This post first appeared in 2008. It was unusual in that it got zero comments. We’re running it again, with some updates, so let’s see if people agree or not. 
We all know of people in their 60s who’ve returned to the bus, care of free travel. Some of them haven’t been on board for 40 years or more. A lot’s changed since this golden age, but do the myths remain?
Myth 1—there are fewer buses now
If you look at bus fleets of 40-50 years ago, that’s true. But back then, there was a predominance of peak buses driven by staff on split shifts, at a time before the National Bus Company introduced operational costing (that brought in the concept of the peak vehicle).
Passengers’ only interest is one of frequency. Here, things have tended to improve, on urban and inter-urban services at least. 40 years ago in many shires, some buses tended to operate for the convenience of the company rather than the passenger. Schedulers introduced all sorts of oddities to save a few quid here, a few quid there. Now, any half-decent service is clockface, regular, predictable, giving the lie to fewer buses operating. With a concentration on those services delivering the best growth, a virtuous circle develops.
Myth 2—buses stop earlier in the evening now
That may be true of some services but 40 years ago in shire areas, there were fewer buses after 2200. Where evening services exist today, the last bus as likely as not to be at 2300 or 2330. And a surprising number of urban areas enjoy night buses on Saturday & Sunday mornings, not that your typical over-60s would care.
Myth 3—buses are more expensive now
Not so of course, for the over 60s. Free travel has brought one of the barriers to travel crashing down. But actually, for those who *do* have to pay, weekly tickets have increased at a rate far slower than singles and returns. Often modern, coarser fares structures have delivered cheaper (and more understandable) fares. Smart cards will continue to grow, offering best value. Comparing the return fare of decimalised 1971 with 2008’s equivalent between Poole and Bournemouth, and pro rata it was the equivalent of 15p more expensive in 1971 than today. But the sting in recent years has been the return to 1970s-style bus fare inflation.
Myth 4—buses were full then
This was true to a point. There were certainly far more passengers 40 years ago. Peak buses were full with workers. Yet, off-peak buses were never full, even 40 years ago. With today’s buses adapting in size plus with free travel, services are becoming full again, leading in some cases to increased frequencies. Go North East is but one example of a company planning to take out minibuses owing to increasing numbers. We are also seeing double decks replacing 40 seat single decks.
Myth 5—information on buses was easier to find then
It was possible to find more bus stations with information offices, certainly. This is a loss. But 40 years ago, you were restricted to standard office opening hours for personal callers and by phone. Now, there’s an array of information available. Traveline opens weekends and evenings. The biggest growth in internet use is the over 55s and more people are turning to the web as the first source of information. And then there are smartphones. The web (in theory) is never out of date; a modern printed timetable is likely to have no end date.
Myth 6—there was more space for luggage then
Smaller single decks didn’t offer much accommodation for luggage other than overhead racks inconvenient for heavy and large items. Double decks might have an awkward stowage area somewhere tucked under the stairwell. Modern single decks have pens in odd places but no roof racks. But now, luggage is easily taken on board, thanks to buses without internal steps. And buggies are easily accommodated, removing at a stroke some significant issues for parents (and grandparents)—except in Edinburgh, Scotland, perhaps.
Myth 7—you can’t live in a rural area without a car now
And here is a further myth. While some villages see fewer buses, others have benefited from rural transport grant and other initiatives. If there’s a reasonable demand, buses operate. OK, so rural buses aren’t always great but you have to live in a deep rural community to have a poorer bus than 40 years ago. Inter-urban timetables are now more likely to be clockface. But what’s happened is that our perceptions and needs have changed. The rural bus inevitably cannot cater for those wishing to visit out-of-town supermarkets or stores; or large district hospital where services have coalesced; or cinemas now on the town’s fringe rather than centre. That said, there’s been a quiet revolution in demand responsive services in some areas that offer the sort of flexibility that competes a little more with the car. Can it last?
Myth 8—there are no Sunday buses now
Sunday services have suffered most in the last 40+ years but urban services are seeing something of a renaissance owing to Sunday trading and leisure. Where Sunday services operate, they tend to be on the road a lot earlier than once they were. In some shire areas, Sunday buses didn’t really materialise till after noon.
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Eight Myths of the Bus—updated
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25 comments:
As with so many things it is easy to look at what you haven't got rather than what you have. It's easy to think or the things that travellers lack (or think they lack) rather than what has hanged for better
Bus firms are far more business-like now and more customer aware. As you say in the article, clockface timetable make buses more accessible by removing the complexity surrounding operation.
Regular times presented clearly with no silly notes and annotations should remove a big barrier to those who see transport (in general, not just buses) as very complicated. Look back to earlier decades and scramble through a complex maze of journeys that operate via different routes, times and days and it's hard to see how we ever got along.
the key (excuse the pun) now is ensuring the information aailable on the internet and all other ediums are kept up-to-date and accurate, the same goes for staff too. I reckon there are far too many occasions where passengers tell drivers and other staff what is going on rather than management - so wrong
Agree with the last bit. "When's the bus back due" or "When can I get the bus to Y" should never be answered with "don't know, mate". Drivers, as pretty much the only customer facing staff, need to be provided with the information to answer that sort of question quickly and correctly.
Myths 7 AND 8 ARE NO LONGER MYTHS.
Oh dear, Mr Glum's going to have a field day ;-)
Seriously though, it all sounds good to me. Certainly in places that I'm familiar with in the south of England, services have improved greatly in the last 30 years (I can't go back much further!) - better buses, more frequent, later services...
Here are a few more (only slightly tongue in cheek):
Myth 9 - bus companies have no concept of customer service.
Myth 10 - bus companies haven't adapted their services to take people where they (now) want to go and blithely run exactly the same routes as 40 years ago.
Myth 11 - bus companies do not innovate, take risks or try anything new.
Myth 12 - bus companies are forever changing their timetables.
Myth 13 - bus companies give no notice of timetable changes.
Myth 14 - all routes are contracted out by the local council to greedy, rip-off bus companies (reading any comments on online newspaper articles will show how widespread a belief this is).
Myth 15 - bendybuses regularly kill cyclists.
A few years ago I did a piece of work about buses in Hastings which was partly designed to rebut a load of claims from a campaign group called Save Our Services. One of the things we found was that the bus network in Hastings, with one or two minor exceptions, was more frequent than ever, with better evening and Sunday services, and provided more coverage. The rose tinted specs of those who wanted a return to the "good old days" pre-1986 were well and truly smashed and the group disbanded soon after the report was published.
Thank God for E-bay and their stock of old National Bus Company timetables...
I cannot agree with the general assertion that all of these things are myths. It depends on where you live, the group operator etc.
If I were to take as an example where I live south of Maidstone we used to have both corporation and M & D services. At least eight buses an hour and every 20 minutes in the evenings and on Sundays. At such times I could travel into town and then on to any other suburb quite easily. No need to check timetables before setting out.
After de-regulation daytime frequencies initially remained high but have declined to every twenty minutes on one route and hourly on another. In effect reducing from virtually turn up and go to an average ten minute wait - more if you just miss one. The evening and Sunday service is hourly. Yes people could check a timetable but the perception (reality)is of a reduced service. Other parts of the town have also seen similar reductions - some down to hourly in the daytime and the fact that some routes have improved to every ten minutes is no comfort to people not living in those areas.
It is a similar tale in several rural and semi rural areas.
I sometimes wonder if this partly because of the group operator and there attitude. Stagecoach seem to be able to do the reverse.
I am interested in Dave's comments about Hastings as I worked there about twelve years ago. The route network was very complicated appearing to try and link every area with the town centre and the Hospital etc. All sorts of 'diversions' to serve areas just off the main roads. Any attempt to rationalise this brought screams of protest to local councillors by the few people affected.
It wasn't Dave who bought the Hastings timetables I sold on ebay last week.
Ha ha Robert - no it wasn't me this time!
The strength of feeling about bus services in Hastings was quite surprising. We had lots of meetings with Stagecoach, councillors, "interested groups" and individuals who wanted to have their say (and in one case, wanted us to recommend a trolleybus system).
Going back into the mists of time the service patterns were very complicated, all had weird and wonderful route numbers (I seem to remember that the main north-south route in St Leonards had so many bus numbers they had trouble fitting them on the plan). Obviously there are some winners and losers but that's not just a feature of the bus industry.
We also looked at fares. The campaign group were doing the obvious "it's cheaper in London" type argument. We looked at four other "similar towns" (I think we used some kind of Census analysis to do this) and found that actually the fares were comparable with those places. (I think they were Worthing, Crawley, Lincoln and somewhere else).
It was a fun project with a good outcome!
It depends entirely on where you live and how good the operator is and their relationship with the local authority / PTE.
Some people do have better services and there has been innovation in vehicles, fares and customer info. Equally there are dreadful operators and councils that don't care about public transport.
The greatest issue is the lack of consistency of good performance, innovation and product development so that the poor passenger doesn't face a "bus service lottery" by virtue of stepping across a borough or council boundary or change of operating territory.
The government claim to want an increase in bus patronate but are doing next to nothing to help it come about. Some of your myths may no longer be true in some areas but it would be good to have them dispelled across the country.
Someone clearly works for a bus company if they think that.
Sunday services are almost non existant, services have been cut back drasticaly
Bus are run far more now for the benefit of the bus companies rather than the passengers
Fares have gobne through the roof for very infrequent and shoddy service
If you want to travel before 7am or after 7pm forget it there will be almost no services
Dave
Yes the routes going north from Hastings or St Leonards through Silverhill were very confusing. One reason I produced the first two editions of The Borough Council bus map. If I couldn't easily work out the network in answer to a query how were the public supposed to?
This must have been before all these questions arose as I recall that just after i left Stagecoach had decided to revise the network.
Good old Mr Glum @ 14:51, surprised its taken him this long to comment!
Anonymous@1451
Perhaps you could tell us where you live and the bus company that provides you with such terrible service?
Bus services are provided commercially where practical. This requires making a profit to continue. If a service cannot be operated commercially then a local authority has to subsidise it. They have a duty to get best value for money, and if there is no money there will not be a bus.
It's set to get worse in Wales as there is a bug re-regulation push behind the scenes by the politicians. Where on earth they think they can pay for this us beyond me. If demand existed then operators would serve. Lots of people in the Senedd wearing rise tinted glasses me thinks!
He's too ashamed to divulge that, Anon 14:51, I've asked him before, to no avail.
I would post a list of places that it couldn't be but the list would be rather long and I don't have the time or inclination :-)
Sorry - the previous comment was to Anon 16:29.
Getting my Anons mixed up, oops, taht will never do!!
Afetr all the First bashing of late, First Hampshire have just posted all of their timetables which commence on 29th April (yes, over 5 weeks notice!) and the frequencies have improved again.
They are now offering a bus from the city to Woolston or Shirley every 7 1/2 minutes ON A SUNDAY.
They are also launching a totally new link between the City Centre and Millbrook every 10 minutes (the X2 Millbrook flyer) which avoids the congested drag up through Shirley. Combine that with a new regular 4 bus per hour service from the centre of Hedge End into the City (where incumbant BlueStar have bit by bit reduced to hourly, and charge £6 return), and First really are on a resurgence in Southampton.
So to return to the 8 myths - I'd say the evidence is that whilst you could agrue that a couple of them are true, it's the authorities who should be supporting evening services who have let the public down, by and large the commercial bus companies are doing a fantasic job.
Re: First in Southampton. That's a very positive and welcome move both in terms of getting the message out early and some of the improvements. Do they smell blue blood?
The evening and Sunday services which have disappeared have, by and large, been the services that don't make money and need a subsidy to survive. That's especially true up here in the north east- in County Durham if you want to go anywhere in the evening or on a Sunday you need to drive, but that's because Durham County Council have stopped subsidising the empty buses.
The only real example I can think of for Mr Glum is First West Yorkshire, where even in urban areas like Halifax and Bradford many last buses have gone. The last bus from Halifax to the town where my parents live is 2235, which is simply not acceptable in an urban county like West Yorkshire. But that's First short-sightedness in action, something they say they're looking to change.
Things may have improved since 40 years ago,but not over the service 2 years ago.This is due to Somerset CC cuts.
The 2 largest towns in Somerset are Taunton and Yeovil.The last bus now from Taunton is now 1740(previously 2240).Now there is no Sunday service.
Supply and demand. If there's no demand why would a bus company run a service or late journeys? Equally, should a council be spending my/our council tax subsidising bus services that few people use? I'm not convinced it should.
I don't dispute that there's a need for some subsidy within the industry but it's been totally skewed by the concessionary fares debacle and the reduction in BSOG. The whole subsidy 'thing' needs an overhaul - go back to funding concessions for *local* journeys (as opposed to jollies to the seaside) and and reverse the BSOG cut. Better still, channel the money into *increasing* BSOG, so that the overheads for *all* routes can be reduced by a few degrees - that would immediately bring some boderline routes/journeys out of the danger zone.
There's got to be a better way than the mess we're currently in. And no, I certainly don't mean re-regulation or franchising, the additional costs involved in that would be totally disastrous.
Ditto Suffolk.
Ditto most of the UK outside of the major cities
In Wales steep fares increases are now coming through. With most bus companies the child discount currenltly 50% is being reduced so in future children will pay two thirds of the adult fare. Adult fares are also being increased by upto 10%
Some of these comments do seem to hark back to a bygone age that perhaps never really existed.
As regards Somerset, it is true that Sunday and evening services have declined from a high water point of a few years ago, including the 54 from Yeovil to Taunton.
However, I remember 20 years ago and the entire Sunday network was:
Wells to Weston - 2 hourly
Street to Bristol - 4 journeys (one extended to/from Taunton)
Street to Bath - 3 journeys
Taunton to Minehead - 3 journeys
Wincanton to Yeovil - 1 journey (as evening bingo bus)
That was it whereas now there are hourly services from Taunton to Bridgwater, Wellington and Minehead, and between Street and Bristol, plus Sunday town services in Taunton.
As the OP originally said, there have been winners and losers but the simplification of networks and the rise of Sunday trading has transformed some services
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