Bus strategy looks set to under-deliver
In recent weeks, I’ve spoken to local authorities all round England.
The conversations I’ve had suggests to me that the National Bus Strategy looks set to significantly underwhelm.
But the good news is that this is not inevitable. Like so many things in life, it can be solved with time and money.
Timing
The timings in the bus strategy are heroic beyond measure. The improvement plans need to be complete by the end of October, with the changes in place by March of next year.
There is an obvious logic to moving quickly. There’s a political logic (delivery by March 2022 gives a year for citizens to see results before the next general election, which could be as early as May 2023) and a moral logic (better buses are a good thing, so why wait?)
As a carfree citizen, the faster we get this stuff done, the better it suits me.
But here’s why the timing is a danger:
1) Exhaustion. Speaking to Simon Munk for The Freewheeling Podcast, he pointed out that council officers have had a truly exhausting pandemic. He has personally spoken to transport officers who were pulled from the job to be seconded to morgue duty but then had to go back to implement the Government’s statutory guidance. Everyone is shattered. They just want this stuff to go away. That’s not a good starting position.
2) Hearts and minds. There are many local authorities where the elected members aren’t just not on the same page, they’re not even in the same encyclopaedia. To get a Shire county Tory baby boomer who grew up believing motors are the ultimate symbol of capitalist freedom to suddenly believe in redistributing road space away from cars is a massive undertaking. It can’t be done in weeks, but that’s all there is.
Both the bus and bike strategies are explicitly based on the success of London. But London has had generations of political leadership that has been entirely absent in many English towns, cities and counties. The first bus lane in London was installed in 1968, and the network grew at an average of 5 miles per year, reaching 175 miles in 2006. While there are other cities in England with a similar record of consistent political leadership, there aren’t many. But just as Donald Rumsfeld learned in Iraq when he tried to inspire democracy through aerial bombardment, it takes time for political cultures to change.
3) Covid. No-one yet knows what demand patterns are going to look like post-pandemic so the exercise in developing a regional strategy for bus and bike priority is incredibly difficult. So difficult that it just inspires the exhaustion referred to earlier.
4) People. 10 years of austerity followed by a gargantuan spending splurge isn’t the best way to get results. Local authorities have had almost no money to spend on either bikes or buses for 10 years so they’ve reacted by cutting the posts to manage that non-existent money. The people to write the bids and plans that the strategies depend on literally don’t exist. Some local authorities are doing their best, some have already given up, some are outsourcing to consultants and don’t give a damn what the outcomes are as long as they get something they can hand in.
5) Geography. To achieve a Bus Service Improvement Plan by October, local authorities will need to get sign-off from local councillors in September, which means a first draft needs to be complete in August. That is crazy ambitious but it’s almost certain that each local authority will have something to hand in (albeit written by a consultant). But it makes it virtually impossible to produce a single plan for a single transport region. That’s a real shame. To give just one example: how can it make sense for Luton and Dunstable (in the form of Central Bedfordshire) to be producing separate plans, when Dunstable is - from a transport perspective - utterly integrated into Luton. They even share a busway, for heaven’s sake! But there just isn’t the time for new officer and councillor relationships to form. There are countless similar examples across the country.
6) Planning. The bus service improvement plans are meant to be plans. But there simply isn’t time for the planning necessary to produce the plans. There are now just weeks before the first drafts need to be complete. Instead of the levels of ambition the Government wants to see, virtually every council I’ve spoken to is intending to simply rehash their existing Local Transport Plan (with a few added schemes they were already working up). In the time available, they don’t seem to have seriously considered any alternative approach.
The same is also true of operators. In some of the Shire counties, there are almost no operator managers beyond those necessary to deliver the operational service that exists today. The strategy requires operators and councils to sit down together. But in some counties, if the key experts and decision-makers from the council and operator sit down together, you’ll have an empty room.
Money
There isn’t enough. The problem is that the total amount announced for the extraordinary ambitions in the bus and bike strategies is £5 billion. Yet experts in the sector can see that the ambitions in the strategy (which include, for example, remodelling every single road in England that has congestion and space for a bus lane while increasing frequencies and cutting fares) are going to cost much more than £5 billion. There is no long-term funding and no clarity on how the funding that has already been announced is going to be distributed.
As someone said to me “What’s the point in going to all that effort when nothing may even come of it?”
The problem is that the gap between the ambitions and the funding is so vast that it calls into question the credibility of the ambitions.
Indeed, the message I’m hearing is not that councils are excited about the chance to improve their networks, but worried about how to keep the lights on when discretionary funding is being cut but infections are surging and users are staying away.
The other money problem is that £27 billion has been committed to road schemes. There is a lack of credibility to the strategies’ commitment to active travel and bus travel when the Government is spending more promoting competitor modes.
The consequences
The bus strategy is full of ambition to transform local bus networks.
The idea is that local authorities will present their transformational plans back to Government in a “Bus Service Improvement Plan”.
Based on what I’ve heard, the Government will actually get a bunch of rehashed Local Transport Plans.
Some suggestions
I really want these strategies to work. There are some great ideas in them, and they could improve transport in Britain beyond recognition.
But the Government needs to accept that both the bus and bike strategies are going to fail if they continue with the current approach.
Instead, I suggest the following:
1) Two-speed approach There are areas of the country which already have collaborative relationships between councils and operators, where money is less tight and where political will is strong. These include Brighton, Liverpool, York, etc. In these places, stick to something close to the original timings (though it would still be a good idea for a small extension to be granted, as there are just week to do all the work before the approvals processes need to start).
Places with experienced bus teams and the right political culture will be in a far better place to fulfil the Government’s ambitions. For example, Nottingham - even in the time available - is producing a bus plan for the wider Nottingham commuter area, as opposed to falling into the Luton/Dunstable trap.
Treat those places as exemplar projects. Fund everything the enhanced partnerships ask for and prove how well this stuff can work. Yes, that means all £5 billion will need to be allocated to just these exemplars but that’s how much it will cost to do the job properly.
Then use the success of the exemplars to prove to everywhere else just how good this future can be. Yes, the Government will then need to get spend more, but they were going to need to do that anyway - at least this way, the initial £5 billion makes sense as a budget to match the scope.
2) Scrap the pots Combine the bus and bike funds into one new future mobility budget as it doesn’t make sense to ask a council to bid from two separate pots of money to rebuild the same road. And accept that these exemplar authorities know what they’re doing so don’t micromanage delivery - just give them the money to get on with doing what needs to be done.
In the non-exemplar areas, continue the current discretionary funding while allowing operators and local authorities to flex their networks as demand patterns become established and then release the new transformational budgets in a few years time when teams have been recruited and councillors are starting to see the benefits.
I know it’s slower but forcing elected members in unprepared counties to implement policies they detest and aren’t ready for is a recipe for failure; so give them time to see what good looks like. And for some elections to take place and prove that bus lanes actually don’t cost votes because (here’s a shock!) lots of people use buses.
I realise this sounds expensive but the good news is that the Government doesn’t need to spend any more than they’re already planning on allocating to roads, as they can simply divert the £27 billion. It will still be spent on roads, so it’s not a U-turn. That way they get the double-win of proving that they’re serious (so motivating managers and officers to do the hard work) and ensuring that the British Government doesn’t look like an idiot when hosting COP26. (Oh, and they help save the planet).
I realise that this means that most places won’t be done for the 2023/4 election. But, right now, the Tories are the favourites to win the 2024 election and there’ll be another election in 2029. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to keep some good news up their sleeve.
Conclusion
I really hope the Government does reconsider on timing and budget.
There are some truly inspirational ideas in the strategies.
But without a change in approach, they’ll never be implemented.
