Yes - but British insistence on doing everything to avoid local public transport being a single network means it’s not obvious.Indeed - almost as if there’s not a definitive way of doing things but something more nuanced based on local geography and demographics
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How could bus and railway stations be better integrated going forward?
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Unfortunately the 'pragmatic middle ground' almost always results in the road public transport services being moved further away from the commercial activity than they are at present, either or both the stops and the routeing. In my County of residence there are four main towns, all of which are seeking a diminution of bus convenience in their town centres, under the guise of various Central Government grant funded town centre regeneration schemes - three are seeking to move bus stops/ bus layover points to peripheral areas (in one way or another) to where they are at present and one is seeking to shrink the size of the bus station (with the buses going to the outermost area) in order to 'unlock' the value of the site for Development.
In all of the cases, the town centre regeneration is focused on attracting the higher spending demographic (cafe culture, independent shops, theatre goers etc) and the bus riding demographic is of little interest.
This may well be the theory that our Planners and Developers are following, but with no expectation that public transport (more specifically - buses) are playing any kind of non-peripheral role in this - they are merely a nuisance to be accommodated out of sight. It is not difficult to work out why this is.
I don't think most town centre shop owners particularly believe this is that important - some may have shops focused on the bus riding demographic, but these often have little influence in the decision making process.
In the meantime, most of the affluent shoppers are heading for the out of town retail park and leisure complex, where there is plenty of parking and fewer oiks......
On a slightly related note I was in Newcastle the other day needing to get back to the train station and was literally stood next to Monument Metro station
'Ah that is handy I can just catch the Metro rather than the 10-15 minute walk'
Price of a Zone 1 single ticket for that 1 stop journey...£3.20!
Err no thanks I'll stretch my legs instead I think!
'Ah that is handy I can just catch the Metro rather than the 10-15 minute walk'
Price of a Zone 1 single ticket for that 1 stop journey...£3.20!
Err no thanks I'll stretch my legs instead I think!
Marcus Fryer
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Mgameing123
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Thats the point of those extremely high fares. It’s the incentivise people to walk or cycle for short distance travel.
Also just a by-product of a zonal fare structure unless you overlay it with a “short distance fare”
I think this is an overly loaded way of looking at things, and being a British-centric discussion there's a whiff of 'inventing wheel for the first time' going on.
When it comes to town centre bus stops, there is such a thing as being too close. From my travels all of Europe over the years the thing that's most struck me is the lack of terrace seating on British our town square / market squares. And no, weather is not a valid excuse. Town square car parking is mostly to blame, but for it to work properly you do want a fully pedestrianised space where it's possible. The oldest buildings in the oldest part of town are best suited to hospitality, and modern retail moving to larger more modern buildings in new developments is no bad thing. Historic town centres are what out-of-town retail parks can't replicate and it makes sense to fully leverage that advantage.
Yes, as pedestrianisation expands in our town centres buses do get 'pushed out', but as long as the pedestrianised radius doesn't exceed 400m I'm relaxed about it. When I was in Maastricht last year and walking through the market square, I was struck by how remote from buses I was (by current British standards). In the Netherlands, in cities the size of Maastricht, most trips are expected to be walked and biked.
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Back to the topic of rail-bus interface - I did a whistle-stop tour of Liverpool and Leeds yesterday.
Lime Street - Queen Square Bus Station is no distance at all. The only slight problem is sightline - in the short term a large sign pointing to the bus station might help, in the longer term any future redeveloped St John Shopping Centre should talk to St George's Place better and have its facade curve in a way that naturally draw pedestrian flows between Lime Street and Queen Square. Having a nice pedestrian environment and good quality cycle lane between St George's Hall and the Lime Street station building is worthwhile.
Leeds Station forecourt regeneration remains work-in-progress but you can clearly see the direction of travel. They've done a good job on the new concourse. The combination of bigger pedestrian space through the Queens Hotel archway and the grand staircase down to Bishopsgate will make a huge positive difference. Having walked it I can confirm that having Boar Lane acting as the station's organic bus station is absolutely fine.
Chester station isn’t really too far from the start of the main shopping area, the issue is the dreadful urine and dope smelling and often flooded subway you have to use to get to the city centre…
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Yeah, they really should just put surface crossings in. That subway feels unsafe.
The subway is extremely unpleasant not helped by some shady looking characters lurking about…
Just entertaining the T&W integration debate for a little longer ...
Having looked at the network a bit more and indeed travelled on it, the 'deregulation destroyed integration' refrain really is a red herring.
On the continent if the rail mode has a stop spacing of about 1km or above (big metro), then it's common to have a stop-every-400m parallel mode, be it bus or tram. The T&W metro is a stop-every-km big metro, and most of the alignment does not parallel roads, so all segments of bus routes have every reason to exist. All deregulation allowed was for, e.g, route segments either side of Heworth to be operationally joined up, oh the humanity!
Operations like the T&W metro should be sized so that (morning peak inbound) trains approaching Gateshead should be carrying critical load, and Gateshead alighters get replaced by foot passengers towards Newcastle. Enforced bus transferers would drive the critical load between Gateshead and Newcastle, increase rolling stock requirements and lead to trains being underutilised coming into Gateshead.
Bus stations can be grim places - not all bus stations are grim but it's easy to make them grim. Gateshead is grim. I'd take Leeds Boar Lane over Gateshead Interchange. Looking at stations like Heworth Pelaw, it seems to me that T&W designers in the 80s over-relied on bus transfer and park & ride passengers, and completely neglected to create urban walking environments that attracted foot passengers. I would go as far as saying around half of T&W stations are openly hostile to foot passengers.
Whisky Papa
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Where's the subway? We just walk down City Road, along the north side of the roundabout and cross St Oswald's Way at the pelican crossing to bring us to the east end of Foregate Street and on to Eastgate.
That said, the station certainly is further out than is ideal; we have used a Chester PlusBus on to get into the centre on one occasion, although we needed it for later in the day anyway.
Topological
Established Member
Same, I stopped to think about a subway when reading the previous posts.
Sometimes, I will walk along the canal and then enter the city centre later. That is very much weather dependent. The canal does take you to the bus station.
In Swansea we have ample buses from the train station to the bus station. Again, different companies and fare structures mean that it is not always optimal to take a bus. Coming in from the East I get off at the bottom of Wind Street and walk up. There is an option to use the University bus that goes up to the station, but that has fallen victim to the Higher Education sector challenges and now lacks the frequency it had when I used to work there.
I have looked at the network as it was before, during and after the Metro build and introduction, and indeed travelled on it a plenty in that era.
I think you are missing the full understanding of integration - it is not just about the interaction of bus stops and railway stations; it is about integration of timetables, of fares, of finances so the economies of concentration of passengers on a particular mode creating financial surplus can cross finance the weaker parts of the network and give them a better standard of service than would otherwise be the case with the same pot. It can also mean improving environmental factors not directly due to the profit and loss account of the public transport provision element.
In the case of T&W, some of the business case was relieving the stress of heavy vehicles (particularly buses, and trains above) on the High Level bridge (which was going to require major work), and also partly to reduce the impact of the quantity of buses in Newcastle City Centre streets and in particular the elimination without replacement of the busy, outdated, dangerous bus station situated in Worswick Street. (the operation of which had to be seen to be believed, and is inconceivable in today's environment).
Bus deregulation did destroy this integration - bus services were extended from Metro stations into central Newcastle, through fares between bus services and Metro services all but disappeared, the Metro had financial difficulties and has run a poverty stricken system more reliant on subsidies, central Newcastle had to accommodate all these terminating buses again and money spent on the High Level bridge / other bridges to cope with the load.
It was not been a case of merely joining up route segments either side of Heworth, the services feeding Heworth were greater than those between Heworth and Gateshead, at least by the direct road. As I understand it, the collapse of integrated fares meant that passengers had to take longer 'through' journeys around other suburbs or suffer financial penalty by changing modes. The finances of the Metro were greatly damaged by this, and no doubt the bus riding numbers dropped too.
I am not sure that this principle is quite correct, otherwise a train leaving Bournemouth for London should only be able to collect sufficient passengers at Southampton to replace the relatively few that get off there? I don't think that principle works in practice quite like that anywhere does it? I think that an Achilles heel of the integration scheme was that effectively at Gateshead the transferring bus passengers would be crush loaded, standing, onto the Metro for a few stops. [This was not an issue with the original (pre-deregulation/pre Sunderland extension) at Heworth, because the majority of trains towards Newcastle started there]. This may well have been fine for younger, more sprightly, passengers, but not so good for the older and disabled. Very few of the passengers would have had to endure such conditions on the pre-integration bus system. The issues that London Transport had with the concept of standee buses ten years earlier had not been learnt - presumably the architects of the scheme thought that such loading is accepted on the London tube so would be accepted on Tyneside? There needed to be Gateshead terminating/starting trains at main travelling periods.
Enforced bus transfers did drive the critical (crush) load between Gateshead and Newcastle, but Gateshead and Newcastle (in particular, but also the other duplicating routes to the Metro) did drive the critical number of buses required on the pre-integration routes and it was reduction of these (both cost and road/kerbside occupancy) which assisted the financial case for the Metro to be built at all.
That sounds quite subjective - I doubt there was the money or political will to create urban walking environments that attracted foot passengers, . The system was designed in the 70s and mostly opened in the early 80s, much of it on existing railway lines, and between Gateshead and Heworth in an alignment much wider of rail track, and an industrial corridor (at the time of designing). Not everything could be done perfectly, and if too much had been demanded then the system would not have been built at all. The art of the possible.
It was one place in provincial Britain where a really good go was made at Bus/rail integration. Of course mistakes were made, but bus deregulation (for good and for bad) did destroy this integration.
Not wanting to renew essential bridges is a weak excuse for forcing passengers onto the Metro for one stop.
Southampton - Waterloo is a big distance and generates big money. There's also the option of running half-length trains between Weymouth/Bournemouth and Southampton. Gateshead - Newcastle is a tiny % of total route miles from Sunderland / South Shields. Comparing journey, passenger km and revenue figures (DfT light rail statistics), those Gateshead transfers actually had little revenue impact. Rather than sizing the fleet for Gateshead - Newcastle crush load, it should have been a smaller fleet for the same passenger density from Heworth.
Bus deregulation happened in 1986. It's now 2026. It seems Nexus and the constituent councils spend those 40 years blaming Thatcher rather than seeking alternative ways of improving Metro finances.
It's clear that most Metro stations rely on bus interchange or car parking passengers - that was always going to be a perilous business model. Despite owning and operating a fantastic transport asset the constituent councils made no attempt at pivoting their planning policies towards Transit Oriented Development. A lot of the sprawling estates were approved and built well after 1086 - the councils should have limited development to high densities around the stations. Massive bus stations and car parks around Heworth are an outdated model. The councils have had 40 years to generate foot passengers and they've not even so much as made an attempt.
It was a way of getting the Metro funded - that renewal money could be diverted to Metro construction.
Revenue impact and bus cost impact. Savings from running such a quantity of buses across the Tyne could be used to get the Metro funded.
Reducing capacity between Heworth and Central Newcastle (without Gateshead interchange passengers) would have resulted in Heworth passengers, travelling a longer distance and time, having to endure crush load conditions. Sunderland was not a consideration at this point.
The idea at the time was to replicate the many similar metro/feeder bus systems of northern European countries, which can only happen practicably under a regulated environment. Bus deregulation destroyed that plan. (for good and for bad.)
The option of running half length trains between Bournemouth and Southampton (for instance) could happen, but mostly it does not - here or in other countries.
I think you are looking with the benefit of hindsight. If the conditions of deregulation of buses were known in the 1970s when the system was designed, it may well not have got off the drawing board.
Nexus and the constituent councils did attempt to find ways of improving the Metro finances - the Sunderland extension to replace the passengers lost from the interchanging bus services at Heworth and Gateshead, for instance, and money had to be found for bridge repair. But this was all very expensive, and in the context of revenue loss from the lack of integration, has left the system in poverty.
The Planning laws of this country do not practically permit Local Authorities to 'limit development to high densities around stations' , so this was not an option. Developers would unlikely be wanting to build such developments, and Local Authorities would come under indefensible criticism to try and maintain that stance.
Where would the money have come from to 'generate foot passengers'? Are you not aware of the increasing straight-jacket that Local Authorities have been subjected to since the era of Bus deregulation? Demolishing and changing nearly new construction in the vain hope of getting people to walk long distances to Metro Stations seems an unlikely political choice to have been taken.
I looked at a few Metro Stations - in fact all the consecutive stations on the original section of line from Haymarket to Tynemouth and all seem pedestrian access friendly. Yes, I'm sure there is not a direct footpath from every house in the vicinity, but then nowhere is like that where private ownership of land is a thing, and land purchase expensive. Relatively few stations are bus / car park interchange points.
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They got the system built, that was the big prize - they got it.
Then deregulation happened. They've had 40 years to react to it. I'm using T&W integration as an example to discuss the topic of this thread with a 2026 lens. Whether the particular integration model was right or wrong in 1980, it's not one I would advocate for 2026. The 1970s/80s T&W Metro design ethos is not one I would replicate for a new system today.
Local plans and land-use designation are not a new thing. Even if the legal framework for these things weren't there in 1986, it wasn't invented yesterday. Just looking at the quality of local plans / frameworks, and quality and existence of pedestrian crossings and cycle lanes, T&W appear at least a whole decade behind other northern cities. In the case of North Tyneside they actively promoted Cobalt business park and left existing town centres like Wallsend to neglect. That meant actively moving trip ends away from Metro locations.
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And I am debunking your assertation in #102 that bus deregulation destroying integration is a 'red herring'. Concentration on population within walking distance of railway stations is not integration between bus services and rail services, minimising duplication. It may well be a pragmatic solution for todays environment, but there is little integration (in the context of many posters' favourite Northern European countries/cities) there compared to the 1980-6 era.
And that is where theoretical Town Planning bumps its head with commercial reality - In an area like T & W, I expect the prospect of any privately funded Development is grabbed with open arms. Development areas will largely be determined by what developers are willing to develop, rather than the theories of being convenient and viable for public transport and in particular an inflexible Metro line. I daresay the Cobalt Business Park was seen as far more attractive than costly redevelopment of existing town centres with all their constraints and extra costs. Assuming that the concept of encouraging Development next to Metro Stations has been thought about much!
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Here's a graph of passenger journeys, passenger km and revenue (2025 prices) of T&W Metro.
There was a one-off reduction in journeys in between 1986 and 1987, but any corresponding reduction in passenger km was far smaller in proportion, and it then followed quite a different trajectory to journeys. Revenue has simply shown steady growth up until 2002 when the Sunderland extension opened.
By these statistics alone, the 'deregulation affecting Metro finances' claim is debunked. Bus deregulation was a non event.
Stats are from:
Light rail and tram statistics (LRT)
Data on light rail and tram systems in England, including statistics on Glasgow Underground and Edinburgh Tram systems, produced by Department for Transport.
The 1970s was a weird time. Two metro schemes were approved (Merseyrail and T&W Metro) at the same time both cities were enthusiastically pursuing road centric policies both in terms of road building and the built environment. If we were in a rational / logical world either those scheme wouldn't / shouldn't have been approved, or the subsequent wider development policy would have been transit oriented.
When you have a London-capacity transit system, your most important part of the business model is to develop London trip-rate corridors. TOD is far more important than bus stations. When you have a city with fast roads, plentiful parking and relatively short journeys, then if their first stage of their journey is a car or bus then naturally they would want to stay on that for the whole journey. It's only in environments with London-style parking scarcity and traffic levels that park & ride or bus feeder are reliable business models.
Niceness is a factor too. Metro bus stations are often not nice environments because they are part of an otherwise car-centric development ethos. Gateshead and Heworth bus stations combined with the big roads have a direct severance effect.
- Gateshead bus station butting onto the motorway-like A184 with no through pedestrian traffic = hostile waiting environment
- Leeds Boar Lane bus stops in a high-quality urban high street environment with a pedestrianised route to/from the station = nice welcoming waiting environment
IMO in a wider, comtemporary, town planning context, T&W's model of integration is totally discredited. (The thread title says 'going forward' not 'if you could turn the clock back') Even if it made sense in 1985, it's been discredited over the subsequent 40 years. If you've no walkability to the station, you've already lost the busability battle. The fundamental problems were Newcastle was too easy to drive into and trip ends were moved en masse to car-centric business parks.
Other cities also operated in constrained financial environments yet none have made such a hash of it as T&W has. The built environment has always been a highly regulated industry and it was totally up to local authorities to exercise their own political will to shape the market. They could have insisted on the new council building and commercial office developments to be immediately adjacent to Northumberland Park station in high-rise urban forms, so that trip ends remained on the Metro. If my Google Earth sleuthing is correct, the Barratt estates around Northumberland Park came after Cobalt Business Park, so the moving of trip ends to cars was entirely avoidable. They've simply made no attempt at TOD.
Ruing over bus deregulation while completely neglecting TOD is just penny wise and pound foolish.
I would think that this is because a lot of the voting public are not interested in being co-erced, cajoled or forced into using public transport, and demand that their (private vehicle) journeys are made better too, now.
Would you have preferred the Barratt housing being built where Cobalt is instead then? How would that help? However, I am not sure how any of this improves bus and train station integration, the original subject of this thread? (Aside from the theoretical argument that it is best not to have bus & train integration by removing the need for the bus bit...... Don't build or allow to remain any development not within walking distance of a railway station)
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Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
The subway is underneath the roundabout. It's better now there is the option of using the pelican crossing at St Oswald's Way but the footpaths do still lead you to the subway under the roundabout. It's grim.
That's the consequence of zonal fares. It is also £3.20 to go from South Gosforth to Heworth.
The issue, particularly post-2000, has been the loss of integrated ticketing at a sensible price. T&W used to have the Transfare system where you could buy a single from anywhere in the county to anywhere else in the county, and you weren't penalised for changing modes. Gradually the rules around Transfare tightened, operators (especially Go North East) started being more restrictive with the tickets, and the prices went up to ridiculous levels. Then came the familiar refrain that "nobody uses them."
When T&W first attempted franchising, the bus companies promised better integration. So we got smart ticketing zones where you could buy multi-operator bus tickets but these only aligned with council areas. The North Tyneside one was pointless.
Things improved a bit with the new North East Combined Authority and the new NECA Day Rover tickets. But even that's taken a slight step backwards this month, with the T&W specific day rover being abolished- for travel in T&W you now need to buy a day rover for the whole of the NECA region. A sneaky way of shoving through an 80p fare rise.
Whisky Papa
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Right, I wondered if that was the one you meant, or if it was the one further round at the end of the Brook Street option from the station, which as it leads to the bus interchange, might have been the more relevant one for the thread. That too is now easily bypassed by pelican crossings of St Oswald's Way and Frodsham Street, but I'm not sure how long that has been the case. I do recall us having to use a subway when visiting Chester when our son was small in the 1990s.
SargeNpton
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Or c) the geography made it impossible for railways to get anywhere near to town centres that are on top of a hill.
As an example, Northampton's two main stations (Bridge Street and Castle), were built a mile or so from the town centre as it would have required significant civil engineering to get them any closer. I'm sure that others can provide many examples from around the country.
And of course in countries that properly integrate transport, tge railway station being away from the town centre would be a reason for ensuring that both were well served by buses rather than an excuse for them not being. It’s where the station is 2-3 minutes’ walk from the “hub” of the town that you don’t need to bother…
TheGrandWazoo
Veteran Member
The fact is that often there is, and has often been, insufficient fare revenue to justify extending services and incurring additional cost even in the halcyon days of regulation and public ownership. Now in other countries, and let's face it, we're talking about Western European countries, they may well be happy to spend funds on additional vehicles in order to extend services to/from stations, and also not worry about revenue apportionment etc. Given we struggle to fund what we have, I'm not confident that will happen here soon.
I would be genuinely interested to see figures from somewhere like Germany or Netherlands that show the actual level of passenger flow from bus to rail etc.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I don't have them, but intuitively it will be higher than here because urban networks are set up for interchange, with a city like Hamburg (population a bit higher than Merseyside) having only low tens of bus routes penetrating the city centre, with most set up to take people to suburban interchanges. Notably some of those that do are premium fare express* routes, though, so perhaps that indicates some might favour the UK "much slower and less frequent but direct" approach and actually be willing to pay for it.
* I had a bit of a nervous twitch when I just looked it up and saw that Schnellbus has been renamed Xpress...more cringey Denglisch...where's my Händy** again?
** Mobile phone
If the local populace and politicians are this uncompromisingly car-brained then talk of bus interchange is pi$$ing in the wind.
The whole thing should have been designed as an urban new town with office blocks interspersed with residential mansion blocks.
This matters because the physical measurements of bus stations are a penny-sized dimension in a pound-sized spatial planning context.
In terms of hierarchy of transport users, walking and cycling come at the top of the pyramid. Integration with motorised modes should respect high quality walking and cycling routes on desire lines, ideally in urban environments with active frontages. In this respect the T&W metro bus station designs have failed. In terms of maximising the overall station catchment, Tynemouth and Whitley Bay work better than Heworth. In a city centre context, the primary concern should be the best pedestrian environment for those accessing employment and retail/hospitality on foot / Bromptons, so rationalising bus bays to 'a buffer distance away' from the entrances of Lime Street and Leeds City is the correct course.
Yes? Ideally the homes would be higher density and still close to a station, but even London has Barrett boxes with poor public transport. Building the (allegedly) largest office park in the UK with no access to the Metro was pure stupidity. North Tyneside Council are really taking the mick, moving their offices there and then asking the rest of the country to subsidise the Metro they part own.
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