Vocal Voices

... is the last to the World's end.

The Local Government Association (LGA) claims that a funding gap of about £652m a year for free bus passes is "unsustainable". It goes on to say that almost half of England's "vital" bus routes could be scrapped.

This could be a scare story, and possibly an exaggeration, but there must be something behind it. When you look at all the concessions such as OAP passes, school pupil passes, student cards and the like it is a wonder that anybody ever pays the full fare.

I am all for concessions when they are necessary, but I am also for people chipping in when they can. I think that many pensioners would be quite happy to fork out 50p (day pass) on the days they use their passes. Pupil passes and student cards at £1 a week during term times - less than the cost of a bottle of (unnecessary) water - would hardly break the bank. It has to be down to priorities.

We cannot all expect "free" everything all of the time.

Fully agree, although is it Luxembourg who have made all public transport free?
I got the bus home from Walton last night, the next village to where I live. For a journey of less than 2 miles it was £2.40. Besides we three drinkers, there was only one other passenger.
Better public transport is always wanted, but if nobody uses it then it will disappear. Same with trains. At some times of the day there's nobody on the local ones but in rush hour they are jammed.

We had a meeting some time back about local public transport and the representative from First Leeds made a good point.

Upping the number of buses to offer a better service at peak times was fine in theory, but what happens to all those extra buses and drivers at off-peak times? Then there are all the behind the scenes expenses of garage space and servicing.

It all sounds so easy to solve, but delve deeper and the difficulties start to emerge. Having said that, there is no doubt that a bit of better organisation and management would not go amiss.

Well, of course, if you take that approach things can only get worse. The more packed in rush hour and the more unavailable off peak, the less people will use it. The less people use it, the more prices go up to cover the costs and the less people use it. In the end you wind up with the only people using the busses are people who have no other choice.

Extra drivers? Flexible contracts, part time, overlapping shifts. There are ways, but it doesn't fit into the "one size fits all" often insisted on by the Unions to "ensure a better standard of living". I do wonder what the standard of living will be as each driver, one by one, is laid off due to lack of use of the busses. Having used the busses in London, I truly believe that it is a service which can only flourish where there is a high density usage. Country busses are going to be a thing of the past at some time.

The solution? In the end it is likely to be small, flexible self driving electric vehicles. Whether service busses or taxi's at a very reasonable rate. It will take 10 to 20 years and then we will be inundated with them. I see it now and there is no way it is not coming.

I do wonder what the bus drivers will do then? Most EV's require very minimal servicing, many of them only have normal brakes (as we know them), as an emergency backup, braking is done by regeneration. This reduces services to an absolute minimum. The Nisan Leaf has a reputation of being virtually indestructible with virtually no servicing at all. There is an article out there in Spanish which talks about a Leaf which has done 750,000km with no servicing but it only required one wheel bearing. Granted busses have to be cleaned and the washer fluid topped up.

Sweden had this with the trains in the 90's. They had reached the point where the take-up was so low that they were struggling to keep the price affordable. A new government came in and cut train fares by half and put on more services. They got triple the passengers and it has never looked back.

My father talks about people in business who are too busy pinching pennies to make pounds. It was also his fathers saying and my Grandfather was a highly placed accountant before he left his protected job and joined the Navy in WWII. My Grandfather always said that people who spend all their time looking at diminishing returns and ways to limit them, were people who wound up with a bust business. People who spent money to improve the business and revenues were success stories.

Frank, being a non-driver (due to issues with my eyesight) the buses are very important to me! Luckily the services in Gloucester are excellent - one of the pluses of G being a working class city I suppose

I am still cross about not getting my bus pass next month, but having to wait another 6 years, but hey ho! I had a discussion about this with the wife of a local (Tory ) councillor and former Sheriff who is a very good friend of Mick's, both from school and playing rugby. She told me a very funny story about attending the WASPI march on Downing Street and being quoted in the press on a remark she made about our local Tory MP, that she thought was off the record I'll tell you about it when we go to Brum

Suff, I think you might possibly have missed the point the First Leeds rep was making.

On the most heavily trafficked routes the buses run every ten minutes or less at peak periods, and the buses carry adverts to that fact. Those buses then run to the same timetable throughout the day and, certainly in Leeds, they remain well used. That is also the case for the less trafficked or minor routes. There simply is not much leeway or room to build extra capacity, not least because of other road traffic.

When it comes to drivers the company already uses split shifts and 'spares, for extra cover - a neighbour, now retired, was one. And let us not forget that drivers are expensive. They are not burger flippers or coffee makers (baristas) who can be trained up on a two day NVQ course. For a car licence driver you are looking at a ten day intensive course, then a test at something like £2,000 a go. Then there is specific company training for things such as taking fares and giving tickets, checking transport passes, giving timetable or route information and helping passengers with mobility problem. And they have to keep their hours up or be re-tested.

With buses the costs skyrocket. A decent double decker bus costs about £200k. It needs servicing to very high standard by techies with good qualifications. More buses requires more of them, and at some cost. These extra buses need garaging or parking up when not in use. And how many would be needed to make a big difference to a city the size of Leeds, Birmingham or Bristol, 10 (£2m), 20 (£4m), 50 (£10m)? With an average of 77 passengers per full bus I am thinking that an extra 50 buses (3,850 passengers) would not cut it. Scale up whatever numbers are needed countrywide and it comes to a sizeable chunk of cash.

The other forms of vehicles and practices you mention will one day come in and prove very worthwhile. I absolutely agree on that, but they are for the future when the problem is now. There is one thing that I do know and is that bus companies cannot 'force' people out of their cars to use their services - no matter how comfortable and efficient they are. That is going to need a mighty shift in the way society operates.

Kaz, do NOT mention the qualifying age for a pass to many female members of my extended family.... they could form a lynch mob all on their own. I remain surprised that the changes did not go the same way as the Poll Tax.

Irish pensioners have free travel country wide, and it is without doubt the most enjoyed benefit of being "older" Lord knows we have paid enough for it in our taxes over the years. It allows us to use our cars less but still get out and about. I appreciate the point you are making WM, but if any government tried to take it from us, you would see revolution here!

That's the thing Osc, here - apart from one or two major cities, including London - the pass does kick in when you reach SPA. Which is 66 in my case

Frank, pass me a pitchfork and I'll gladly join 'em!

I regularly use our local bus service to go into town. The one after 9.30 a.m is always full with pensioners. I think there would be a big revolt if they were stopped. A bus company in Lancashire tried to stop one route but have had to keep it going after protest from viiages which it served.

I know it is not about buses.
Got information about the Santa Specials run by East lancs Railway in December 2018. The number of passengers increased from 2017 to nearly 38,000.
Shows that providing a good service can be profitable.

In the West Midlands, it was always said that the pensioners making use of the free bus-pass effectively kept the daytime service running, and in practice there was no frequency difference in the timetabling between the daytime service and the morning / evening "rush-hour" service. Back in the 1970's in contrast, there were numerous "extra" buses kept in the garages during the day for use purely in the rush-hour periods. But these were all pretty ancient vehicles.

Going back to the modern day era, however, it was quite noticeable that the number of services on the road after 18:30 dropped away very significantly - some routes went to double the daytime interval (30 mins from 15 mins, for example) while other routes ceased running entirely after that time. Evening travel was a very hit and miss affair.

West Midland pensioners (Centro) also get a rail network "add-on" which gives free rail travel from Wolverhampton to Coventry, which was even available on Mr Branson's Pendolinos. I often felt guilty about bagging a seat on a Euston service for free, whilst the well-heeled businessmen, having paid loads of dosh for a season ticket, had to stand. Well, perhaps not too guilty …

To be fair, I wouldn't have had any objection in the West Midlands if they'd charged something for the rail add-on, or for individual trips. It was mooted at one stage but never got past the consultation point.

Here in North Dorset, we still do have a bus service, but (and I have compared it with the situation even just 20 years ago) it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. There are noticeably many bus shelters still standing in rural villages which have long since been without a service. It is possible still to get to Poole and back in a day (2 changes each way) but to be honest I wouldn't want to risk it - miss a connection and you're sunk. It is no longer possible to get to Wincanton, the next town to the west across the border in Somerset, nor is there any daily service north into Wiltshire. There is a daily return service east to Salisbury but that only duplicates the railway which is far quicker; this rural bus service basically serves the intermediate villages (different ones each day). I do use the main bus service here in Gillingham which runs to Shaftesbury (half-hourly), but it's not well used in my experience; the load is only 8 - 12 folk, often far less. It is subsidised by the Council at present - if that stops, there's no way it could be run commercially, and you'd easily finish up with 100 square miles in the north of the county without any bus services at all.