Passengers face longer bus waits because of lack of competition
A long time ago I led a best practice review (do colleagues in local government remember those?) which revealed that the major factor conditioning price in a deep rural area was lack of supply of operators, not the carefully panned cartel the Council Treasurer suspected. This article bears out my findings on a national scale. Some things never change – but they could if we moved away from associating local authority responses to public transport principally with buses – and tapped more into local innovation. The article goes on to explain.
“…the reality is that in too many areas of the country, competition has stagnated and the incumbent providers know that they face little in the way of serious challenge.
“As such, the incentive to increase services, innovate and even lower fares is absent. On the occasions when there are outbreaks of rivalry, they don’t tend to last and passengers are quickly returned to something like the status quo without any enduring improvement in services.”
The Commission called for sweeping changes including measures to stop major operators squeezing out rivals by flooding the streets with buses or denying competitors to bus stations.”
Welcoming the report, Norman Baker, the local transport minister said: “I am clear that more needs to be done to free up the market so passengers get a better deal.”