National Bus Strategy: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The National Bus Strategy opens the biggest window of opportunity for buses in my career to date
There’s a lot of good in the National Bus Strategy. But there’s also a lot missing, and there are some hidden warnings of future trouble.
In today’s post, I’ll focus on the Good.
But because I know you don’t come to Freewheeling in order to watch me being nice to the Government, tomorrow we’ll dive into the bad and ugly. You can also remind yourself of the Freewheeling ‘asks’ from the strategy here.
Bus lanes!
There are 21,000 words in the National Bus Strategy. But only 21 of them actually matter:
Statutory traffic management guidance will be updated to make promoting bus reliability an integral part of highway authorities’ Network Management Duty.
We can get excited about who runs the buses, but the reality is that they can be run by the private sector, the public sector or the Pope and it won’t make any difference if the bus is caught in the same traffic jam as the cars.
The “London model” has long been seen as a panacea for buses; but the “London model” was actually Ken Livingstone having the courage to combine bus lanes and road pricing. Since 2012, the impact has worn off and TfL buses have been on precisely the same trendline for decline as buses outside the capital for the last nine years.
Livingstone’s London’s bus lane bounce
So the strategy to update statutory guidance is incredibly exciting. This doesn’t just mean that bus lanes are being advised: they become a requirement of local authorities, one of their statutory duties.
Alongside the guidance, the Strategy requires all local authorities to develop Bus Improvement Plans. And if the plans come even close to meeting the ambition of the National Bus Strategy, then it will be a spectacular turn-around. I will quote in full the poetry of the relevant section here:
In Bus Service Improvement Plans, we expect to see plans for bus lane on any roads where there is a frequent bus service, congestion, and physical space to install one. Bus lanes should be full-time and as continuous as possible. They should be part of a whole corridor approach, including other physical measures such as:
• Traffic signal priority;
• Bus gates, which allow buses to enter a road that prohibits access to other traffic; and;
• Clear and consistent signage.
We will not support opening bus lanes to electric cars or vans, which would quickly erode their benefits to bus users
I mean, wow! Did that say any road with space, buses and congestion should have a bus lane? Just compose a quick mental map of where you live. That’s a lot of roads!
As regular readers of Freewheeling will know, I’ve been very worried about the tendency to treat electric cars as pseudo buses. This strategy neatly dodges that bullet, by making it explicit that bus lanes are for buses.
If this happens, it is the biggest step in the right direction in my lifetime.
Bus Priority in the post-truth world
This is not the first time this Government has used statutory guidance to achieve modal shift. This time last year, they published the most extraordinarily sweeping guidance requiring local authorities to install cycle lanes. (Indeed, if I was a local authority, I might reasonably wish that both sets of guidance had happened at the same time!)
Inevitably, this was followed by a wave of protests around the country as local authorities did as they were told, and the car lobby came down on them like a ton of bricks.
What happened next was interesting.
The Government, far from defending their own policy, hung the local authorities out to dry. Grant Shapps said he was “not prepared to tolerate” cycle lanes that impose “sweeping changes”. Other MPs and Cabinet Ministers criticised implementations in their local papers and from the floor of the House of Commons. “No one should be in doubt about our support for motorists”, said Grant Shapps, while keeping the policy intact.
Who put that there? Oh, we did
This might be where having a Government that has weaponised dishonesty as a day-to-day tool of trade is somewhat helpful. Previous Governments, fearful of the car lobby, have not dared to introduce sweeping bus priority measures. But, of course, that was based on the expectation that if they introduced them, they’d have to own them and defend them.
This Government is quite content to say one thing while doing the opposite, so we can expect a stream of cabinet ministers over the next five years to express apoplectic fury at local councils implementing faithfully the guidance of their own Government.
As a politics student, it’s not an approach I particularly like but, in this case, it probably gives the Government the political air-cover to get the thing done.
Red Boris
One of the remarkable things about this document is that it is refreshingly non-ideological. The strategy highlights best practice from the state sector (Translink), the municipal sector (Reading Buses) and the deregulated sector (the 36).
Indeed, the two people who are probably most upset by this strategy are Sir Keir Starmer and the ghost of Baroness Thatcher. Sir Keir is now faced with the impossible question of where on earth Labour parks its buses now the Tory tanks are all over its lawn. The Lady, meanwhile, must be turning in her grave to see the Conservative party embracing new municipal bus companies and encouraging re-regulation.
But it’s actually quite nice to see a strategy that doesn’t just adopt the traditional solution of whatever party’s in power but actually attempts to address the key issue.
Partnerships
Ask any senior bus manager and they’ll tell you that the thing they fear most is spending the next year being distracted by yet more structural change.
In fact, better than that, you don’t need to ask a senior bus manager - let me do the asking for you, and have a listen to what James Freeman has to say. Having worked in the state sector, the municipal sector and the private sector, he doesn’t give two hoots who runs the buses - as long as the basics are done well; which is about leadership and detail. So the fact that the strategy doesn’t envisage wholesale structural change is to be commended.
Partnerships have been proved to work in cities like Oxford, Reading and Brighton. If you look at the places where bus use has grown, you will see local authorities and bus companies working together on things customers care about. So the emphasis on partnership working is perfect.
The success of the London model
Indeed, the partnership working described in the strategy could be described as a total vindication of the success of the London model.
What? Eh?
Oh, no, not the London bus model - the London river model!
Since 1999, the fastest growing transport mode in London has been neither buses nor bikes, but river traffic. In 1999, the Thames Clipper commuter service had 31,000 passenger journeys. By 2018/9, this had become 4.2 million. This was driven by a partnership in which TfL invested in high-quality stop infrastructure, real-time information systems and the Oyster/contactless ticketing system; while the operator focused on great quality vehicles, the right timetables and pricing.
It may not be an Enhanced Partnership but it’s certainly an enhanced partnership
It seems almost inconceivable that the river would have seen 13000% growth without either the entrepreneurship and investment of Sean Collins and the team at Thames Clippers; or the investment in high-quality multi-modal interchanges and ticketing by TfL.
If you want a vision of the future success of the bus industry, change from the Victoria line to the boat at Vauxhall and then jump back onto the tube minutes later at Embankment.
Data - at last!
As I talked about previously, one of the big failings of the bus industry in recent decades has been the lack of data. What is measured is managed, and yet there is no public data for journey times and reliability. The strategy rightly calls on this to change and not before time.
It’s great news for bus operators as it gives them a stick with which to beat local authorities (which is one of the reasons why it’s so odd that they’ve needed to be told by Government to do it) and because the actual results will be better than non-users expect - even before interventions.
The opportunity
The National Bus Strategy creates the opportunity for a genuinely virtuous circle of investment in bus priority leading to new customers, enabling lower fares, leading to new customers, enabling more investment, leading to new customers.
Private sector finance directors will find it easier to invest behind growth than decline and local authorities will find better buses generates political capital.
Operators will worry that margins will be cut (and, certainly, some of the crazy margins of the early 2000s when big owning groups squeezed out costs but, temporarily, retained the customers) are over. But a virtuous circle of investment and growth can lead to long-term sustainable margins; and the partnership model envisaged will only work if the operator has an incentive to invest. London has set an expectation that operators can earn sensible margins doing the right thing, so the base expectation will be set.
If I was an owning group that had empowered local managers already in daily dialogue with their local authorities, I’d be feeling a lot more confident reading this strategy than if I’d spent the last few years hollowing out my local management tiers.
But the prize is there to be taken.
This moment won’t last forever.
We have a Prime Minister who has decided that his interests are served by being seen as someone that likes buses. I don’t actually believe a word of it. Someone who genuinely cared about buses wouldn’t have diverted priority in London from buses to bikes, scrapped half the Congestion Charge zone or foisted on London an open-platform conductor-worked bus with neither open platform nor conductors.
Nevertheless, right now, Boris feels that being a busman is a way of highlighting his track record in London. There’s a window of opportunity open for the bus industry and it’s now time to see which operators, owning groups and local authorities have the will to walk through it.
Tomorrow we focus on the bad and the ugly…
