Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I did have Glasgow in mind as another possibility, but as I don't know how regulation is progressing there I deliberately left it out. Thanks for the update
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How could bus and railway stations be better integrated going forward?
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I did have Glasgow in mind as another possibility, but as I don't know how regulation is progressing there I deliberately left it out. Thanks for the update
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Tyne and Wear did “do this” from the opening of the Metro till bus de-regulation…
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Indeed, and that was one of the biggest pieces of vandalism of integration in urban transport history. 1985 has a lot to answer for.
I kind of avoided it because of the "Gateshead example" though. Tipping everyone out at Gateshead for the Metro rather than running a couple of miles over a bridge didn't make sense (though there are plenty of German cities where that approach is still followed). It was more the outer city where buses connecting to the Metro rather than running all the way in is a sensible approach. Newcastle however is quite small and punches wildly above its weight with Metro - really it's more of the size of city that would be suitable for trams, and Manchester one that would be suitable for a metro, so it'll probably have more suitable use cases for direct buses than Manchester, but Manchester might still need them in some cases because of Metrolink's well known capacity challenges.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
You gave Stockport as an example.
Let's say that the bus station had been built where Grand Central is. Great for the railway station, but anyone heading for the shops and cafes and bars in the town centre would have been faced with a walk or faced with using on-street stops in the town centre. How is that preferable to the situation we have now, where the bus station is great for the town centre but people using the railway station are faced with a walk or faced with using on-street stops?
With the best will in the world, buses aren't going to serve the bus station by the railway station, do a loop around the whole town centre, and then serve the bus station again. That defeats the whole point of having a bus station in the first place. In Stockport the buses from the south stop by the railway station on the way to the bus station. If you move the bus station, you just have those buses terminate at the railway station.
Most people using the bus are not using the bus as part of a multi-modal journey. They're using it to get to the shops.
I wouldn't say that there is that much duplication of routes in Liverpool, where the train is the most obvious choice the bus routes have naturally withered away. You could argue that there's some duplication along Aigburth Road, but once you get to Dingle the railway is actually quite a distance from the houses. The only obvious duplication is the number of buses going through the Queensway tunnel, but that's a consequence of Birkenhead town centre (and the bus station) having migrated south away from Hamilton Square.
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The issue, as with Liverpool, is that the buses fill in the gaps in the Metro.
Take Four Lane Ends as an example. It is a natural place for buses from Killingworth in the north to terminate and to allow transfer to the Metro. It is also a natural place for buses from Heaton in the south to terminate to also allow transfer to the Metro. So what happens is that the buses operate across Four Lane Ends, running Killingworth-Heaton-City Centre. But on face value it looks like they're running buses which duplicate the Metro.
The Gateshead issue is also seen on Merseyside with Birkenhead. It would be daft to terminate everything at Birkenhead and make people from Heswall, Upton, etc, change at Birkenhead for a train. But the number of buses through the Queensway tunnel is a prime example of duplication.
johncrossley
Established Member
Look at what they do in other countries. Town centres are normally served by regular bus stops. Maybe sometimes a bigger bus shelter than normal. You are also assuming that the whole town centre can be served by one stop. That isn't the always the case. Even in Stockport, there are bus stops at the other end of Merseyway.
The towns in the UK with high bus usage often have no bus station at all, or a bus station only used for longer distance routes.
Obviously not at the moment, because integration is far from optimal. Not only in terms of location of bus stops, but also in terms of fares. I bet if you looked at the proportion of users in Switzerland changing between bus and rail as part of the journey it would be somewhat higher.
And also far more attractive in the context of a Grade 1 listed building.
johncrossley
Established Member
There is however a significant cost saving which can potentially be used for improved services or fare cuts etc.
Whilst this may be, I think the long term plan is to reduce the number of buses using the pedestrianised streets.
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I do worry about the safety of double deckers going through the "old tunnel", given that they can only fit in the outer lane.
If this was looked at with the same hyper-safety approach as adopted by the anti-3rd rail brigade, I think this would be problematic.
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Most bus stations are utter ratholes or if new will become them in due course. I don't agree with your suggestion that on street stops are a problem. Nobody is moaning about Metrolink being entirely on street stops or walking to Piccadilly station to avoid using them. If you have a frequent service they are absolutely fine, and avoid the smelly hives of antisocial behaviour that most bus stations seem to be or become.
That however renders most large suburban bus stations a bit pointless, rather than suggesting moving them, though. Probably not so for Stockport though, but I do think Milton Keynes is better off without a single bus station. (Some would call the stops by the station one, and it sort of is, but really it is just a long set of on street stops).
Stockport bus station probably is to be fair in the right place, though the fact it even exists on the behemoth scale it does is probably symptomatic of the poor development of Greater Manchester's rail network for its size. What they have done however is improved the connectivity with rail with the new direct path, which is probably the best that could realistically be done, though I recall there was always a set of steps there.
I'm not sure I'd see that quite the same as Gateshead. By car it's 6 minutes from Gateshead bus station to Newcastle railway station. Whereas from Birkenhead bus station to Liverpool One bus station it comes up as 12 minutes, twice as much. Neither is a particularly long time, I'll give you, but I think there's probably more justification in having connections to Merseyrail stations with no routine under-water bus service in Liverpool than there is in terminating buses at Gateshead. I get that 12 minutes is pretty borderline, though.
A service I do think is fairly pointless is a direct Liverpool-Southport bus service, and Liverpool-Ormskirk is only marginally more sensible due to Lydiate and Maghull being away from the railway (but for the latter a shuttle to the station is probably better and I believe does exist, it also exists for Formby). Merseyrail on the north side is a classic "beads on a string" layout with stations at the centre of each "bead" and so a parallel bus service is just not necessary. One could argue that this commercial Stagecoach service is just in part abstracting from the railway unnecessarily (one problem with the £3 fare scheme, of course).
Merseyside does have more "German examples" of connectivity than Greater Manchester, though, which up to the opening of Metrolink still had frequent Oldham-Manchester buses taking over an hour, for instance. And the 192 is a prime example of a bus service that is only there because of rail inadequacy (though solving that inadequacy really requires HS2 2B due to the long 2 track section preventing any increase of the stopping service to 4tph a la Merseyrail and adding a few stations). Though Manchester is a bit less usefully shaped for removing bus services than Merseyside - it's more of a giant blob, whereas Merseyside outside the much smaller urban "blob" is "beads on a string" which is ideal for rail based transport being primary.
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I certainly suspect that the rather silly spacing of the two in Preston does dissuade connections to rail for people living in places like Garstang and makes them more likely just to drive to Preston station instead. The trouble is that there's no sensible cross-city working for the regional buses. I'd reckon with Preston being quite small that people going to the station who actually live in the urban area are more likely to go there by taxi than bus or car.
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There probably isn't a chance - the Local Authority will not want the Developers to walk away because of that kind of cost burden.....
It may well be a hub in some other countries, but those countries no doubt subsidise their bus services to a greater degree. (Aside from where is the money going to come from to do this demolition and build the bus station - there is no money in buses to do it). Indeed, what would be the impetus to do such a thing? If there was money available to establish the services at a hub, would you use it for that or to improve service to & from the suburbs and surrounding districts instead?
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
When you look at the route compared to the railway line it makes more sense. Crossens-Southport has to be a bus because the railway was closed. Between Southport and Ainsdale it's fairly close to the railway, but it still serves the bottom end of Ainsdale away from the station. In Formby its the same, serving the top end away from the railway station, and then it's quite a long way away from the railway until Waterloo and Bootle. Operationally you'd probably run the bus Crossens-Southport-Formby-Bootle anyway, so it's only really the bit from Bootle New Strand that truly duplicates the train. I can't imagine all that many people do the route from end to end, not when Merseyrail prices are as they are.
johncrossley
Established Member
You can always argue whether money could be better spent on something else. Britain is not particularly afraid of spending vast sums on bus stations. It probably spends more than any other country. Putting regular bus stops at Rugby station would probably be fairly cheap compared to what Greater Manchester (for example) spends on its bus stations. But I'm going into this discussion with the assumption that running buses to the railway station is important if not essential, given that it is routine policy in several other countries. The argument on this thread is mostly about the practicalities of running buses to a railway station that is not in the town centre. It is probably assumed by many that Rugby station is much too far outside of the town centre for that, but it is clear from international comparison that it isn't necessarily the case.
The introduction bus-rail interchanges on the periphery of large urban areas does not automatically mean that all through “country bus” services to the city centre have to cease. What it does / should do is remove the “direct competition” element so that the bus no longer heads for the centre by the most direct route but deviates to provide more local links (and potentially a bit of a radial service as well).
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I can see this line of thought, but:
Crossens: You do need a Preston-Southport bus service as there's no railway, this would still serve that;
Formby: a figure-8 local service serving the centre and both stations would be better (and I think does sort of exist);
Ainsdale: You could probably do a local service of some kind snaking around southern Southport calling at all the stations to connect to them.
That said closing Crossens' railway was an act of wilful vandalism. I seem to recall it was even profitable.
WolvertonWorks
Member
The Old Bus Station in MK got Listed status in 2014, even though it had ceased being used as a bus station well before then: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1416117?section=official-list-entry
There were two main problems with it even though it was perfectly sited for rail/bus interchange - as Bletchleyite says it was too far away from the main shopping area and also passengers didn't like having to walk 150 yards from the railway station to the bus station. This was solved by introducing the current bus stops directly in front as one leaves the station. But these don't have the facilities like loos that one would hope to find in a bus station.
The other was long distance coaches. These tend to use the M1 and the location of the bus station, which was designed as a bus and coach interchange, meant coaches had to make a detour from junction 14 to the western edge of the centre of MK and back which added a good ten miles to the journey. So coachway was built at J14 and a bus service introduced to run into CMK from there.
The Old Bus Station was built where it was - greenfield site - with the best of intentions to integrate bus, coach and rail travel but it just wasn't in the right place.
About twenty years ago I heard of plans to build a new central bus station with facilities such as loos, as part of a larger civic building, on the land that is currently a car park next to the Point. This never materialised.
Virgin Trains introduced a bus service VT1 that picked up outside the station and ran with very few stops to Luton airport, encouraging passengers from the north to use the train and then "the bus that thinks it's a train" (as we used to call it) to fly from Luton. The route still runs, although no longer as the VT1, and has been routed to be useful to bus passengers located along its route, not just for train-airport journeys.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I'd argue that country buses should still run fast (non-stop unless there is a destination people from the country origin will want to go to, which might include an interchange) to the main interchange (and should look more like coaches). However Oldham isn't a "country bus", it's urban.
Thus if there's say a Towcester to Milton Keynes bus it should just run straight to the centre via the A5 for instance. And using the Aylesbury-Buckingham-MK X6 (X prefix completely undeserved) to wander around new build estates west of MK is totally inappropriate.
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johncrossley
Established Member
The facilities of the railway station can be used by bus only passengers. Assuming that the toilets are not beyond ticket barriers and even if they bus passengers should be allowed to use them. In places abroad where bus stops are right outside the railway station, instead of in a separate building, there is usually a similar assumption that bus only passengers can use the railway station facilities.
Indeed it is, but anything from further out isn’t. The concept would be that anyone travelling in by bus would, at the interchange point have the choice of changing for the fast rail / metro service into the centre (on the same ticket, of course) or remaining on the bus. Tgat bus would no longer be making a beeline for the centre but acting as a local feeder to serve areas without easy access to rail / metro services.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
These stops of course don't need their own facilities because they're right next to the railway station building which has them. The only problem is that there are no longer toilets accessible to bus passengers in that building (there used to be in the back of the cafe), but it wouldn't be unduly hard to add them and they'd probably be less vandalised in there than in most (far lower staffed) bus stations.
Also remember that it wasn't built there to be near the station. When its location was decided MKC station was not even going to be built. It's nearer the central business district than the shopping centre (which sort of makes sense), but really a city like MK with a long thin centre is ideal for cross city running and shouldn't have a central bus station at all - the central Midsummer Boulevard spine basically allows all routes to serve close enough to everywhere in the centre and is by far the best way of doing it. OK, it does mean regional buses have to run the length of the centre before terminating at one end or the other, but there aren't many regional buses, they're mostly just local ones.
I'm not sure how good a use of money that would have been. There isn't really much wrong with the existing setup, and if you want facilities there's an entire shopping centre right there. OK, not in the late evening, but bus station toilets are usually shut at such times anyway as otherwise they are subject to excessive misuse. Often whole bus stations are - Preston's behemoth shuts about 10pm and you have to go to an obscurely situated small set of outside stops at the back.
It's now a combined route MK1 that also serves Bedford. This route was quite interesting in that it was never heavily used for going to Luton airport (from MK, driving or taxi is so much easier) but mostly for commuters between Luton's residential areas (mostly "kiss and ride" at the stop just off the M1) to the warehouses around Kingston and the M1. Indeed for a long time the busiest two stops were the one just off the M1 in Luton and the one down the side of Kingston on Standing Way - both stops which were arguably only in the route at all so it could be a registered local bus service and thus claim BSOG!* Strange things happen sometimes...
* Bus service operator's grant.
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Well yes - this kind of decision has to be made about bus services all of the time, and connectivity of every service with rail stations is not very high on the list of priorities.
I am not sure about that. It is just that in some other countries, the opportunity cost of the bus station site for redevelopment is not considered.
There are regular bus stops at Rugby Station - just not every bus service serves them; those that do suffer serious unreliability at peak periods as a result.
However, it is not seen as essential, or affordable, in this country.
It is only impractical because the funds are not there to do it and if some funding where to become available it would not be high on the priority list due to the perceived lack of sufficient use that would be made of them. Aside from the practicalities of the site and road network in the vicinity of this particular location; obviously they could be overcome with sufficient funding which is unlikely to be seen as a priority. Many other stations are in a similar position.
I haven't seen much argument about the impracticality from anyone about your suggestion, aside from the assumption that big funding is not available to pay for the additional operating resources required and the infrastructure work.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I suppose you're getting into debates on what constitutes a country bus. Because of all the mountains in the way, you're just talking Sholver, Delph, Denshaw, Uppermill and Diggle. I'd treat those as outersuburban and just connect them to the local Metrolink/railway station for onward travel rather than setting up long, unpunctual routes into Manchester. By "country bus" I had more in mind the idea of something coming in a long way with the urban section a very minor part of the route - Brackley-Towcester-MK or Buckingham-MK are probably decent examples, I can see little or no benefit in just terminating those at Wolverton or something.
Particularly when Milton Keynes Central Station is not in the city centre proper and would require a third form of transport.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I'd say it is seen as actively negative by commercial bus operators who would (understandably) rather compete with the railway than complement it.
Fortunately the mistakes of the 1985 Act are slowly but surely being reversed, and sanity will start to prevail again.
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It is at the western edge of the CBD and thus is "in the city centre proper". It would probably have been best, however, had the city centre straddled it rather than it being at one end. It's perhaps analogous to the edge locations of the London termini really.
This, notably, is why most non-car-owning locals won't consider rail for local journeys, just bus (or bike). I say non-car-owning, as car owners won't consider any of those as car is by far the best way around MK, with journeys taking 5-10 minutes that would take an hour by other modes.
But that location is why a central bus station there wouldn't make sense, and why cross city running is best for MK.
johncrossley
Established Member
They are on the road next to it. I was thinking of bus stops right next to the station building, so no need to cross roads. Maybe about half a dozen stops roughly where the taxi rank currently is. That's what you would expect in Switzerland, for example.
The fact that we are still debating this does demonstrate that integration is inferior to that in some other countries, despite the difference being played down earlier in the thread.
But we aren't in Switzerland. The taxi industry would not want to move, the railway would not want to pick a fight with the taxi industry, nor would they want to reduce the setting down and 20 min waiting car parking area. The turn from Railway Terrace into the Mill Road tunnel, and its single alternating traffic lights mid way is problematic for buses without reducing the traffic throughput in the tunnel (i.e. including the Railway Terrace junction in the traffic signals), which is already a major cause of unreliability and delay. In the opposite direction the turn is currently impossible (although this could be changed I think, but there is nowhere really to put a line of stops). In both directions it is not practicable for services to use these stops and the main stops in Clifton Road. All this presents an inertia to changing the current arrangements
I am not doubting that integration is inferior compared to some others. However, it is not seen as a priority. You have not identified where the funding is coming for the additional costs involved in extending existing services that don't run to the station, to the station and why (apart from other countries do it) it should/would be a priority? Most existing passengers are not interlining with trains (even those on the routes that do pass the station), so why would extending some other routes make any difference to that? Throwing good money after bad?
Might I suggest that there are other factors (frequency and hours of operation of services, and station facilities, for instance) that also play their part and would also require additional funding. Someone will be coming along to suggest giving the bus ride away as part of the train fare shortly, which just further ups the subsidy bill.
Indeed - one could argue that till the cows came home (whichever bus they used). Growing up where and when I did it was easy and meaningful. (country buses were green and only stopped at selected stops; corporation ones weren’t and stopped everywhere).
I don't think there was much more integration between bus and rail in most of the County (outside PTE areas) prior to the 1985 Transport Act. As I have said to you before, this will only change when both bus and rail are with the same budget holder [and not high up, but on a local level], which will probably put the difference between rail and bus subsidies into stark view....
johncrossley
Established Member
As mentioned earlier, people don't change between buses and trains that much in the UK because integration is poor. Obviously the whole point of improving integration is to get more people to use public transport. That's the main reason why any public transport improvement is done. The Swiss etc. wouldn't do it if there was no point.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
There was however in PTE areas, which was lost in 1985. Within PTE areas probably constitutes by far the largest amount of local public transport travel. What happens rurally is of less importance.
Bus links to connect into rail/tram routes have been tried before and have generally failed.
Why not offer options and allow the public to choose what best meets their requirements?
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