every day last week making her late for work and his son miss nursery.

Mr Todby, 27, of Arnison Avenue, High Wycombe, says Arriva needs to rethink its strategy if it wants to get more people on to buses.

"All this about getting more people on to public transport. It's particularly obvious to me now why people don't want to," he said.

He told of his wife's ongoing problem with the 364 route from Arnison Avenue to Widmer End.

"One morning she went to catch the 8.04am bus," he said. "When it didn't show she went inside as the bus stop is just outside our door. She saw it come by half an hour late and the same happened with the next one on the timetable. She didn't get on a bus until two hours later making her late for work and my son, Dimitri, who is three, late for nursery. It went on all week."

David Shadbolt, spokesman for Arriva, admitted a shortage of buses, due to technical problems, was behind cancelled services.

"We've not been able to avoid this as we had an unusual spate of major unit failures leaving many routes short of buses," he said.

"We have additional buses in reserve to deal with such vehicle failure but we were still left short."

But he denied engine failure was a result of using older buses, a problem highlighted by the Free Press in November.

He said: "It's nothing to do with age. We expect to change engines on a bus at least once in their lifetime. It was sheer bad luck so many buses had problems at the same time."

He added that services should be back to normal this week.