Least of our Worries

Pseudonymous has a second contribution. Re-read the first here...

The recession may well be the least of a number of worries for many bus operators.

While the recession is clearly having an impact on rail travel and especially long distance, the bus market appears much more robust. Go Ahead clearly impressed the markets with its continuing solid performances at its franchises, while National Express looks to be at considerable risk from it's East Coast Main Line operation.

Reports from across the country indicate the status quo of a mixture of stagnation, decline, and growth in bus travel.

In our own back yard there are still significant operators posting strong passenger growth, and so shouldn't all be well in the bus stations of Southern England?

Sadly, holding your ground in a recession doesn't seem to be enough at the moment.

Bus operators, especially the big groups seem to have finally tired of the concessionary fares debacle. In many areas operators have spent huge sums on the lawyers and advisers for three years' worth of appeals, yet still they haven't reached the point where they can manage with the current arrangements for payment for free travel. Faced with another round of appeals needing to be submitted imminently against multiple local authority schemes, and despite Stagecoach and Go Ahead both being in the process of extremely expensive High Court legal challenges against the Department for Transport, it seems that operators are giving up on their 'waiting game'.

While they continue to appeal and take action, it seems as though they are turning a corner. For some years now they have been very hesitant about axing routes, preferring to sit tight and hope that the concessionary payments come right. Some have tinkered, some been a bit more willing to make cuts, mainly to those routes that carry almost exclusively free travellers. The reluctance to cut is most likely in the knowledge that business lost will be lost forever. It appears that operators have been taking the pain in the hope that things will work out.

Yet word from within a number of operators suggests that they have decided that enough is enough—that their businesses cannot sustain the additional costs and reduced revenues that free travel has brought them. Apparently there are a number of them now working through the detail of significant network reworkings, poised to wield the axe in the remainder of 2009.

Word has reached them too that the government is not to rebate the 2p increase in duty on a litre of diesel either. To bus operators who pay a lower price per litre than other motorists that 2p in a significant percentage increase in their fuel costs.

The recession may be hitting many businesses hard, and government may be bending over backwards to prop up some sectors of industry and commerce. It seems however that public transport is one area where, as over many decades, successive governments fail to understand fully the importance of the services that are provided to every community in England.