Should buses (and public transport in general) be a "safety net" or a tool to cut congestion?

Shaw S Hunter said:

Why so negative? Most bus depots are practically empty by 0800 (on weekdays): who is using those buses? Concessionary passes aren't valid at that time and schoolkids certainly aren't filling all those buses. Your location is apparently Reading: perhaps you should spend some time observing the operations of your local bus company and then try suggesting that people don't use buses to travel to/from work.

Obviously we don't have a command economy that could dictate how people travel though I get the impression you would be happy if that was indeed the case. Nevertheless buses are being actively chosen by many. Indeed more people travel by bus each day than by train. I don't believe all those people have no choice.

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The buses might all be out by 8am, but it is a very fair point that bus services in many parts of the country are not designed to cater to commuters. How many major employment sites have no or very poor bus service? You look at timetables, how many routes have reduced frequencies at peak times because the operators won't use extra vehicles to accommodate longer journey times, or take vehicles off public services for school contracts?

The obvious issue is that without subsidies it is not profitable to have lots of buses sitting around only doing a handful of peak journeys a day. The UK has generally chosen not to subsidise buses for people travelling to work.

158756 said:

The buses might all be out by 8am, but it is a very fair point that bus services in many parts of the country are not designed to cater to commuters. How many major employment sites have no or very poor bus service? You look at timetables, how many routes have reduced frequencies at peak times because the operators won't use extra vehicles to accommodate longer journey times, or take vehicles off public services for school contracts?

The obvious issue is that without subsidies it is not profitable to have lots of buses sitting around only doing a handful of peak journeys a day. The UK has generally chosen not to subsidise buses for people travelling to work.

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The difficulty is many of these offices and factories have moved to remote edge of town locations that make them difficult to serve (or at least combine with existing more traditional flows where there is still significant demand) and people no longer move close to work but expect to commute from where they happen to live which makes it difficult to get sufficient agglomeration of volume to make the journey itself viable (or the journey time attractive, if you have too much of a deviation to get enough passengers those further out won't use it as it will be so much slower than driving).

You are seeing a growth in these works services, planning requirements and companies environmental policies, though more so at the lower wage end of the market (warehouses & factory workers many organised by employment agencies who are recruiting for these roles, though my employers do operate and have bid on work built around office workers) but they are private and closed door contracts so aren't obvious to non-users and don't appear on public information systems (they are excluded from BODs). They are managed through user specific apps managed by contracting companies (like First Travel Solutions, Zeelo and the like) so employees know about it.

Dwarfer1979 said:

The difficulty is many of these offices and factories have moved to remote edge of town locations that make them difficult to serve (or at least combine with existing more traditional flows where there is still significant demand) and people no longer move close to work but expect to commute from where they happen to live which makes it difficult to get sufficient agglomeration of volume to make the journey itself viable (or the journey time attractive, if you have too much of a deviation to get enough passengers those further out won't use it as it will be so much slower than driving).

You are seeing a growth in these works services, planning requirements and companies environmental policies, though more so at the lower wage end of the market (warehouses & factory workers many organised by employment agencies who are recruiting for these roles, though my employers do operate and have bid on work built around office workers) but they are private and closed door contracts so aren't obvious to non-users and don't appear on public information systems (they are excluded from BODs). They are managed through user specific apps managed by contracting companies (like First Travel Solutions, Zeelo and the like) so employees know about it.

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It's surely not their location. If anything, being on the strategic road network away from urban centres makes it easier to provide commuter services from further afield.

It's surely how the bus operators view the low paid non-car owning passenger. They're likely viewed as a captive market, not a growth opportunity.

I've never been more disgusted by privatisation than on seeing first bus of the day services of exactly that nature, relied on for decades, cancelled day after day, week after week, as if you can keep your job under such circumstances.

There'd been no change of operator, it had been run by the same company for 40 years, if not longer. It had been part of the same big group for 30 years at least.

There seems to be no awareness among operators that as well as people with no other option, there's often even people on that sort of bus who are crazy enough to have still chosen a life of bus commuting, even though they can afford a car and it would be a much faster and more convenient option.

All that is required is indeed a decent enough journey time and an affordable fare. Proper hard workers don't mind a bit of a walk. Rain or shine.

The true failure of privatisation was not that no competition arose, it's that the penalties for such a contemptuous attitude to your customers, were eminently ignorable.

It's been made clear for years, decades, by both industry and the public authorities, buses in particular are the transport equivalent of having no option but to claim welfare.

Nammer said:

I live in Portsmouth. The bus service has been improved beyond recognition by the very pro-active council using BSIP money wisely. Services now run frequently from very early, 4am to past midnight on Mondays to Thursdays and until 3am on Fridays & Saturday nights. Plus there are now 2, 24-hour services, 7 days a week. The service has never been better! More bus priority has been put in to speed buses up. The trains from my local station from the outskirts of the city into Portsmouth on the other hand are useless. 2 trains within 14 minutes in both directions and calls on other services (GWR) taken out, so it becomes a no brainer for people to use the bus over train to the city now.

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Very impressive.

We definitely need a past midnight service between Leeds and Wakefield and yet we don't have one. West Yorkshire is supposed to be a major urban area !

Magrar said:

It's surely not their location. If anything, being on the strategic road network away from urban centres makes it easier to provide commuter services from further afield.

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The sites may not be difficult to access but they are difficult to serve efficiently without compromising the existing substantial demand. We serve a business park with a works contract, it is out on the edge of town on the by-pass to a suburb centre but by serving the business park we can't then serve the main suburb demand points which include a school and town centre shops/offices. The individual business park isn't big enough to generate sufficient demand to support a service (it is less than half a dozen smallish office buildings), it relies on one of the employers to contract a specific limited service built around their office hours.

The further afield the employees are travelling from the more spread out they become and the harder it is to get sufficient volume to pay for even small vehicles in a journey time that the employees will put up with. 40 years ago these employees mostly came from the local towns in big volumes and were travelling to factories/offices in locations either quite central or on sites near housing areas which allowed flows to be integrated into wider networks (either as part of a normal service or as a special service that can easily drop into normal network usage afterwards).

Also compared to 40 years, due to automation, factories employ fewer people so again the demand isn't as high as it used to be. Buses were also cheaper and staffing costs or terms & conditions more amenable to peak work which made deploying extra resource for special peak services easily to provide with volume that justified doing it.

Magrar said:

It's surely how the bus operators view the low paid non-car owning passenger. They're likely viewed as a captive market, not a growth opportunity.

I've never been more disgusted by privatisation than on seeing first bus of the day services of exactly that nature, relied on for decades, cancelled day after day, week after week, as if you can keep your job under such circumstances.

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I can't comment on your experience of an operator but that attitude doesn't chime with my experience at any of the operators I have worked at in over 20 years in the industry. Those sort of journeys (early/late, first & last) are second priority behind school buses at ensuring they run and it is much later in the run out where things start getting dropped as all the flexibility and adjustments made during the morning to cover for bus failures or unexpected driver absences start running out at the end as all the spares have been used.

Magrar said:

It's surely not their location. If anything, being on the strategic road network away from urban centres makes it easier to provide commuter services from further afield.

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The location is a core reason, for example the office I work at (and many others within the city) sit in the south west corner of the city near the motorway junction. As the city bus network is set up to facilitate people across the country getting in to the city centre this causes a problem. The buses essentially radiate out from the centre of town down the main roads to serve specific suburbs of the city.

For example I work about 3 miles away from my work in an anti-clockwise direction. By car it takes me about 15 minutes to drive to work. When I've had to travel by bus it's taken between 1-1.5 hours. Because I first have to catch a bus in to town, stand around waiting and then catch a bus back out in a slightly different direction but essentially doubling back on myself. We have an orbital bus route in the city, although this only runs hourly and the issue with this is that it doesn't go far enough outside of the city so I'd have to catch a bus to get to the orbital, then the orbital to Fosse Park, then the bus after the orbital to work - so unless I get the orbital exactly right it is not any quicker.

It really depends on where you live. I'm in Bristol where apart from a handful of suburban rail stations, the bus provides the vast majority of public transport. So the idea that its just a safety net that isnt used by people going to work etc is laughable. Are there issues - yes, are some areas of work poorly served - also yes, but use the buses here and you'll see people from all parts of society.

To state the obvious, a bus doesn't need to be all things to all people, or only ever be run on a hub and spoke model, to make money, or to place it into today's context, be a useful loss leader as part of a cohesive network.

Magrar said:

To state the obvious, a bus doesn't need to be all things to all people, or only ever be run on a hub and spoke model, to make money, or to place it into today's context, be a useful loss leader as part of a cohesive network.

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Of course, and every bus company has its loss leading products, be they individual journeys or complete services. But there is a limit to what they can do (especially nowadays when there are precious few profit making services), and these will be those which complement their existing network / timetable the best.
Local Authorities also sponsor services, but they too have limited funds.