Irrigating Bus Deserts

Most studies analysing what is required to deliver Net Zero on transport emissions, and improve the liveability of our towns and cities, conclude that the major key to those improvements is to deal with traffic congestion through cutting car use by between 20 and 30%.

Beyond that consensus, much less detailed study has taken place on how to make that happen.

Some of it just needs us to walk more, some of it needs us to question whether our journey is even necessary and some journeys can conveniently be made on a bike, train, tram or bus BUT there is a material proportion of the population who will tell you that they have no choice but to own and use a car.

At least half of those are telling the absolute truth as they live too far away from their essential destinations to walk or cycle and have no sensible mass transit option.

Many of the people in the streams of single occupancy tin boxes snaking their way through city streets every morning and evening (or should that be snaking and stopping, snaking and stopping?) are truly captive.

So, if we’re serious about caring for our Planet, we need to think about irrigating the bus deserts ….. the significant residential areas where bus networks are either non existent, dysfunctional, sub optimal or simply crap.

The ‘we’ in that context are government, transport authorities and bus operators.

There are a myriad of reasons why those deserts exist with most of them associated with the explosion in car ownership since the 1950’s sucking the life out of bus routes which then shrivelled and died. Some others are due to poor planning inhibiting good bus access and others due to poor decision making by Operators and Authorities on network design and pricing at some point in time sealing their fate.

However, if you look around the UK, you also find very strong bus routes defying the impact of the car and some cities and counties having a bigger problem than others without any apparent rational justification.

Political interest in bus investment wained post the 1985 Transport Act when the initiative for network development and design was passed back to operators and then declined further as public expenditure cuts hit buses hard as a discretionary element of expenditure and, these days, local authorities struggle to fund their statutory duties so, by default, the discretionary has died in many places.

Whatever the reasons, we can’t deliver Net Zero, and we can’t improve the quality of urban life, unless we rehydrate the bus deserts.

To deliver Net Zero, the bus needs to increase its market share of mobility from around 7% to over 12% which will require the Size, Shape, Style and Quality of bus networks to change.

Addressing the Bus Deserts will require all four characteristics of change to succeed and the most expensive category is changing the Shape of networks which will require entirely new services posing their own unique financial challenges.

Most commercial businesses invest resource in research and development to continuously improve their products, grow their market and increase market share.

Buses, however, are relatively unique in that they find themselves prioritising investing resource to keep dying routes alive to maintain some semblance of social responsibility and political equilibrium.

We don’t see technology companies being obliged to keep poorly used operating systems or hardware supported for ever when the demand for their use has evaporated.

Giving birth to entirely new routes is a very expensive process.

Implementing a brand new route from scratch can involve acquiring, say, 20 expensive new buses, recruiting and training 60 to 70 new staff, providing bus stop and other infrastructure and then embarking on a long, slow process of growth to eventual financial sustainability.

If it is to succeed, it must be done at an exceptionally high quality.

Leveraging people out of their car demands that they find a level of quality on the bus that they would never, previously have imagined. So, it is a big investment which, if done well, will generate a decent return ….. eventually! 

Costs at day one will be around 110% of the long term day to day delivery costs and revenue as low as 10% of the ultimate potential. Maybe 75% of the long term potential will arrive in the first year but it can take up to 6 years for a brand new bus route to reach its true revenue potential.

In some cases, it will require waves of investment over many years as, once a service reaches maturity running every 30 minutes, it might need more new investment to take it to 20 minutes and then 10 minutes and, possibly, more.

Look today at the powerful, high frequency 24 hour operations of The Oxford Tube between Oxford and Central London. Behind that success, lies a long programme of growth and patient investment and relentless reinvestment from its infancy and throughout its life.

Getting there depends on awareness growing, people changing jobs or moving home, people deciding not to replace the car when the lease runs out or the engine packs in – all sorts of lifestyle decisions that don’t just happen the day a new bus route opens!

Capital costs land well before the route even starts with heavy expenditure on fleet and infrastructure whilst revenue evolves slowly over time requiring significant working capital to cover day to day operating costs.

If we’re to achieve Net Zero, we need a whole new generation of bus routes rehydrating those deserts and, upfront, that needs capital expenditure followed by substantial operational development expenditure on marketing, advertising and simply covering the gap between cost and revenue before each route finally becomes self-sustaining.

Now, with a shiny new, albeit hard up, Government in place, it might be a good time to put this issue firmly on the political agenda to answer two questions.

Firstly, where is the commercial entrepreneurial initiative to come from to identify, design and create long term successful new commercial bus services riding to the rescue of those currently forced to own and drive a car?

Secondly, where does the short term, but substantial, investment in capital and medium term development expenditure come from to make it all happen?

We’re on the cusp of a new era of the bus where growth can become the norm again but it needs expertise and investment in an area not entirely suited to the public sector.

The public sector needs a strong input into the social and economic growth aspects of those developments but in a manner where, in the current economic circumstances, it can leverage private sector expertise and capital some way, somehow in the process depending on the governance model in place.

The ‘Kick Start’ Schemes of the mid 2000’s, funded jointly by the DfT and Operators, succeeded in this on a small scale but now we need to see that writ on a much larger canvas as part of the Net Zero agenda.

The scale of growth in bus networks to deliver the 20% to 30% reduction in car use is beyond the kind of funding invested in BSIP’s.

This is BSIP’s on steroids over an extended period of time across the whole country.

This is just one of many challenges on the Road to Net Zero facing the bus.

More on those issues can be found at www.busreinvented.com