community transport

This really interesting article makes Jessica and I think about the work we are currently doing in a cluster of villages in the Melton area of Leicestershire where the importance of a community transport service is emerging as top of the list of local issues. The story tells us:

Sit on the 210 for just a few minutes and strangers start to tell you things. They tell you how they were once ace footballers. About their heart problems. If you’re busy, they fill each other in on their just-completed trips to the GP or Aldi. And they’ll talk about how lost they’d be without this squat little bus turned impromptu social club.

“If this weren’t running, I’d be knackered.”

“I’d be a prisoner in my own home.”

Before getting off, almost every passenger turns around and tells the driver how grateful they are.

“See you Tuesday afternoon, Dave. I’ll bring the jokes.”

For a mere 15-seater, the 210 holds a lot of different meanings. For its operators, it’s “an ice-cream van”, running from Witney to Chipping Norton through five villages in west Oxfordshire that are otherwise starved of public transport. For passengers it’s a lifeline, either saving them from spending their pension on a minicab or – for the young – begging parents for a lift. It’s a new service run by and for a community that has been stripped of scores of bus routes. And that makes it a journey into a huge yet silent crisis: the shredding of our bus services.

Buses hardly get a mention in austerity Britain, yet they’re among its biggest casualties. Since 2010 funding for buses across England and Wales has been slashed by a third, while 134m miles of bus coverage has been lost over the past decade. Behind these big numbers are countless small stories of everyday indignity: of your nan no longer being able to get to the shops, or your teenage son struggling to clock on for a first job; of lives stripped of independence, or days out breaking tiny budgets.

Barely any of this is reflected in the London papers or what comes out of Westminster. They care more about trains. You can see why – our privatised services are big, costly and riddled with legalised larceny. But even so, buses figure far more in our everyday travel.

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.”