How to get more people onto buses
Pre-Covid, more journeys were made by bus than on the National Rail network, London Underground and all tram and metro systems combined.
It will be impossible to hit the country’s carbon targets without more people on buses.
So it’s something of a concern that bus was, in the last decade, not a growth sector.
Indeed, bus use grew meaningfully in just four places: Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Reading.
So it’s a remarkable fact that, of those four places, three of them had their buses managed by the same man for at least some of that decade.
If there’s one person who knows how to get more people onto buses, it is James Freeman.
James was MD of Reading Buses most of the first half of the decade, then MD of First West of England (incorporating Bath and Bristol though, slightly surprisingly, not the actual West of England) for the second half.
The most popular episode of The Freewheeling Podcast so far was when I spoke to James to understand if it was fluke, or if there is a reason why everywhere he goes, bus use increases.
The formula for growth
What was interesting from our conversation was the sense to which there is a formula. James didn’t quite put it this way, but it is clear that he operates to a three-point plan:
1) Internal focus: get the people culture right
2) Quality: deliver the basics
3) Marketing: hyper-local identity
It’s all about the people
James is passionate about the importance of starting with the team, before trying to generate growth:
Bus staff generally tend to think of themselves pretty poorly. The general perception of bus drivers is that they are victims: victims of fate, victims of management and victims of customers. You have to establish a sense of pride and self-worth amongst the workforce.
A big part of that is about recruiting people who enjoy working with people:
You can teach people to run a [bus] but what you can’t teach people to do is to like people. If it’s in them, it’s in them, and if it’s not, no amount of training will change them.
He emphasises the need for both patience and faith at this stage, as this approach yields nothing for the first few years - but is the essential building block:
In every place I’ve ever worked, it’s taken years to change peoples’ perceptions of who they are. In Reading, I was there for seven years and for the first three years, I thought “this isn’t working”.
But it did work and his successor, Martijn Gilbert, when I spoke to him emphasised just how powerful that culture change had been.
James described being at a route 5 drivers’ dinner. When a route 5 went past, everyone stood to attention
One question I asked James was about money. I frequently hear senior people in bus companies say something along the lines of “I’d love to have better people, but we have so many vacancies that we have to make do with what we can get”. James challenges this way of thinking head-on. His approach is to say:
If we could actually reduce the turnover and get better people, we could justify paying them more money. We had a wage increase in Bristol of 16% in one go, without any negotiation. We just put it in.
His point is that this was not an act of generosity: the wage increase paid for itself twice over: first in reduced recruitment and training costs (as good people didn’t leave) and secondly in the increased revenue it enabled.
The costs we waste in the bus industry on staff turnover are huge. Stopping people from leaving and continuing to improve their product knowledge, energy and enthusiasm is a hugely effective investment.
His key insight is that customers and drivers both want the same thing: to feel like they’ve made a great choice in choosing the bus:
If you get the workforce side right, everything else starts to happen. When people realise they can be part of a winning team, it changes things.
2. Deliver the basics
James emphasises that for drivers to feel they’re part of a winning team - and for customers to feel like they’ve made a great choice - buses must be clean, smart and run on time:
Who wants to do something which is suboptimal? You’re going to try and do something which is the best. I want to be a winner - somebody who’s made a brilliant decision. By making a decision to travel on James’s bus, I want to be winning myself.
A bit like culture change with the workforce, making the buses punctual sounds easy and is very difficult. James emphasises the need for resilience and trial-and-error over many years, including building excellent relationships with the local authority.
He also talks about the importance of presentation and cleanliness, and is passionate about making fares simple and easy to buy. He was an early advocate of both app-based and contactless ticketing and believes its’ important to give customers a choice of channels.
Fairly obviously, the most important basic is punctuality - but it takes a lot of effort. He talks of the effort he put into untangling local agreements that had a detrimental effect on driver incentives; for example by encouraging drivers to return to depot not in service as opposed to finishing a route and returning late if needed. And it’s critical to get the timetable right so that it’s realistic and can actually be achieved. He talked about how they grew one route by halving the frequency: but actually making it work.
Throughout the conversation you get the sense of a lot of painstaking hard work.
3. Hyperlocal marketing
Buses in Bristol how they were when James took over: a single, national corporate identity (and a tendency to not actually be in service!)
James is passionate about the importance of treating each route as a local business. He believes that national brands are a distraction, and even the level of a town or city is too big an area for customers to relate to.
What matters is “does the bus service on your road relate to you?”
He describes how the higher echelons of owning groups don’t get why local identity matters
but the buy-in you get from local (very local!) identity is a very valuable thing and allows you to build all kinds of things around it.
He likes individual rotas of drivers for individual routes. He talks of attending the route 5 drivers’ dinner in Bristol and when a route 5 bus went past, all the drivers stood to attention! With that level of ownership, the customers get much better service.
He uses the analogy of a tramline to explain why brightly coloured, branded routes work: seeing the same coloured bus in different places paints a mental map of the route without the customer consciously needing to consider it. Local brands “generate goodwill and return business”.
The summary of why he adopts the approach he takes is very simple:
We’re looking for ways to convince people, reassure them and make it about them.
Buses in Bristol today: brightly coloured, distinctive route identities
Who cares?
Dispiritingly, when I asked him why this approach is not commonplace across the country, given that he’s proved it works, he told me that senior managers in owning groups just don’t think it’s important.
In part he blames the constant debate around industry structure:
These ownership issues cause the big PLCs to take their eye off the ball because they’ve got so much noise going on around them that it’s difficult to concentrate on the basic delivery things.
But he also blames the culture of instant returns and ‘quick buck’ that makes it impossible to devote time to the long-term transformation he describes.
You need to have a very long-term view. You need to be prepared to pursue your goals relentlessly while it doesn’t happen.
Nevertheless, what is interesting is that there is a template. It’s a template previously adopted in Nottingham by NCT and TrentBarton, and Nottingham now has some of the highest modal shares in the country. Similarly, this culture has also been seen in Oxford and Brighton; both with very high modal shares. It’s now being explicitly adopted by Transdev, Go North East and First in Cornwall - and it will be fascinating to see what happens to bus modal share in the places that these operators serve.
Because if there is a template for bus growth, we surely owe it to the planet to adopt it and make it work?
