272 million trips were made on trams and light rail in England in 2018/19 and more than 1.76 billion on trains in the same year. But the trusty bus accounted for almost 70% of all public transport journeys – a massive 4.31 billion.

Yet bus services are treated as the poor relative, as an afterthought. The result is fewer people using buses each year and fewer services being run. Rural bus routes have been especially badly hit, with subsidies drastically cut back through years of austerity.

We broadly agree on what we want from our buses. We want them to be fast, frequent, reliable, run early in the morning and late at night, be clean, safe and comfortable. These days we want USB charging points and free Wi-Fi (though with 4G and 5G becoming ubiquitous, Wi-Fi usage on buses is already falling). We want electric buses that pollute less: they cost about twice as much to buy, but fuel savings mean the lifetime cost of ownership is no more than a diesel bus.

Designing your bus network

Jeff Speck argues in Walkable City Rules that there are four key decisions to be made when planning a bus network. You can’t offer everything to everyone – choices need to be made.

1. Passenger numbers vs geographic coverage

Bus networks need to achieve a balance between passenger numbers and geographic coverage. These are competing goals. You can have packed buses that only serve dense urban areas, but this ignores the needs of many people in more sparsely populated and rural locations. It is important to decide how much resource to allocate to each goal – and to make sure you can afford it. Your busy routes will be subsidising the quiet ones, so you risk a financial black hole if you get the sums wrong.

2. Frequent vs less frequent

The core network should run frequent services (every few minutes) and extended hours to make it as useful as possible. On these routes, no-one should have to worry that they might miss the last bus or be stood at the bus stop for an hour. It is unlikely that you will have the money to implement this across your whole network, so you need to decide which services will be frequent and which will not.

3. Connections vs complexity

Most of us would prefer to get on one bus and be taken directly to our destination. We don’t like having to get on and off and wait for connecting services. Unfortunately, we also don’t want to snake around endless housing estates to get to everyone else’s destinations. Providing that end-to-end single service for everyone would make the bus network complex and staggeringly expensive. Better to reduce the complexity, have simple bus routes and more connections. Providing the buses are frequent enough, that will work fine.

4. Bus network shape

Most public transport networks move people in and out of the centre in a hub-spoke model: to town and city centres. As I noted in my article on the 15-minute city, this is a network designed by and for wealthier men who tend to make fewer, more direct, trips than women and poorer people. As our society recovers from Covid, we need to consider whether this model is still appropriate (if it ever was). It tends to make orbital journeys around the edge of an area long and slow. A network designed more like a spider’s web or grid may be better and fairer.

Faster bus journeys

Another transport expert, David Levinson, offers some practical advice for speeding up bus journeys. In The 30-Minute City, Levinson argues that we should be looking to make lots of small changes to improve bus services: they all add up.

Levinson suggests:

• Payment before boarding, cashless only, saving between 1.5 and 6 seconds per passenger. (That may not seem like a lot, but multiply by the number of passengers who get on a busy bus along its route and it quickly becomes significant)
• All-door boarding (where buses have multiple doors)
• Larger gaps between stops – ideally one stop every 800m
• All stops in-lane, not pulling over and then having to wait for traffic to allow the bus out. If passengers are boarding more quickly, this won’t cause significant delays
• Signal priority at junctions, allowing buses to hold green lights longer and turn red lights to green.

Interestingly, Levinson argues against allowing bikes on buses, at least when they’re carried on a rack on the front. He supports more cycling, but believes it just takes too long to get bikes on and off racks.

I would argue that for frequent services the bus timetable should show intervals (“one bus every 6 minutes”) rather than times (“Buses at 5, 11, 17…minutes past the hour”). The real-time display will show the expected arrival times.

Buses need to be clean and comfortable, but we should look at the whole experience: every bus journey begins before boarding. Passengers should have shelter and benches as they wait for a bus, and real-time information displayed at the stop so they know how long they’ll be waiting. As much data as possible should be freely accessible so anyone can use it to innovate with new apps and websites.

Bus lanes are beneficial, and we need more of them. There are two reasons for this. First, they speed up journeys – not just for bus passengers but for car drivers too. That sounds a little counter-intuitive, so I’ll explain. Imagine you’re considering whether to drive your car into the city centre or take a bus. The car will get stuck in traffic and there’s the cost of parking, so as long as the bus is fast and reliable, you’ll use it. That’s the benefit of bus lanes. But what happens if the bus lane gets taken out and given over to general traffic? Now the bus is stuck in traffic too. It’s no longer fast or reliable, so you, and many others like you, stop taking the bus and you get in your car instead. Those cars take up a lot of road-space, so the extra lane is soon filled by all the extra vehicles and everyone is worse off.

Second, bus lanes are fairer. If we believe in fairness, 80 people on a bus deserve as much space as 80 people in cars. Buses are far more efficient – they can carry those 80 people in a fraction of the road-space – so the bus lane will look emptier than the car lane, even if it carries more people.

As we bring our whistle-stop tour of buses to a close, let’s have a quick look at franchising, also called regulation or even re-regulation. While London has long had a franchised bus network, buses across the rest of the country were de-regulated in 1986. Local authorities now have the power to take control of their bus networks once again and Greater Manchester is first in line to reintroduce franchising, with strong support from residents.

Greater Manchester’s bus franchising aims to get more people on buses by introducing standard ticketing and better integrating bus, tram and train: both very worthy goals. Franchising is not essential for these to happen, but there’s a good case that the changes will make it easier to achieve.

It gets more complicated when we start considering the network coverage. Most people want more and better buses. Many residents will have a particular service they would like to see created and believe franchising will allow that to happen. They believe regulated buses will be run for the benefit of residents rather than bus company shareholders and all those services people have been asking for will be created.

Sadly, this is unlikely to happen. London’s buses are propped up with an annual subsidy of more than £700 million. Greater Manchester will need a subsidy of £250 million to achieve the same standard, which is precisely £250 million more than it’s going to get.

Without more money, Greater Manchester risks going through a lot of pain to do little more than reorganise the deckchairs and add a new layer of bureaucracy.

What can you do?

In each of these articles I include some practical action that you can take.

If you are an elected councillor or a campaigner for better bus services, speak to the bus operators as well as council officers. If something isn’t happening, understand why not. Is it a lack of money, or a lack of will? Buses can be improved, and private operators may be willing to trial services.

Where there is a planning application for a significant new development, ensure it has a bus service from the start. Planning officers will often require the developer to fund a bus for a couple of years. The problem occurs if the service is only introduced when the development is built out. By then, everyone has got used to using their cars and it’s too late. The solution is to start the bus service from when the first property is occupied. The bus becomes a part of everyday life for residents as they move in, giving it a much better chance of being financially viable when the developer funding ends.

* Iain Roberts is a Stockport councillor, LGA Peer and consultation, communications and public affairs consultant specialising in the built environment.