A few disconnected thoughts on Maidenhead -
The '
bus passenger journeys per head of population' figure is published - Windsor + Maidenhead Borough tends to be fairly close to the bottom of the list for a whole host of reasons.
As with most places, bus use has been on a steady decline since the 1950s. Maidenhead is a relatively affluent area, and suffered from a fairly poor bus service (from what I gather) in the 1960s and 70s because of major staff shortage at (the original) Thames Valley / Alder Valley which meant there weren't enough operating staff to crew the buses, and not enough engineering staff to provide buses to be crewed. These things tend to spiral.
I think some of the town services were operated by Beeline as Slough - Maidenhead - Maidenhead suburb, I can't remember the detail now, or how much of it was commercial, but think the current network of hourly circular routes started some time in the mid 2000's and was tendered to (then independent) Courtney Coaches.
These are clearly designed to do as much as possible (in terms of geographic coverage) with as few buses, for as little cost as possible - reflecting the political priorities and / or budget of the Council. A 'service of last resort' will gradually carry fewer and fewer passengers and is at risk of further cuts. Getting lost passengers back is never easy, and is likely to require someone to take a financial risk. Some services will never become commercially viable.
Having bus services that work for London train commuters is something that is an issue across much of the 'home counties' / ever expanding London travel to work region (although people moving out of London can have unrealistic expectations of the deregulated bus market outside London.)
There are a lot of practical issues with providing this, and few places in the home counties have enough critical mass of commuters to make it remotely commercially viable or within what local authorities consider is worth supporting, and that was before the increase in work-from-home. At one time, London commuting was much more fixed to a '9 to 5' sort of pattern, but it's not as simple as that any more, and the commuting day is more drawn out, so potentially fewer passengers per bus.
The amount of local employment in the home counties town centres has (in many cases) dwindled, and there is hardly a viable commercial daytime network, and far less travel to the town centres in the evening for leisure / pub etc. Councils have tended to focus their dwindling budgets to keeping the 'lifeline' daytime services going.
Adding early morning and evening buses pushes the bus operating day beyond what is often done as a single (long) day shift for drivers and supervisors. Some operators sell 'no evening / Sunday work' in their recruitment advertising, and getting bus drivers in the home counties is increasingly difficult.
It can be done where there's a will and / or enough funding - the network based on Heathrow (which no longer reaches Maidenhead) is a 24/7 operation (or getting close to that) now on many routes. I'm not sure how much it all costs or where the funding is coming from.
Commuters are reluctant to depend on an hourly evening bus service which they may miss if the train is late (not a rare occurrence.)
I'm not sure the traffic commissioners have given a view on whether buses should wait for trains and end up running late as a result, but if the bus waits for the 8pm train which is late, should it be scheduled (on paper 'inefficiently') to have enough recovery time to meet the 9pm train that's on time, or will it be late for the rest of the evening? Too many evening / tendered routes are timetabled on the basis of 'we want the bus to do this much in an hourly cycle, that's what we'll put on paper, never mind how practical it is.'
Then there's the question of rail timetable changes in short or long term, and bus operators / local authorities getting the information and reacting to it within the timescales the traffic commissioners expect. And if a bus connects with two different railway stations, and one train timetable changes, then what?
And in the Thames Valley, there's some commuting to / from Reading and Oxford as well as to London - connecting neatly with the London trains might mean missing the trains from Reading.
My understanding of demand responsive routes is that you can't have 'buses will leave town centre at these times and go anywhere within this area' - passengers need to pre-book. Which gets messy, especially if the train gets delayed. More use of flexible route registrations is something that might make a difference, but not many places seem to do this.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but have a feeling it's going to take more ongoing revenue funding than most of the home counties transport authorities currently have available...
