¡Adiós Pasado, Hola Futuro!

Remember MAP? This is the second post on the National Bus Company wide (and beyond) Market Analysis Project. MAP started in the late 1970s as Midland Red’s Viable Network. Huge teams of temporary surveyors would assist in the gathering of passenger data and from them NBC would put together a network that broke even.

Nowhere was this more important than at Hants & Dorset, a struggling subsidiary at the time. The various MAPs exposed poor performing routes to the respective county councils within each area. In turn, each county council could see what it needed to buy back as part of the supported network. The approach was almost like another language, a complete change from the past practices of incremental withdrawal. And it was much more transparent.

In hindsight, would it be cruel to say that the whole exercise was excessive, even grandiloquent? Was it a good investment on the part of England's many county councils? Could a good manager with foresight and a sound feel for his territory have performed a desktop exercise costing next to nothing? Probably. The whole MAP process was cumbersome and long-winded. It certainly would never suit today's commercial bus industry, where decisions to alter networks can take as little as 56 days. But electronic ticket machines giving quality management data were a good few years off at that point.

But the MAP result was scientific enough to inform councils and to leave the industry in better shape than it had been for some time. The trouble was, it invariably failed to stop the rot. Two years later, most networks were in trouble, again. As the title to this post says, say goodbye to past and hello to the future.