How to encourage bus use?

[TheWalrus]

This is a question I've had for a long time but I am not sure of the answer.

I deas I've had include: more accessible good quality vehicles, fixed drivers offering good customer service, reasonably priced fares and different ticket types to cater for all passenger's needs, good connections with other services, better quality waiting areas, bus priority systems in urban areas, promotions, strong marketing and advertising and most importantly cooperation between communities, bus operators and local transport authorities.

So what schemes are known to have increased passenger numbers? What do you think could be implemented to encourage bus use? What would make you use a bus where you would otherwise take another mode of transport?

Your responses would be much appreciated, thank you for your help

 

[nicobobinus]

A couple of thoughts..

Comprehensive service provision, where the operator is prepared to offer a service at 'loss making' times e.g. late evenings and outside shopping hours on Sundays. If people are able to make journeys and *know* there will be a bus to get them home, whatever the time, then they might just choose that over the flexibility of a car. It does involve a commercial risk, but can be rewarded. Withdraw those services and demand will slowly drain away to a core of commuters and shoppers who have no other choice than to take the bus.

Quality partnerships - such as seen in Oxford, where competing companies work together on key corridors to encourage growth, in partnership with the local authorities helping to implement several of the infrastructure improvements you've mentioned. I think they have ticketing interavailability too.

 

[NWindsor]

One of the simplest answers in the current climate:

Make them cheaper.

1. Make buses cheaper, even before 9am:
For minimum waged, jobseekers, mums and carers, students, children and teens. I used to use Bakerbus when I lived in Staffs. 79p a journey was a Godsend. Now I live in Derbyshire and no cheap competition exists. I have to pay £5-£10 a day just for an all day ticket. Two journeys costs me £5.

2. For those on a middle to upper income, make buses luxurious, trendy, comfy, play nice classical music? I don't know. Will buses always carry a stigma for those who can afford a car, or can marketing and image overcome it?

I loved the Christmas Spice fragrance used by Megabus in their toilets over Christmas.It made a massive difference - coach and train toilet smells can be offputting. Free wifi, wipedown seats, laptop tables and charging sockets are all useful things on longer journeys. Make buses greener - see below.

3. To appeal to eco-conscious people - keep making buses greener. This will also help general appeal as exhaust fumes should become less of a strong smell, and engine noises should be quieter.

Your ideas all seem really good!

Waiting areas - great idea.

They should be heated, secure, well lit, wind and rain proof, and staffed, ideally. With travel updates available.

More links between counties is a must, so that maybe eventually, a unified bus payment system for everyone to pay into and travel up amd down the country? Like an Oyster Card, to allow for price differences in single fares between regions?

Oyster Cards. Derbyshire has a similar system but it is offputting because it takes 24 hours for top-ups to register. Nationwide efficient Oyster Card systems would be good, though.

Different ticket types would be good if they benefit everyone with a low income, including jobseekers and those on income support, esa, etc.

This is a question I've had for a long time but I am not sure of the answer.

I deas I've had include: more accessible good quality vehicles, fixed drivers offering good customer service, reasonably priced fares and different ticket types to cater for all passenger's needs, good connections with other services, better quality waiting areas, bus priority systems in urban areas, promotions, strong marketing and advertising and most importantly cooperation between communities, bus operators and local transport authorities.

So what schemes are known to have increased passenger numbers? What do you think could be implemented to encourage bus use? What would make you use a bus where you would otherwise take another mode of transport?

Your responses would be much appreciated, thank you for your help

 

[vicbury]

There are lots of ways through which bus usage can be increased. A big theme in recent years has been integrated transport whereby connections with other bus and rail services and walking and cycling facilities are improved or instated.

A scheme that has increased bus usage is the Greater Bristol Bus Network (GBBN). First are quoting passenger growth of up to 46% on some routes, which is pretty impressive. For those who don't know, the GBBN is a variety of city and regional routes in the West of England. It includes bus priority measures (bus lanes, bus gates, bus-sensitive traffic lights), new bus shelters to a very high standard (as seen here), raised kerbs, real time displays at bus stops, marketing, new buses, better frequencies, earlier and later journeys. In fact it's been such a success that Bristol is now getting night buses six nights a week on more routes than ever before, the first ever 24/7 route, and Bus Rapid Transit in the longer term.

You can read more about how First are increasing usage in the West of England in their newsletter.

From a completely different perspective, as a Transport Planner my job is to ensure new developments are as sustainable as possible. So for example, if a development of several hundred houses was planned, we'd look at re-routing existing services to serve the development (if necessary), enabling access to bus stops (one plan I worked on recently was adjacent to a main road with three bus routes on it yet the developers hadn't planned a footpath to get from the estate to this main road), upgrading nearby stops with raised kerbs, decent shelters and real time information, and if necessary proposing that the developer funds an increase in frequency or earlier/later buses.

 

[VTPreston_Tez]

Place them on appropriate routes?
That's prestons case anyway

 

[ainsworth74]

Make them run on time or make it possible to know when a bus will arrive at your stop. There is a bus stop about thirty seconds walk from my house that will take me to the centre of Redcar, but, I hardly ever use it and instead walk twenty minutes to the train station because I know when the train will turn up and it doesn't cost me any time (train takes five minutes to centre the bus from my local stop about thirty).

Unless I can know with certainty that the bus will be at the bus stop at xx:yy or I can know how late it's running I will always pick the train. Even if it involves a longer walk.

 

[Yew]

Make them run on time or make it possible to know when a bus will arrive at your stop. There is a bus stop about thirty seconds walk from my house that will take me to the centre of Redcar, but, I hardly ever use it and instead walk twenty minutes to the train station because I know when the train will turn up and it doesn't cost me any time (train takes five minutes to centre the bus from my local stop about thirty).

Unless I can know with certainty that the bus will be at the bus stop at xx:yy or I can know how late it's running I will always pick the train. Even if it involves a longer walk.

Same here, I have a bus into town maybe 50m away from my house, however as I have no line of sight I cant wait for it inside, and anyway if nobody is at the station it might not stop

Make busses a nice place to be. Look at noise reduction, nice seats, maybe a bit of wifi so I can look on the net on my tablet.

 

[bb21]

Unless I overlooked it, you missed out one of the (if not the) most important factors - frequency.

If it is less than a turn-up-and-go type of service then punctuality/reliability becomes a very important factor.

The other things I was gonna say have already been covered by people before me.

 

[northwichcat]

£1.50 unlimited all day travel bus ticket within a specified zone. It works well in Gibraltar.

 

[gnolife]

Actually advertising where the bus will be stopping when diverted. One bus route that I use regularly to get from my dad's house to Manchester can't stop at around half a dozen stops because of roadworks. A diversion was advertised when this first started. However, a road on the diversion got closed as well, which means that bus drivers on this route seem to be making the route up as they go along - I've had drivers taking at least 5 different routes in the fortnight since that second road closed. Complaining to the company in question got me a long winded response to the effect of 'have you got any proof of that?'

 

[LexyBoy]

It depends on the route I think - urban routes are going to need different things to (semi-)rural routes.

Agree with bb21 on frequency vs punctuality - my parents live a couple of miles from the nearest town (Stroud). A bus route passes their house with a timetabled hourly frequency, but it's totally useless for getting into town as it passes anything between 15 minutes before and 30 minutes after the timetabled time. It's OK for going to Gloucester in the other direction as it hasn't time to accrue much delay - on the downside it's more expensive and takes longer than walking to Stroud and taking the train (and worst of all you end up in Gloucester either way).

So, no more than a 10 minute wait or bang-on-schedule arrivals are a must. Obviously unclean buses and antisocial noise / music-on-phones / smelly food etc will also put off those used to their cars. Information at stops and on buses is also vital for infrequent users.

Tart up Traveline to look like a professional website rather than a hobbyist's creation. People are always amazed when I show them traveline, as it looks so unpromising but is actually incredibly detailed and generally very accurate. It should include the price for journeys too, none of this keeping bus fares top secret.

A unified fares system would also make the bus more attractive. Journeys involving more than one company quickly become uneconomical with fares of £5 return for each leg. And where there's more than one company running on a route, nobody wants to wait for company B on the bus home because they got a bus run by company A into town.

 

[northwichcat]

Actually advertising where the bus will be stopping when diverted. One bus route that I use regularly to get from my dad's house to Manchester can't stop at around half a dozen stops because of roadworks. A diversion was advertised when this first started. However, a road on the diversion got closed as well, which means that bus drivers on this route seem to be making the route up as they go along - I've had drivers taking at least 5 different routes in the fortnight since that second road closed. Complaining to the company in question got me a long winded response to the effect of 'have you got any proof of that?'

I had that problem with First Manchester once. The road where I intended to catch the bus from was closed for utility works. There was no indication either on the TfGM or First Manchester websites or at the actual site of roadworks so I had to walk across to the other side of Manchester to another stop that the bus was timetabled to stop at.

 

[radamfi]

Surely it would be obvious to look at places where they have decent modal share for PT and then copy it? So Switzerland would be the natural place to look. I find it bizarre that so many people on this thread give examples in the UK, where there are the constraints of deregulation and low subsidy and bizarrely, Gibraltar! I don't think there is anything special about Gibraltar other than that they are a British Crown dependency.

I do think it would be better to look at total non-car use, rather than bus use. In other world, include trams and bikes too. In terms of PT usage, the Netherlands is quite low, but only because far more people use bicycles for local travel which inevitably reduces bus usage. In terms of share of non-car use, including cycling, the Netherlands is probably the best in the developed world.

 

[northwichcat]

Gibraltar! I don't think there is anything special about Gibraltar other than that they are a British Crown dependency.

There's 4 bus routes which run every 10-20 minutes mainly using air conditioned Dennis DARTs. Some of the routes are obviously quite hilly. You can buy a day ticket for all buses for £1.50. How many towns in hilly areas here have that kind of service for that price or attract the same level of patronage? None that I know of.

Gibraltar's also special because a bus route crosses the Airport runway! (It is traffic light controlled.)

The disadvantage of Gibraltar bus travel is that all buses stop at the Spanish border. Although, there is a bus station the Spanish side of the border with buses to the likes of Algeciras, San Roque and Marbella.

 

[radamfi]

There's 4 bus routes which run every 10-20 minutes mainly using air conditioned Dennis DARTs. Some of the routes are obviously quite hilly. You can buy a day ticket for all buses for £1.50. How many towns in hilly areas here have that kind of service for that price or attract the same level of patronage? None that I know of.

Buses in Gibraltar are obviously heavily subsidised, which is different to the UK, but they do use British style buses which are typically cheap to buy and are low specification, albeit air conditioned. Buses in the UK can be high frequency, often higher frequency than in Switzerland, but frequency is only part of the story. The Swiss (and Dutch etc.) model is to run buses in careful coordination with each other, with penalty free interchange, and obviously to provide sufficient priority to ensure reliability.

The point is, though, why mention Gibraltar instead of the far more obvious Switzerland?

 

[317666]

For me personally, a more reliable service and much cheaper fares would attract me to using buses. Stagecoach Cambridge are an absolute joke, apparently "every 10 minutes" actually means "wait half an hour then three turn up at once". I know that's a common saying about buses but it actually happens here! The fare from my area to either the station or city centre (the former being 2 miles, the latter being 3 or 4) is £2, which isn't exactly good value, especially considering the quality of the service! Also annoyingly, in the evenings when buses go down to about every hour or so, trains from London just miss them at the station. Whatever happened to good connections and/or integrated transport?

Until the fares come down and the service is reliable, I'll be walking and enjoying the fresh air and exercise

 

[northwichcat]

Buses in Gibraltar are obviously heavily subsidised, which is different to the UK, but they do use British style buses which are typically cheap to buy and are low specification, albeit air conditioned.

On checking the Gibraltar DARTs were not actually to a typical specification. They aren't an exact match for any other DART - they are a right hand drive version of the ones built for the Channel Islands, which are a slightly different size to the standard sized DARTs used in the UK. OK that's cheaper than designing a bus from scratch but it's certainly not an off the shelf model fitted with air conditioning.

The £1.50 day ticket is actually the commercial tourist price for a day ticket. Gibraltar residents' bus travel is very heavily subsided (free for people who meet certain conditions since 2011.) The aim of that high subsidy is so that residents should feel they don't need to own a car just to get around the peninsula. The buses are very well used but there's probably still more cars around than is the aim.

 

[jon0844]

Good bus information is vital, as well as running to time and running buses long enough to allow for a return trip (as said already).

We now, at long last, are getting real time information for our buses - and so I can check an app before leaving to see when the bus is due. It's not perfect; some buses don't send the information, while the system can still fail to update quickly and a bus that's still showing as being a couple of minutes has already gone (but, if you're looking at an app for a bus due in 1 or 2 minutes, you're pushing you luck).

The best thing is that bus drivers are now monitored and so my original problem of loads of drivers running early, meaning I was missing buses quite a lot (some buses running as much as 5 minutes early, or 10 minutes late at night). Now they will park up and wait if they're really early, as I assume they run the risk of being called on it.

The same system also allows for buses to announce the next stop, but none of the buses are fitted with this facility as yet.

Finally, if you can't get home by bus then you won't go by bus in the first place. We had that issue around here, but thanks to the local users, councillors and a bus company that did listen, a service that was curtailed from 11pm to 7pm was restored to 11pm - and is now, as far as I am aware, pretty much paying for itself (it also receives a subsidy from the county council, but this was cut back in 2010/11).

 

[northwichcat]

For me personally, a more reliable service and much cheaper fares would attract me to using buses. Stagecoach Cambridge are an absolute joke, apparently "every 10 minutes" actually means "wait half an hour then three turn up at once".

At least they send the right number of buses. With First in West Yorkshire 'at frequent intervals at least every 10 minutes' means something like departures at 09:00, 09:10, 09:30, 09:40, 10:00, 10:20, 10:30, 10:40, 10:50, 11:10 etc.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

The same system also allows for buses to announce the next stop, but none of the buses are fitted with this facility as yet.

Weren't Arriva Malta proposing to trial that facility?

 

[radamfi]

For people who have only travelled by bus in Britain next stop displays may sound revolutionary, but in reality this facility has been available on buses in mainland Europe for at least 10-15 years. And, of course, this information is still virtually non-existent in most of Britain, despite it being the norm on the continent. Metrobus and Brighton & Hove have 'next stop' information on most buses but even this does not have the audio.

So, while London has just got the system and most of the rest of the country has not and is unlikely to receive it any time soon, certain cities in Europe have taken it to the next level. I have been to various places in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway in recent years and they have monitors showing not only the next stop and the arrival time there, but also the arrival time at the next few stops and the arrival time at the destination. I'm sure this exists in other places.

Zurich's system (which seems to cover every S-Bahn, bus and tram in the whole canton, covering a wide rural and suburban area outside the city) even tells you what bus, tram or train services you can transfer to as you approach an interchange point. Not only service numbers and destination points, but also departure times and there even appears to be a box to give notice of any kind of disruption which may apply to that service.

 

[jon0844]

Sweden has certainly had the next stop information for ages, from my own personal experience, but meanwhile we still have many trains that have no screens - let alone buses! I doubt we'll ever get a system that can show information for connecting services and real-time updates, even if the train/bus has a data connection for providing Wi-Fi internet.

We're always far behind here, then seem to be so proud of getting something as if we invented it (in some respects, we're as insular as we accuse the Americans of being).

I had to laugh when we got the new X-crossing at Oxford Circus, which was another big idea that wasn't new at all - and yet we had to do various tests and trials beforehand. That and the countdown timer on a pedestrian crossing - another idea done abroad for God knows how long! There are also countdown timers for motorists, so maybe that's something for us to look forward to??!

Another thing we're now getting, again after being done abroad, is the conversion of wide single carriageway roads into 2+1 lane roads, where the second lane swaps every mile or two. It means you can now overtake that tractor or caravan, and then have a short wait to allow people to overtake in the other direction. It's far cheaper than making a road into a dual carriageway and probably just about as effective - with the crash barriers and modified junctions making things safer still.

But, we didn't come up with that idea either! Sometimes I wonder about these people who go around the world on 'fact finding' missions and seem to come back having missed so many good things.

 

[northwichcat]

Another thing we're now getting, again after being done abroad, is the conversion of wide single carriageway roads into 2+1 lane roads, where the second lane swaps every mile or two. It means you can now overtake that tractor or caravan, and then have a short wait to allow people to overtake in the other direction. It's far cheaper than making a road into a dual carriageway and probably just about as effective - with the crash barriers and modified junctions making things safer still.

That happened in the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire areas 20 or more years ago, so not a new idea in the UK.

 

[overthewater]

Alot of people are still WAY OF THE MARK..............................I dare say this is why bus travel has not increased, whats been mist out?

Operating direct buses to and from people work, Its that simple. Alas many companies do not do this thus, most people no choice of there own, but to take the car. Of course if you paid for a car why on earth are you going to waste even more money on buses?

Until Bus companies stop chasing shoppers and oap, its not going to get any better.

People traveling to and from there work dont want to wait 20mins for a buses, then travel 40mins or change buses and spend an hour. Its not like bus companies needs to waste high amount of resources, there could target highly precise times of the day to met most peoples demand, which would be linked in to school runs.

It does go back to another point, in which bus companies tell passengers when to travel or use there services. If this was any other business etc, there would have gone bust.....

 

[northwichcat]

Operating direct buses to and from people work, Its that simple. Alas many companies do not do this thus, most people no choice of there own, but to take the car. Of course if you paid for a car why on earth are you going to waste even more money on buses?

Well that's partly why the 47 Knutsford-Lymm-Warrington service failed. It was and still is 2 subsided return workings on Tuesday and Friday but there also used to be 3 return workings Monday-Friday which were commercial. However, there was no useful service for someone working normal working hours in either Knutsford or Warrington even when the commercial service operated, despite there being no direct alternative transport between the two towns.

 

[Deerfold]

Alot of people are still WAY OF THE MARK..............................I dare say this is why bus travel has not increased, whats been mist out?

Operating direct buses to and from people work, Its that simple. Alas many companies do not do this thus, most people no choice of there own, but to take the car. Of course if you paid for a car why on earth are you going to waste even more money on buses?

Until Bus companies stop chasing shoppers and oap, its not going to get any better.

People traveling to and from there work dont want to wait 20mins for a buses, then travel 40mins or change buses and spend an hour. Its not like bus companies needs to waste high amount of resources, there could target highly precise times of the day to met most peoples demand, which would be linked in to school runs.

Everyone else doesn't have to be wrong for your idea to have some merit, you know. You may want to proofread your comments too - I don't normally comment on this but the errors in yours are into double figures.

This may sound simple but for this to work you need the people going to a business to all live in the same area (or the bus will go such a long route that there's no time saving).

You also need people to be starting and finishing at the same time - and wanting to go straight home instead of via somewhere else.

There used to be quite a few services like this in places where I've lived but as people have moved to different places or new people have started who live in different places and work hours have got more flexible they've tended to disappear.

Having said that, government polices haven't helped - Boots in Nottingham used to subsidise direct buses from all over the city to their site for their main shift times (which where usually quicker as they could bypass the city centre_ but it was decided this was a taxable benefit for staff, pushing up the cost. When they withdrew the subsidies the number of services which continued dropped from around 30 to just a couple.

Some do still survive, usually as variations on other routes such as Burnley and Pendle who divert their Mainline services via the Silentnight Factory at shift start and end times. However for those catching the bus who don't work there this can be confusing as the bus misses out part of the normal route - especially as the shift times are not at the same times on Fridays.

 

[radamfi]

Surely we must understand that only a very limited number of destinations can be accessed if we only rely on direct buses? The British tradition is to try and provide as many direct routes as possible. Because of that you end up with a lot of overlapping routes (i.e. expensive duplication) and very complicated, indirect routes. But still only a few places can be reached by a direct bus. So workplaces not in the town centre or on the direct route to the town centre are effectively considered inaccessible by bus.

The preferred solution in places like Switzerland is to have a more sparse network where you provide timed connections at convenient locations so that everywhere can be accessed easily. This leads to higher patronage at lower operating cost.

(This is all explained in a far more eloquent manner in the book 'Transport in Suburbia'. Read a preview here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D3K0FMVhcjsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)

 

[tbtc]

How to encourage bus use?

Firstly, consider those who never use buses.

You need to convince them to investigate public transport from scratch. Having better signs at bus stops isn't going to make any difference to motorists driving past them. They're not going to look at your swish website, because they don't even consider using the bus. Need to begin at the absolute beginning.

Stagecoach in Sheffield have been putting external adverts on the back of their buses promoting bus use, with a short story about someone who is sitting on the bus - something like "Emma is enjoying the crossword, she's hoping that she can get Eighteen Down before the bus arrives at her stop - Emma is on the bus, why aren't you?" or "Ian has a job interview - he's sitting on the bus revising his notes - Ian is on the bus, why aren't you" (something like that - I've not remembered them perfectly, I'm sure!).

These are the kind of simple messages that a frustrated driver would read whilst stuck behind a bus at traffic lights - easy to understand - trying to sell the positives of bus travel (like catching up with your mates, watching something on your ipad... the kind of thing that motorists can't do).

Then, once you've got people interested in actually using a bus, the quality of information comes into it. This is always going to be a problem because sometimes its for the council to provide (or PTE), sometimes its for the operators. Lothian buses have great timetable/ fare information at their stops, but I appreciate that other cities aren't as simple to understand.

Next, reliability of service. You can't guarantee that buses will arrive to the minute due to traffic (though please don't pretend that all train services arrive to the minute either). However you can guarantee that the timetable won't change for a fixed period. Non-bus users will complain about the fact that "they are always changing the timetables" (as a reason why they don't trust bus services) - this may be perception rather than reality, but I think that it'd help if timetables were guaranteed to be in operation for at least (say) six months, so that people didn't worry that the route/ times would have changed since last time. This wouldn't cost anything to implement, but it would rely on Operator A taking the risk that Operator B didn't come along and register a bus five minutes in advance.

Then, timetable information. Too often, like on the railways, bus companies publish timetables with hundreds of bits of information on them without any explanation of what has changed - no space to point out which journeys have changed?

After that, the quality of on-board information. Even if you can't put information up at bus stops (or it gets vandalised), you could have posters up on the bus to inform people of where the city centre stops are or with a map, or details of ticket prices. A lot of companies miss out on the need to communicate with existing passengers, and I've known a few people who get the bus home from one stop in the city centre because they are unaware of what other stops it leaves from.

Lastly, promote other bus routes that the company has. You get the bus to commute into the town/ city centre five days a week, but you may have no idea of which bus to take if you need to go to the Hospital. Or which route to that out of town shopping centre? So you could have posters up promoting various other routes inside the buses. For example, I know some Sheffield Wednesday fans who'd never use the bus to go to matches in Hillsborough - the ground is by one of the tram lines and they know that they can rely on the tram to get there. It's also by a few bus routes, but as its not on any of the bus routes that they regularly use, they wouldn't know where the Hillsborough buses stop in the city centre/ which route to get etc.

Buses are great at dealing with the dwindling core market, but not so great at attracting others. Hopefully the above ideas are fairly cheap/ simple/ basic enough to have a chance. Nothing expensive/ complicated/ far fetched, I hope.

Surely it would be obvious to look at places where they have decent modal share for PT and then copy it? So Switzerland would be the natural place to look. I find it bizarre that so many people on this thread give examples in the UK, where there are the constraints of deregulation and low subsidy and bizarrely, Gibraltar!

I think that we have to be realistic and come up with solutions for the deregulated reality that we are now in - a lot of what works abroad is because of different regulation/ subsidy/ car use, and cannot be replicated here (without massively changing things).

Another thing we're now getting, again after being done abroad, is the conversion of wide single carriageway roads into 2+1 lane roads, where the second lane swaps every mile or two. It means you can now overtake that tractor or caravan, and then have a short wait to allow people to overtake in the other direction. It's far cheaper than making a road into a dual carriageway and probably just about as effective - with the crash barriers and modified junctions making things safer still

That happened in the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire areas 20 or more years ago, so not a new idea in the UK.

The Stocksbridge by-pass (the route from Greater Manchester/ Woodhead Pass to Sheffield/ M1) was built like that in the late '80s and has seen a lot of accidents/ deaths as a result.

 

[northwichcat]

Surely we must understand that only a very limited number of destinations can be accessed if we only rely on direct buses? So workplaces not in the town centre or on the direct route to the town centre are effectively considered inaccessible by bus.

Three of the main out-of-town work centres near me are accessible by bus:

1. Barclay's Radbrooke Hall site outside Knutsford has a complimentary shuttle service to Knutsford station for employees.

2. The Gadbrook Park site near Northwich (containing The Hut Group head office, a medium side bakery and a regional Morrisons warehouse) has an ordinary Arriva bus running to Northwich station and Northwich Watling Street (the bus interchange.)

3. The Astra Zeneca site at Nether Alderley is served by the Knutsford-Macclesfield bus at peak times.

However, the complications of a public transport commute are:

1. Knutsford has poor onward transport links. A Radbrooke Hall-Warrington commute without using a car would be painful.

2. Lack of a universal Plus Bus scheme makes journeys like Knutsford-Gadbrooke Park very expensive by public transport - you're talking about peak time return fare of around £10 for the two legs when the road distance is 7 miles.

3. Bus services can be changed at short notice. The Knutsford-Macclesfield service has changes numerous times over the past few months (which includes a reduction in the number of services serving Astra Zeneca) and from April there is currently no operator to run the service. You wouldn't get an announcement saying Northern are withdrawing a train service in 6 weeks!

 

[radamfi]

I think that we have to be realistic and come up with solutions for the deregulated reality that we are now in - a lot of what works abroad is because of different regulation/ subsidy/ car use, and cannot be replicated here (without massively changing things).

Bus deregulation is not necessarily set in stone. Indeed, West Yorkshire are continuing to work towards Quality Contracts. You can do bus priority but otherwise we are basically wasting our time if we have to work with the current low subsidy, deregulated system. If you want to do things properly, it does cost money.

 

[northwichcat]

Stagecoach in Sheffield have been putting external adverts on the back of their buses promoting bus use, with a short story about someone who is sitting on the bus - something like "Emma is enjoying the crossword, she's hoping that she can get Eighteen Down before the bus arrives at her stop - Emma is on the bus, why aren't you?" or "Ian has a job interview - he's sitting on the bus revising his notes - Ian is on the bus, why aren't you" (something like that - I've not remembered them perfectly, I'm sure!).

Burnley & Pendle used to do printed adverts promoting The Witch Way route. One was of a car with a dent in it saying how much is that going to cost to repair. Another was showing the saving between a bus season ticket and a car parking season ticket for Manchester city centre with a beach background, implying you can afford to go on holiday more if you take the bus.