Bus Spotting – or why buses are important

The proud municipal livery of the former Birmingham City Transport

Bus spotters are seriously unfashionable. There are surprisingly large numbers of the species about and whole sections of bookshops are given over to their esoteric picture books. I share the nostalgia for the old municipal liveries like Glasgow’s jazzy olive and orange or Hull's deep blue with futuristic white flashes. They gave specific identities to cities, and companies such as Midland Red or Crosville defined provincial fiefdoms unknown in earlier historical geography. I hate the bland uniformity of the big companies like Stagecoach and First with their shit liveries, the same everywhere in the country, from Aberdeen to Cornwall.


The heritage Routemaster, a design classic

But I have never been much interested in the vehicles per se. I am unmoved by a heritage Routemaster even if Nairn loved them although I seeth with anger at the sight of a Heatherwick ‘Roastmaster’, which perfectly captures Boris Johnson’s vainglorious, flash vacuity. What I am interested in is bus systems and their part in urban design and development.


Boris Johnson's hubris and Heatherwick's Roastmaster

Buses lack the dynamic excitement and raw, sexy, power of trains but they are important. For a start they carry many more passengers than trains. But trains are mostly used by the affluent, and particularly men, so naturally get much more political attention and a lot more public subsidy. Buses are predominantly used by women, poorer people and the old. So providing good bus services should be an important element of policies to improve social inclusion and equality. Yes – well there’s the problem – we haven’t got any. Attitudes to buses are a classic example of class prejudice, as captured in Mrs Thatcher’s pronouncement that ‘ a man who beyond  the age of 26 finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure’.


Glasgow's public transport policy still stuck in the Thatcher era

Of course this is absurd. Buses are used by a wide cross section of society in big cities like London, Edinburgh and many other places, especially those like Oxford and Nottingham with good networks and large student populations. Buses can and should provide the basis of high quality public transport, complementing metro and tram systems in larger cities. This is a fundamental of sustainable urban planning.


New housing at Upton, Northampton - all about the car

But unfortunately there is a huge disconnect between town planning and public transport planning and between public transport planning and privatized-bus-world. Town planning is essentially about physical development and planners like new trophy infrastructure like trams, new rail stations or possibly guided bus which are rarely deliverable. For nearly all new developments public transport is going to equal bus. Local plan vision statements always include fine words about the importance of public transport and transport consultants write reams of self serving bollocks in Design and Access statements supporting crap planning applications. But the promised improvements are usually tokenistic.

What is really needed is to design estates with road layouts that allow for simple bus routes at high frequencies and good pedestrian access to bus stops. Most volume builders’ estate are the obverse of this with winding distributor roads and cul-de-sacs, hopeless for buses to serve effectively. There are hardly any good examples of new developments designed around good public transport, at least outside London. Even urban design exemplars like Upton in Northampton are almost entirely car centric. And good public transport also requires improving bus systems as a whole, not just the bit within the estate. This is partly about bus lanes and bus priorities but more about things like ticketing, marketing and information, attractive frequencies and accessible buses.


Heroic London Transport - East Finchley, image courtesy Owen Hatherley


Arnos Grove, image courtesy Owen Hatherley

Buses used to be important to cities. In the early 1900s nearly all sizeable towns enterprisingly invested in electric trams. From the 1920s to the 1950s municipal buses replaced trams and their networks expanded into the inter- and post-war suburbs. There was a period of chaotic competition to municipal trams from ‘cowboy’ bus companies but in 1930 the government regulated bus services. In 1933 a Conservative government set up London Transport which integrated tubes, trams and buses in a single public transport system and this became a model for the world.


Heroic London Transport - Stockwell Garage, courtesy socarra 

However 50 years later a dogmatic Tory government swept away bus regulation. Some ideologues had been to Jakarta and saw there a classic free market competition paradigm in the melée of minibuses, vans, bajajs and motorcycles all vying for passengers on the congested and polluted city streets and saw this as the ideal way forward for public transport in Britain. Deregulation was designed to slash public transport subsidies although in other developed countries and even American cities public transport is heavily subsidized. Britain’s deregulation of bus services was unique and typically ideological and reckless.


London: an integrated, comprehensive and coherent bus service

Of course if the loony theory really held good then the greatest benefits would have accrued to London but Mrs Thatcher was too canny to experiment on the capital where free market chaos would inconvenience our rulers and the establishment. So regulation and integration of services and ticketing was retained for London Transport. That is why the plight and poverty of public transport in provincial cities is just not understood by the metropolitan-dominated political and intellectual elites.


Ubiquitous First (Worst) bus liveries, here in Bradford

The Thatcher government quickly sold off the publically owned National Bus Company subsidiaries, along with those of the Public Transport Authorities, set up in the bigger conurbations after 1968 on London Transport lines. Often sold as management buyouts at knock down prices, bus companies were quickly consolidated into three big groups – Stagecoach, Arriva and First (Private Eye’s Worstbus) that dominate the industry today.


Such a waste: the closed Northampton Corporation Transport Offices

The effects of deregulation have been catastrophic. The number of bus passengers has declined by 50% since 1985 across the big conurbations like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, West and South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear. Over the same period  bus passengers on London Transport have doubled. The reason is obvious - Transport for London specifies the routes, service levels and fares and the system is fully integrated and adequately funded. The differing performance however does partly reflect the increasing economic dominance of London over the last 40 years and also the car centric policies of many of the big cities like Leeds with fast motorway access and lots of commuter parking.


A bus station with design effort – Southampton University

In the Shires the decline in bus usage began in the 50s with the advent of mass car ownership. But some medium sized cities like Nottingham, Oxford, Reading and Brighton have managed to buck the trend of bus decline through strong planning policies favouring buses. And, importantly, Nottingham and Reading still own their own bus companies.


Stagecoach to Lincoln's Ermine Estate; no local identity, no evening buses either

The huge problem of deregulation, competition and privatization is the loss of integrated planning, comprehensive route networks and ticketing. The split between public transport planning, which is done by transport authorities, and the operations of the commercial bus service providers resembles the internal market in the NHS. Under absurd competition rules bus companies must only operate profitable services and cannot cross-subsidize socially necessary services such as those to local shops, hospitals, schools or work places off the main bus routes. Transport authorities must fill in these routes with tendered services but since they are strapped for revenue usually only an infrequent and basic service is provided. These tenders are mostly won by low cost, low quality small operators and are excluded from the publicity and ticketing of the main companies, greatly reducing their usefulness.


A sad joke: Weston Favell, Northampton

The fragmentation of services is so chronic that often the privatized companies don’t even run evening or Sunday journeys on their main routes. Greater Manchester tenders separate evening bus services usually run by different companies that won’t accept your return ticket. Even a big city like Leicester gets a pitiful skeleton evening service from First. No buses run in Swansea on Sunday evenings except the university shuttle.


Swansea Bus Station is good but you'll have a long wait on a Sunday night

Deregulation and selling off publically owned bus companies did not however usher in the perfect world of competition that the free marketeers had anticipated. Rather than establishing new routes and innovative services, new competitors usually attempted to cherry pick the most profitable routes of the big companies often using old, polluting vehicles and employing part time drivers on low wages. But the big boys fought back, becoming more ‘efficient’ by cutting out marginal services to focus on the main ones and forcing down drivers’ wages and conditions. Their main weapon was to use their much bigger resources and financial muscle to flood routes with buses, far more than patronage could possibly sustain, and hence to drive out the interlopers. Usually after a period of turbulence the big companies reestablished effective local monopolies and the small companies eked out a business by taking over services abandoned by the big boys, together with low quality tendered and school contracts.


World class Manchester University - third world bus service

The big companies have been successful in growing the market in some places like Oxford by investing in new buses and introducing new simplified high frequency networks with good marketing and publicity. And there are some very successful and innovative companies, like Brighton and Hove, which have extremely high patronage and satisfaction rates. Transdev have rejuvinated buses in places like Harrogate, Keighley and Burnley. But in the big Northern cities, where integrated public transport should be the basis for urban planning and sustainable development, bus services have been decimated (in the figurative sense – the numerical decline is much, much worse). Here competition between the big companies as well as with many smaller competitors was fiercer and longer lasting. Dirty, empty buses clogging the streets was especially a problem, most spectacularly in Manchester where the city centre was brought to a standstill by bus wars during a Conservative party conference. The previously integrated Greater Manchester network is now fragmented with 30 or so operators all vying for passengers. There is a bewildering array of tickets, only one of which is valid on all buses, trains and the trams. You can see why getting a London-style franchise system is a priority for Greater Manchester's elected mayor Andy Burnham. Rural areas too have seen a catastrophic decline in their bus services. And since they rely so heavily on Council tendered services, rural communities are particularly at risk from public spending cuts.


Tom Eckersley's Poster for the National Bus Company

The deregulation and privatization of buses was of course part of a much broader assault on public control of local services, and of government centralization. The impoverishment of local democracy, the loss of local accountability, initiative and public enterprise was just the norm. The Labour government of 1997 could hardly conceal its lack of interest but pressure from the cities did result in a new Transport Act in 2000. This sought to deal with the worst excesses of deregulation and privatization through ‘Partnership Working’, but without fundamentally changing anything. Whereas councils sought real improvements and control over rocketing fares, the bus companies wanted to maintain their monopolies and large profits, and they held all the cards. So, for example, transport authorities now had the power to require joint ticketing between operators, but they could not specify the fare levels. So bus companies simply sabotaged joint ticketing by insisting that joint tickets cost more than their own tickets.

Clearly competition was not working. In the northern conurbations bus fares had gone up 59% since 1995, compared with 36% in regulated London. This effectively represents a regressive tax on the poorest in society who depend on buses. Also bus companies are raking in public subsidies through fuel rebates, public contracts and concessionary fare payments. A further Act in 2008 for the first time opened up the possibility of Councils franchising buses London-Transport-style, but this had to be a last resort where ‘partnership’ could be demonstrated to have failed. The process requires all sorts of complicated ‘tests’ to make it difficult to succeed.


Nexus at least trying to make a difference; Gateshead Bus Station

Devolution to elected Metro Mayors does give the power to introduce bus franchising and this was a key demand of the DevoManc deal. There is now no longer a requirement to compensate bus companies for lost profits but the route to effective local control over bus services and fares is still fraught with huge difficulty and endless delay and uncertainty over finance. After years of consultations and negotiations Manchester is still waiting for the public control of its buses that the public has overwhelmingly supported.


Hull's bus station is part of grand Paragon Station

It is no coincidence that probably the most successful city bus networks in Britain are municipally owned. Although Mrs Thatcher sold off the PTA bus operations, non-metropolitan authorities were allowed to retain their buses. Most councils, including big places like Leicester, Hull and Southampton subsequently sold their bus companies and no doubt regret it today. But there are still a dozen municipal bus operators, the largest being in Edinburgh (Lothian Buses), Nottingham, Cardiff and Reading. As far as possible they try to deliver a comprehensive service for their citizens, not just a profitable one. However municipal companies have to be run commercially as ‘arms length’ companies. This is a problem when it comes to plans for integration and joint ticketing since they act in the company interest, seeking primarily to protect market share and profits, rather than the passengers’ interest or the wider public interest.


Lothian Buses, Edinburgh and the magnificent Museum of Scotland

Edinburgh's Lothian buses is by far the biggest municipal. It runs an extremely comprehensive network of routes. Having successfully beaten off Worstbus in aggressive and protracted ‘bus wars’, Lothian has now extended the network into adjacent Midlothian and East Lothian towns. It runs an impressive network of night buses and Edinburgh is the only city in the UK where buses run every day, even on Christmas Day – suck that London. Real time information is provided at most stops and Lothian has a very good phone app. The contrast between the bus service in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, where it is provided by First and a multitude of small operators, is very striking.


New buses and new tram kit on Princes Street

Edinburgh has also buoilt a new tram - highly contentious, years late and horribly over budget but now exceeding its patronage forecasts and with extensions underway. The tram is a political football and hated by the Edinburgh bourgeoisie who say it isn't needed because Edinburgh’s buses are so good. Well yes – up to a point. But congestion makes bus journeys slow and unreliable, most especially in the Festival. Lothian’s smartcard system is pretty clunky.  As bus stop information is very poor the driver spends a lot of time answering passenger queries on fares and what bus to where, so buses take ages to load and bus journeys can be very time-consuming and frustrating. There are other frustrations too. For example Edinburgh City Council tenders some socially necessary routes, like the number 13 bus which serves the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, but as this is run by another company you cannot use your Lothian day ticket or smartcard, which is pretty annoying.


Nottingham City Transport: amongst the best public transport services outside of London


The largest fleet of electric buses in Europe


It's all connected: trams, trains, buses and cycle paths

Nottingham is an example of a more holistic transport and development strategy. In addition to running the municipally owned Nottingham City Transport (NCT), the city has developed a tram network (NET), recently extended with two new lines. This is partly funded by a Workplace Parking Levy (WPL), the only one in the country. Despite the opposition of much of the business community and the instinctive hostility of the Tory government, the introduction of the WPL was approved because it had gone through all the steps required by Cameron's short-lived Localism agenda, so ministers were hoist by their own petard. The WPL and other innovative funding mechanisms also pay for the Link bus network which complements the commercial network of NCT, serving local communities, workplaces, hospitals and colleges. These are operated by electric buses – the biggest fleet of electric buses in Europe. And NCT has a new Biogas fleet too.


So why is Nottingham City Transport competing with the tram? 

Nottingham undoubtedly has one of the best public transport services outside London but deregulation and competition law still conspire against integrated networks and ticketing and the best, most convenient service for passengers. The most absurd outcome is that the City, having procured and significantly underwritten the NET tram system and an electric Linkbus network, finds its own bus company NCT is directly competing with them. The NET tram route does not even appear on the NCT map, which is beyond ridiculous.

But Nottingham is one of the few places to have a travel card like London’s Oyster card – one that can be used on all buses and trams and which has a daily cap on fares. Getting the agreement of the operators to the Nottingham Oyster (inevitably called the Robin Hood card) is a triumph. But it is still something of a compromise and undermined by lack of co-operation and competition from the bus companies. The main operators NCT and Trent Barton both  offer their own tickets and smartcards and aggressively promote these exclusive tickets rather than the integrated Robin Hood card, which they insist must have a more expensive daily cap if more than one bus company is used. So, for example, interchange with the NET tram is penalised.


At last! An Oyster Card outside London, but could be better



Realtime display ✓ , Timetables & Maps ✓ , Maintained Shelter ✓

Although the City provides comprehensive information about the bus network at stops, including good real time information, this is fighting against the different publicity of the bus companies. Each company has separate web sites, timetable leaflets, maps and mobile phone apps.


All Nottingham City Transport services, but why the different colours?


This bus is green but not Green Line. Confused? I'm not surprised

And the bus network is still difficult to understand. Trent Barton, confusingly, give their routes names rather than numbers, like Mainline and each has its own branding and distinctive livery. NCT buses have numbers but are also colour branded by the main roads they serve, so those going to West Bridgford, where I live, are ‘Green Line’ and painted green. But their competitor ‘Mainline’ also has a green livery. The punters are not surprisingly confused to be told they can’t use their tickets on different green buses serving the same stops. You even get the same number bus on similar routes but run by different companies with non- interchangeable tickets, as Owen Hatherley was bemused and angry to find in Leicester.


A unified visual communication system was axiomatic

This focus on the individual route not the network is of course completely at odds with the philosophy which made London Transport the model for the world. Holden and Beck deliberately used a standardized suite of high quality designs for infrastructure, liveries, typefaces, publicity – all the elements of the public transport system – in order to create the image of a comprehensive, unified whole. Even when London buses were franchised, so actually operated by private companies, they were forced to retain the famous red livery and logo. Elsewhere the cacophony of branding, marketing and different tickets creates the opposite – a fractured system. A regulated, franchised bus system would do away with such nonsense and allow the City to concentrate on developing its public transport strategy more effectively and enable better forward planning to increase public transport use and promote sustainability.


Fun with the system: Abram Games's Poster for London Transport

But at a time when this country appears to have pressed the self destruct button it may seem quaint to suggest that providing high quality, integrated and efficient public transport for cities should be a priority. It is even sadder that we may come to see Osborne’s city devolution prospectus as a brief ray of sunlight through the thick dark clouds of Whitehall indifference and centralization. With a new government that seems to have no economic or transport ideas whatsoever the future looks very bleak indeed. So it turns out that the bus spotters, with their anoraks, Ian Allen lists, cameras and rallies of old buses are far more realistic and down to earth than me. Alas.