Bus Back Better: Mission Impossible or Never say never?
Image: https://www.imcdb.org/v006582.html“What’s the mission, M?”
“Well, Mr Bond, we want you to put bus lanes on every road, scrap non-residential parking on every highway and close a bunch of main roads to cars. You start at once.”
“This is my toughest mission to date: the road lobby will be out to kill me. What resources do I have?”
“No idea. Start now and Q may (or may not) tell you when you’re halfway through...”
That’s more or less the message to councils from the guidance on Bus Service Improvement Plans to support Bus Back Better, the National Bus Strategy.
As with the strategy itself, the ambition is absolutely breathtaking in scale. If everything in it happens, buses in Britain will be transformed beyond imagination. I’ve already written up the National Bus Strategy, so I won’t go through all the good points in the guidance, as they’re very similar. But the guidance certainly doesn’t water-down the ambitions of the original document. Just to give you a flavour, here are a few quotes:
“The Government expects plans for bus lanes on any roads where there is a frequent bus service, congestion, and physical space to install them”
“Where there is insufficient space for a bus lane, LTAs should consider point closures of some main roads to private cars, allowing through traffic on other main roads nearby”
“Non-residential parking will not generally be an efficient use of road space on such routes”
While my favourite line is this one:
“In assessing LTA capability, the Secretary of State expects LTAs to demonstrate the capability in traffic management necessary to ensure buses are prioritised appropriately.”
Who could have imagined a Tory Government stressing that local authorities might lack the capability to prioritise buses?
So - as someone who’s waited all my life for the Government to issue almost exactly this document - why do I feel a tad uneasy?
I think because the guidance makes it all sound so easy to achieve such big things that require so much money and so much effort - and yet doesn’t really acknowledge any of this.
One is left with a niggling worry that when it all gets difficult, the ambition will just evaporate.
Let’s go through the source of my niggles:
1) Money
The guidance gives little indication of how the famed £3 billion that supports the strategy is to be distributed. We’re told that the first tranche may be formula-based, linked to the “quality” of the BSIP, with a second tranche for “specific larger schemes”. There’s no indication of how quality will be defined or what counts as larger.
Possibly the lack of clarity is because the Government simply hasn’t decided how the funding will work. Possibly it’s because they don’t want to do anything to distract people from writing what is a highly prescriptive strategy. Or (and I’m afraid we can’t rule this out), its because the Government doesn’t yet want to admit the whole thing is going to be a red wall voter bung fund (as per the Towns Fund - see my previous post on this subject) - and the less time for scrutiny the better.
Either way, if I was a local authority, I would find it disconcerting being asked to write a plan with no indication of the resource envelope available to attempt to fulfil it.
Especially as local authorities are being asked to write such incredibly ambitious plans with a huge amount of data inputs and stakeholder engagement.
The scope of the documents is so broad. Local authorities are asked to transform the bus services themselves and the walking routes to and from them. They’re to work with all the local operators and many other stakeholders, including local loneliness charities. There are also hints that it might be good idea to consider “the cost and availability of parking; land use planning; actual and perceived passenger safety; and connections and coordination of timetables".
If the scope of the document is to be believed, a big local authority could almost earmark all £3 billion themselves! You might say The World is Not Enough…
It’s all very difficult. The guidance says:
“We expect BSIPs to set targets for journey time and reliability improvements for the LTA as a whole and for each of the largest cities and towns, as well as for passenger growth and customer satisfaction. LTAs should show what progress they expect to make by 2025 and also 2030; and progress against these targets should be reported publicly every six months.”
So, is that a target assuming that everything gets funded? Because, of course, if none of the projects actually get delivered, well… then the target would be quite different. Without any indication of money available, how on earth is a local authority meant to calibrate the plans and the targets?
After all, the guidance also says:
“We do not expect vastly detailed and granular documents running to hundreds of pages. Nor will we take them as definitive or immutable commitments or statements of intent on your part. Their main purpose is to get everyone thinking about what questions need to be addressed in the area, to explore possible answers, and to provide an early basis for funding decisions in the autumn and winter in preparation for the financial year 2022/3 when transformational funding begins.”
If the documents are currently simply about ‘exploring possible answers’ then how can they drive specific targets? But if they are about driving specific targets, how can they do so without funding?
And at the back of all this, one still has that niggling worry that none of it will come to anything. A bit like if an estate agent knocked on your door and promised that your house would be worth £5 million if you just refurbished every room: if true, you’d totally be up for all the effort involved in doing the refurb job, but are you certain the £5 million will actually materialise if you put in the work?
2) Politics
Probably the biggest single omission in this entire document is the complete lack of indication of just how difficult and controversial it will be.
The document reads like everyone in Britain is totally on-board with closing roads to cars, mass reductions in car parking and huge increases in bus lane mileage (including the statement that every road with congestion, bus routes and space should have a bus lane).
As someone who absolutely is on board with that strategy, I’m delighted to see it. But are elected members in areas in which bus services are currently poor and in which there has been no historic political leadership on this subject suddenly going to jump on board?
Well, obviously, “yes”, is the answer: they have to drink the kool-aid or they’ll lose their existing funding and the buses will stop running. The guidance is explicit that future access to Bus Service Support Grant (BSSG) is dependent on jumping through these hoops.
But the obvious solution for those councillors will be to write a deliberately rubbish plan in the hope of not getting their new bus lanes actually funded.
It’s a shame the Government is in such a rush (commitment to Enhanced Partnership by end of this month, BSIPs complete by end of October, everything up and running by end of March next year) as it leaves no time at all for the massive hearts and minds exercise necessary for this thing to fly.
3) Centralisation
My final worry about this guidance is that it’s so incredibly prescriptive.
Largely, what it prescribes is good stuff. Who can argue with faster buses, more bus lanes (well, actually lots of people can argue - that’s the whole point of the previous paragraph!), multi-operator ticketing, etc.
But the guidance goes much further, telling local authorities precisely what good looks like in every respect.
Most of it makes total sense to me, but (like everyone) there are holes I can pick (based on my own preferences and biases). Here are three specific requirements that I would question:
1) the guidance says Wifi should be provided “as standard”, but is that really a good idea? 96% of adults under 55 now have mobile internet on their mobile phone; and 67% of them don’t use all their data each month. I suspect that those that don’t have a mobile data package (such as the elderly: only 53% of the over 65s have mobile internet) are unlikely to be potential WiFi users, so is the Government simply duplicating existing, under-utilised data packages?
2) the guidance is clear that “Route variations and letter suffix routes should be reduced.” But is that really a good idea? Brighton has seen consistently high mode shares and bus use growth; but 50% of routes in Brighton are routes with variations or letter suffix routes. If they’re so bad, why do they work in Brighton?
3) the guidance bluntly says that “DRT should be provided in the evenings and late at night.” But is that really a good idea? After all, in places like London, Oxford and Brighton where there are seriously high bus mode shares, the evening and night network looks ever-more like the day network. I’ve had to stand on night buses in London before now. The reason why DRT is seen as a solution for evening and night services is because it seems obvious to provide a personalised service at times of low demand. But the strategy is seeking to increase demand, in which case the evening will no longer be so quiet. If the reason for DRT in the evenings is for reasons of security (many users, especially women, are nervous about walking back from bus stops at night) then it will come with a staggeringly high bill (as DRT solutions typically lose money) and it’s not obvious that it will solve the problem. Is being dropped at a local street corner preferable to being dropped at a bus stop?
Anyway, the reason I raise these examples are simply as illustrations of the point that the guidance is highly, highly prescriptive as to what good looks like in the provision of bus services.
That strikes me as a shame, as it means the BSIPs will all be identical, which eliminates the possibility of learning. When the Government has stamped out all letter suffix routes, it will be impossible to see if they work. Similarly, if WiFi is not a necessity for growth, it will be impossible to tell, as nowhere won’t have it.
I would have preferred for the Government to set clear mode share, growth and satisfaction targets and then let local authorities work with operators to decide how best to achieve them. Some places would have played safe, some been radical. But we’d then have had 81 local experiments to learn from.
Don’t knock the good stuff
I don’t want to sound unduly critical.
As I said at the start, I’ve waited twenty years for this moment.
And there are some excellent points well made.
I love the fact the Government saw fit to say this:
“A good approach is to look at buses from the point of view of people that don’t use them or do so infrequently, to understand why.”
It is indeed an excellent approach, and not always front of mind in transportland.
The fact that the funding is to prioritise bus priority and fare cuts (about which the guidance is as specific as it ever gets on funding) suggests that the Government is serious about starting a flywheel of growth that can then help as many routes as possible to be commercially viable. This is very sensible. I’d much rather funding for bus priority and fare cuts than endless DRT services that get canned after a year (sadly, through a separate pot, the Government is funding these too).
If in places the guidance is ludicrously prescriptive (I love this line:
“We would expect operators to hold their own separate meetings to discuss and formulate their proposals and draft content for discussion with the LTA”
The idea that local operators need to be told to hold a meeting!) doesn’t change the fact that on bus priority, multi-operator ticketing, integration and a whole host of other matters, it is largely right.
But, at the end of the day, it’s also a document that I (and many other people with an interest in buses) could have written.
What marks out a description of great bus services coming from the Government as opposed to from Thomas Ableman is that the Government has control of budgetary and political resources. And it is on those that the guidance is, sadly, silent.
