Comparison of bus vs rail usage for justifying rail line reopenings

DDB said:

You wouldn't expect the introduction of a heavy or light rail route without there already being a substantial bus service already being present. Otherwise it would suggest there isn't the demand to sustain a rail service. Once the rail service opens you would expect the bus service to reduce or even be eliminated as the traffic switches to rail. That isn't a bad thing of itself. The hope is rail also takes a decent amount of traffic from the car. Rail appears to be much better at getting people out of cars than buses.

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What was the bus service like between Okehampton - Exeter and Tweedbank/Galashiels/Stow etc - Edinburgh before the rail re-openings? because, particularly with the Scottish places I would be amazed that anybody would move to, live at or commute at these places if they did not have a car so I'm guessing the buses weren't particular frequent and mostly ran empty so saying: "Empty buses means no demand for a railway but busy buses means a POSSIBLE demand for a railway" is a poor barometer.

Because, now the railways are re-opened they are surpassing all expectations which reinforces my thoughts - that as you and a couple of other posters have pointed out - that you could offer luxury, electric buses/coaches running every ten minutes from 6am to midnight but the vast bulk of motorists will ignore them but rebuild a railway and they will flock to it.

I don't know what the bus service is like between Portishead and Bristol but it will be fascinating too see when the Portishead line is reopened what proportion of passengers come from the bus and what come from the road and if there will be a cut in/scrapped Portishead - Bristol bus services.

My guess would be far more people use the train than ever used the bus which shows railways are the only way to go if we want people out of cars.

Can you just confirm exactly what you're driving at here? I think the point your making is that using bus demand as an indicator of potential demand for a rail re-opening is potentially flawed if, as in the case of Okehampton and the Borders Railway as examples, there is poor bus demand yet when the lines re-opened they saw immediate significant usage? Hence the question what the bus service was like for those routes prior to re-opening?

overthere 2 said:

Because, now the railways are re-opened they are surpassing all expectations which reinforces my thoughts

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For clarity, the Borders Line is not ‘surpassing all expectations’, it is ‘in line with forecasts’.


The X95 between Gala and Edinburgh, following the line of route, was half hourly and anecdotally busy, but very quickly was reduced to hourly. Some local bus routes in the Borders area were also reduced or even abandoned. Transport Scotland‘s own report acknowleged that whilst the new railway improved public transport connectivity for those on the line, it reduced connectivity for some people away from it.

Okehampton had a pretty thin bus service to Exeter prior to the reopening of the railway - broadly two-hourly with longer gaps. It had been progressively downgraded over the years - originally the Bude to Exeter service ran 'fast' via the A30 dual-carriageway from Okehampton, but this was slowed to serve the villages on the old A30 and the separate local service withdrawn. The success of the Okehampton reopening shows, I would suggest, that punters can be tempted out of their cars by a train - but not by a bus, express or otherwise. Okehampton Interchange solves the problem of limited parking at the original station.

It is now a railhead for quite a wide area and I am always struck by how many long-distance passengers there - their luggage suggesting something more than a day trip to Exeter. There is also inbound tourism - walkers on the Moor and quite often the country hotels in the area send their minibuses to collect passengers. One perhaps unintended consequence is that the equivalent of the Sixth Form (yes I am old) Okehampton Secondary is closing - pupils preferring the bright lights of Exeter now made accessible by the train.

When I moved to Gala from Edinburgh in 1993 the X95 was hourly with the last bus from Edinburgh leaving at 9:00pm. The 1.5 miles from my house into town cost nearly double the maximum fare on LRT buses, whose longest route at the time was about 15 miles. When it was on time it took twice as long as driving. At rush hour it was even worse.
I only used it if my wife had the car. The only time I remember it being busy was on a school in-service day in the early 2000s when I took my kids to Edinburgh. Due to the number of teenagers at Gala bus station everyone had to get off the single decker and on to a double decker. Winding up the A7 on an overloaded bus (passengers standing upstairs) was even more unpleasant than usual.
Since the railway opened I've used the X95 from Edinburgh twice, both times returning from holidays when the line was shut for engineering work and the RRB would have been even slower. I've had a bus pass for 4 years now but have never used the X95 to Edinburgh, which I could do for free.

The passenger numbers for the railway as a whole may be in line with expectations but in reality the numbers are lower for the Midlothian stations and higher for the Borders ones.

Hagbard Celine said:

The passenger numbers for the railway as a whole may be in line with expectations but in reality the numbers are lower for the Midlothian stations and higher for the Borders ones.

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Is this down to the frequency of the bus service in Midlothian, or that trains are frequently already full by there heading in to Edinburgh.

HighlandStorm said:

Is this down to the frequency of the bus service in Midlothian, or that trains are frequently already full by there heading in to Edinburgh.

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Housebuilding has been slower than anticipated and the 29 bus is just too good.

I dont think you can use bus ridership as any form of indicator as anecodtaly there is a large percentage of the population who will travel on a train and not touch a bus with a barge pole. I have relatives who would rather not bother than go if they had to go by bus.

HighlandStorm said:

Is this down to the frequency of the bus service in Midlothian, or that trains are frequently already full by there heading in to Edinburgh.

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The trains are often full, the station car parks are usually full, the bus is cheaper and more flexible if not going to central Edinburgh.

On these forums, I feel like I see both:
'The bus service is rubbish, which indicates the likely demand for a rail connection is low'
and
'The bus service is great, so there is no need for a rail connection'

JohnRegular said:

On these forums, I feel like I see both:
'The bus service is rubbish, which indicates the likely demand for a rail connection is low'
and
'The bus service is great, so there is no need for a rail connection'

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Given the fact that the market segments best suited to rail and bus are not identical (light rail/tram and bus are of course closer) those two statements both have validity and cannot be taken as gospel!

JohnRegular said:

On these forums, I feel like I see both:
'The bus service is rubbish, which indicates the likely demand for a rail connection is low'
and
'The bus service is great, so there is no need for a rail connection'

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Along with:

”The bus service is busy, therefore there must be a case for a new railway”
and
”Nobody likes using buses, so the fact that there is little demand for a bus service does not mean there is no demand for a new railway”

The question of how busy a bus service is and whether or not that can be translated into demand for a rail service does depend on the context.

For example, if we're looking at whether to build a new line along the Port Road corridor from Dumfries to Stranraer/Cairnryan, we're probably not bothered about what buses there are to Newton Stewart or Castle Douglas, because the line would be being built primarily for long-distance traffic with any local journeys being a bonus. Whereas if you were looking at extending from Tweedbank to Tweedmouth, on that route I would be more concerned that it can't even sustain a regular hourly single-decker bus throughout the day.

stevieinselby said:

The question of how busy a bus service is and whether or not that can be translated into demand for a rail service does depend on the context.

For example, if we're looking at whether to build a new line along the Port Road corridor from Dumfries to Stranraer/Cairnryan, we're probably not bothered about what buses there are to Newton Stewart or Castle Douglas, because the line would be being built primarily for long-distance traffic with any local journeys being a bonus. Whereas if you were looking at extending from Tweedbank to Tweedmouth, on that route I would be more concerned that it can't even sustain a regular hourly single-decker bus throughout the day.

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for the port road example could you compare that to an express bus from carlisle to Stranraer? I dont know what if anything currently exists, so should the discussion include long distance scheduled coach services?

yoyothehobo said:

for the port road example could you compare that to an express bus from carlisle to Stranraer? I dont know what if anything currently exists, so should the discussion include long distance scheduled coach services?

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One issue when you're connecting between 2 existing pieces of the network is also working out how many people are already using the trains between those 2 pieces of the network, so for this case, are poeple going to glasgow and back out from the wcml, potentially even staying a night in glasgow or elsewhere along the line. It also could be the same with coaches etc, they are going around rather than straight through, but if a line existed they would go straight. Its easier to work out when its a branch line being considered than a connecting line.

In the Stranraer case, we know approximately how many people use the ferries, about 1.6 million per year on the two main routes of Cairnryan (Larne and Belfast). As a large portion of those have cars and probably wouldn't switch to the railway, the passenger potentail is probably much less than this.