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Channelling my father here, but the lessons learned (but not fixed) after Beeching gutted the railways will be learned again here only too late.
That is, once you get rid of the minor bus routes, you’ll realise that quite a few people were using those to get to the major bus routes, and now some of the major bus routes are as little used as the minor ones were.
And so you repeat. Close the minor ones. More minor ones. Confused face. Close the minor ones. Customers are complaining they can’t get anywhere. Profits aren’t rising. Angry face.
Soon you’re left with only the buses that run the straightest routes to the closest nearby major places and all you can say is “nothing we can do, it’s too expensive to run anything else.”
Beeching was tasked with solving a maths problem and that is what he did; also the bus services that were recommended never came.
So now we cut the bus services; there will be a knock on effect on both buses and trains, all at a time at which we are meant to be looking at ways to reduce dependence on cars and promoting walking, cycling and public transport.
British road and rail infrastructure planning, execution, maintenance and review all fall well short of where they need to be.
At least with bus routes, you don’t have to re-lay the track when trialing a re-introduction.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The latest report from the Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain showed that the number of local registrations fell from just over 12,000 in 2021 to fewer than 9,000 in 2023, although the DfT said many of the routes had been reclassified rather than lost altogether.
Campaigners and bus operators have urged the DfT to provide more long-term funding for buses to stem decline after a decade of cuts.
Labour research found that the West Midlands was the region hardest hit by the decline in services, having lost two-thirds of local routes since 2010.
Louise Haigh, the shadow transport secretary, said: “The staggering decline in local bus services under this government is nothing short of vandalism against our communities.
Vidler said longer-term investment in bus priority measures that free buses from congestion and speed up journeys would enable more routes to function.
A DfT spokesperson said the government had invested £3.5bn since 2020 to back bus services, adding: “Our recent £500m boost is capping fares until the end of November 2024 and protecting routes into 2025, helping people save money on travel and improving transport connections to grow the economy.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m basically cut off from the centre of Bristol now. It’s not like the services were underutilised, every bus would be packed before they cancelled them. The problem is running a bus service for-profit doesn’t work.
I’m sure it could work, if car infrastructure, fuel etc, was charged at cost to motorist rather than the massive subsidies it currently gets. Then even for-profit buses would look incredibly cheap!
But yes, motorists are massively subsidised. Buses should be subsidised even more, given they’re a net good to the world and cars a net bad
I just want a bus to go vaguely near where I work so I can stop driving for commuting. I cycle of the weather’s right for it but I really don’t like the heat or rain.
I strongly feel that inner city buses should be council-run and free at the point of use.
Running buses as private companies is dumb. It either means you have multiple companies competing for passengers on the same profitable routes which is inefficient, or a situation where the govt/council have to carefully divvy up routes, which takes away any incentive to do a better job, and incentivises corner-cutting as that’s the only way to increase profit.
More people using the bus is a net benefit. Improves traffic, encourages people to go to commercial areas, increases the utility of expanding routes/timetables, etc. The only possible downsides I can think of are that it may encourage bus use over cycling (though I’d argue that most people aren’t cycling because it’s cheaper, and many cyclists will use alternative transport in bad weather), and drivers will moan (but drivers moan about everything).
I don’t even particularly like taking the bus (personally I’d rather cycle or walk), but it seems like such an easy way to improve quality of life in cities.
The other thing to think about is it’s possibly easier to improve both services than it is to improve cycle options. Improving cycling requires redesigning roads and that might actually not be possible or particularly quick but adding more buses is a much simpler solution.
Bus lanes are more costly than cycle lanes. But cyclists can use bus lanes and they reduce the space available to cars, making the bus and cycling both look much more attractive by comparison. We can kill all three birds with that one stone.
Some places have redundant, confusing , infrequent , complex bus routes. Consolidation into less routes that make sense can be a good idea to give people useful routes that take them where they want to go, and when they want to go. As such a number without a detailed in depth analysis is useless
The government said it was misleading to equate the figures directly with changes in the number of bus routes – with up to 1,400 of the 3,000 services deregistered by the commissioner over the past two years now operated under local transport authorities – but it acknowledged many services were lost.
Don’t they have a map? They can use my phone if nobody else has offered.
