Antony de Heveningham ponders the reasons for cuts to local bus services, and comes up with a novel culprit.
When was the last time you felt optimistic about the future of public transport in the UK? For me it was last November. I’d been invited to sit on a panel at the Quality Bus Transit conference, as a token student, alongside a range of people who were all involved, in their own way, in the renaissance of this much-maligned form of mobility. There were mentions of cutting-edge apps, contactless payments, leather seats, free wi-fi: the sort of things that might be collectively termed “Making The Bus Sexy Again”, to borrow a title from one of my favourite podcasts. Even though I’m someone who hardly ever gets a bus, I left with a renewed sense of the importance of buses to the UK’s transport system, as well as a sense that they could be on the cusp of a resurgence.
It didn’t take long for my shiny bus bubble to burst. The very next day, I saw a link a friend had posted on social media to an online petition. First Group had decided to withdraw a well-used local bus route between Todmorden and the sixth form college in Burnley - a service so popular that, the petition alleged, students were sometimes left stranded at the side of the road as they couldn’t fit on board. First’s official position was that the service was being withdrawn due to “insufficient demand”. Clearly, either the bus company or the person who started the petition weren’t being honest about the amount of riders the route was serving. The previous day I had been sat next to First West Yorkshire’s commercial director, and I could have asked him straight out why they were withdrawing the route. It would have been awkward, but it might also have been informative.
I’m writing this on a transport professional’s blog and if you’re reading it, odds are you’re a transport professional too. So you don’t need me to give my own rehashed version of the issues facing the UK’s bus sector, or remind you that bus companies are at liberty to withdraw any route they want (subject to any partnership agreements), or list the difficulties that even metro mayor regions have in bringing bus networks back under local authority control. There are plenty of local campaign groups out there who paint bus companies as profit-before-people, and it’s certainly hard to ignore the declining ridership figures, or the fact that current market conditions have failed to stimulate competition, and caused bus companies to consolidate instead. But none of these factors really explain why a bus operator would cut services on a popular, high-ridership route. Either campaigners are exaggerating the rider numbers, or there’s another explanation.
A friend’s chat with a First Group employee revealed something interesting. Remember that many of the passengers using this service are schoolchildren, travelling on concessionary school passes. West Yorkshire Metro uses smart ticketing, and the terms on its website state that free bus passes must be swiped on boarding. But what if the kids aren’t swiping their passes? I always used to travel to school with a cardboard bus pass that I just waved at the driver as I boarded, and according to this First employee, some bus drivers were letting children do the same thing with their smart passes. This could account for outwardly low rider numbers.
The removal of a bus service can have an impact on more than just the time kids have to get up in the morning. A new study released this week claims to find significant correlations between poor local transport and low academic performance. It ought to be relatively simple for bus companies to check rider figures against the number of concessionary passes issued by the local authority. If they’re just relying on smart ticketing, there is a danger of sustainable services being cut thanks to nothing more than bad data.
Further reading:
Do We Really Want Fares to be "Fair"?
Deregulation makes improving bus services harder for mayors