Good bus territory?

[telstarbox]

The question to be asked here is "are they still good bus territory?" And even if passenger numbers are reasonable, what is access like (e.g. parked cars?). I will admit I haven't used these routes (bit too far away from me for a random housing estate tour), but has anyone commenting done so, to give some idea of passenger numbers? Being aware, of course, that one person's "rammed" is another person's "never anyone on when I see it".

To take another example from elsewhere in Kent, on a pure "social strata" aspect, the Isle of Sheppey should be "good bus territory" - in fact, it's awful, and has been for decades.

From another thread about Stagecoach in Thanet.

What makes good bus territory these days and are there any areas where operators have 'beaten the odds' by creating an attractive service?

 

[izvor]

It's an interesting question, and an increasingly difficult one. Much easier in earlier days, when (in residential terms) local authority estates were the most obvious ones, especially those with high-rise housing. With the rise of car ownership, and the sale of council houses, this is not so guaranteed. Linking estates of "semis" with commuter stations used to be a good market too (if heavily peaked) which has mostly vanished. More sprawling suburbia, with less dense housing and longer distances involved, is less lucrative. Many rural villages are now so full of "des-res" incomers that there's no market to be had at all, and the buses disappear when the LA subsidy is removed.

Interurbans can be a good market, especially if there is no parallel train service, or an unattractive one with, say, poorly-sited stations. The Oxford - Bedford - Cambridge corridor (formerly X5) was a successful through route, now split in Bedford it seems. Another really good one is Stagecoach 16 running every 20 minutes between Canterbury and Folkestone, with very little intermediate traffic.

The planned New Towns, mostly in south-east England, were (at least in theory) a gift to bus operators, with fairly dense housing and wide roads. It's interesting to compare how differently these have fared over the years, especially since privatisation and deregulation. The nearest one to me is Crawley which has retained and developed a good network, most recently under Metrobus; this could be described as "ideal bus territory" with a large airport close by and low unemployment. Others have fared less well.