www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clke3g03rljo
What happens when councils take control of buses?
Someone should write a book about that, maybe form some sort of political ideology around it
Like, a manifesto of sorts?
Yeah just a short little manifesto, then maybe a few volumes about it if it catches on
What if the main manifesto is a bit incomplete, and we make the extra volumes like a paid DLC?
You know, if it was large enough, there would unironically be sales of each volume separately. If only – that would be so, so funny.
I prefer the big beat manifesto personally.
"Big beats are the best, get high all the time"
That’s it
What was the big beat manifesto again?
Big beats manifesto?
Exactly what I was thinking
Have you even read the Big Beats manifesto lately?
Nope, not even sure what it is.
What's the worst that could happen?
The opposition closes ranks against it and stagnates until the choice of leadership is a billionaire banker or a person with the political sell by date of a lettuce.
Yeah, yeah, but - hear me out here - how about instead of worrying about improving the service, we take all the money out to make profits for a handful of people? Think about the profits!
No no profits are bad because profits get taxed. What we really want is “shareholder value” instead because it’s much harder to tax properly and makes even more money in the long run!
And if the shareholders are in other countries it'll be even harder to tax properly! We could even make some of the shareholders the governments of other countries. That way they can literally get rich while we get poorer!
And even if we run the company billions into debt (while still getting ourselves rich) the government can't bankrupt us because the taxpayer will have to foot the bill
“Robert Williams, the chief executive of Reading Buses, says it means profits can be reinvested into services.”
Says it all really doesn’t it. I’m no pinko, where there’s opportunity for competition I’m all up for free markets.
But on public services where the consumer has no choice which bus company to go with, makes zero sense to have profit driven private bus companies.
To be fair a bus company started up where I live to compete with a popular route and it drove the price down. I know it's rare though
Same happened here. Within two years 'the interloper" was running at a loss and pulled out. The original well established nationwide company pushed fares up way beyond what they had been previously at the same time as reducing services.
But on public services where the consumer has no choice which bus company to go with, makes zero sense to have profit driven private bus companies.
I remember "greater Manchester transport" back in the 70s and 80, absolutely atrocious council run services.
Then de-regulation came along and the competition caused services to improve. Until a point where with takeovers and bankruptcy there was no competition any more and bang the service is awful again.
We need a half way system, where the companies are obliged to offer levels of service (especially on unprofitable routes) in order to keep their profitable routes.
This of course is great in theory and in the larger towns and cities. However as soon as you go to smaller towns where all routes are unprofitable (just not enough passengers). Then it won't work.
The lord knows what they want i mean it shouldn’t be allowed since a private bus in the first place, that’s why the Gov has his own busses
Wtf.
Woah! Local money going to the council who then uses it locally! What an incredible idea!
How'd this get past the Govt!? Can't stop the boats? They can't even stop busocialism going on under their own noses !! /s
Who would have thought that London, which has privately operated but publicly controlled buses has the best bus network in the country. I was in Liverpool around 14 years ago and because the buses were so fragmented, getting from A to B was a complete nightmare. With the only way to find which bus you wanted was to download a PDF of seemingly every bus route going. You also couldn't get a one week bus pass that covered every bus.
Edinburgh also has a city owned bus company, and it's the best in Scotland too.
I think there's a trend here...
Also, Edinburgh and London are the most productive cities per person in the uk by a long way. Perhaps there is a link to public transport?
There's certainly a chicken and egg situation. Government justifies higher spending in London on the basis of high population and economic growth in the city. But the high spending facilitates high economic and population growth. So the cycle goes round and round.
It's fair to say that Edinburgh and Cardiff are becoming the Londons of their respective nations. It's not quite as intense, but there's a similar trend.
So the cycle goes round and round.
And even more so. Apparently the new Lizzie line is seeing more and more passengers without taking them from existing lines.
I guess it's like the highways in American cities. Build it and they will come. But in their case it's turning highways into parking lots as no one can actually get up to highway speed because of congestion.
Who would have thunk that infrastructure not only provides employment during construction but then economic benefits of moving people around decades afterwards!
Thank god we cancelled HS2 otherwise the rest of the country could have benefited from improved infrastructure. Can't be having that now.
It's the curse of politicians being chronically myopic. They're always thinking 5 years ahead to the next election and don't want a massive infrastructure project on the budget spreadsheet.
We need cross party consensus on 10/15/20 year projects!
Wait you been to Scotland?
I am Scottish. I live in Oxfordshire now though. Why?
I asked because I thought you also leave in Scotland
Swansea reporting in, First bus can get fucked with a 10 ft pole
Liverpool was also the place where the council abolished all the bus lanes (which they are now putting back, a decade later), so would they have been any better at running the buses?
Historically Liverpool has been one of the least component local authorities ever. Back in the 1980s they refused to set a budget as a protest against the Tories. Then started handing out redundancy notices, sent by taxi.
https://youtu.be/XSz3xNxnPsQ?t=120
Apologies for sound quality (which is all over the place).
Halton Transport/Arriva/First Choice no doubt.
It has gotten better in that Halton Transport collapsed, and now its just Arriva/First Choice, and they both pretty much cover the same routes.
I think you can also get a trio pass now, which covers both busses as well as merseyrail.
Halton Transport was council-owned though, so it was a shame for Halton that it collapsed, and for those of us who believe all local bus companies should be council-owned / -controlled.
N0 mE peRson4llY I'd rAtHeR hAvE gReatEr cHoicE aNd c0mpEtiTi0n. It mAkEs tHinGs m0rE eFficiEnT aNd dRiVeS iNnoVati0N.
Based and capitalpilled
Try telling that to the people of Darlington. Stagecoach is still a dirty word in that town, almost 30 years later.
Yeah I know and that was the point I was making.
Right, but how are we meant to create value for overseas investors from that?
Apparently not Thatcher. Sigh.
its not always the case that the service gets better, if the public companies are being starved of funds by short sighted Tory governments.
Reading Busses are one of the best run I’ve ever seen. Every other large town near Reading uses Stagecoach and my god they suck.
Big up Reading busses LETSGO.
It’s magic. WOW.
Scotrail
......ummm..
Shhhh, keep the socialism down or someone will notice.
Socialism?! Never. I just want everyone driving into the city centre so they can spend all their taxed income on taxable goods so our glorious nation gets as much tax as it possibly can.
Maybe we should add a bus charge to national insurance or something.
Thatcher?
Thames Water proves that the other way around doesn't work either...
Wdym? The other way around being private ownership makes outcomes worse for customers? I feel like that's a given at this point.
Doesn’t work when the government responsible is incompetent. That’s a big ask these days.
But at what cost?
the reading local council is actually on fire right now, and they still have to sacrifice their daily virgin to keep the busses running.
User deleted comment
13d
Bus use plummeted during the pandemic but even before then it was steadily declining in areas outside the capital. One area bucking the national trend is Reading. The town - 40 miles to the west of London - was hit by Covid restrictions like everywhere else but the number of journeys on local bus services had been on the rise before the pandemic too.
“We're able to take a longer term view, we're not constantly being chased to make sure our profit margin is a certain level, because our brief is just to provide the best possible service we can,” he says.
Like with all public services. It’s sad that what should be just business as usual is now treated as some kind of a revelation.
An bextra £3m a year goes into the town's bus network* because it does not pay out dividends to private shareholders, according to campaign group We Own it. The council says this means it has been able to invest in one of the most environmentally friendly bus fleets in the country, including 66 bio-gas powered and 24 electric buses.
That’s a lot of money saved and proof why public services should be publicly owned.
In London a franchising system was introduced, with Transport for London deciding routes, timetables and fares and operators bidding to run services for a fixed fee. This has contributed to the capital seeing an increase in bus use, with services less hit by cuts, in contrast to other parts of the country.
Even this is better than free for all profit model.
Mr Williams is a supporter of the council-owned model but has doubts over how easy it would be to replicate this more widely. “You have to be able to afford to buy a depot, buy the vehicles, employ the people,” he says. “Setting that up from scratch is no quick job.”
Maybe not “quick”, but well worth it. Besides, what does he think will happen to those depots and busses currently owned by private companies?
If a company is publicly owned, it is the taxpayer that is taking on the risk if it goes bust, he points out.
Eh? That depends on business model of course, but in principle it can’t happen. Besides, it should be treated as a service, not a business.
Greater Manchester Combined Authority calculated it would cost £134.5m to bring the region’s buses under public control and has made use of central government funding as part of its devolution deal to pay for this. The process has been implemented in phases and is due to be completed in 2025 but Labour mayor Andy Burnham says there have been immediate improvements including more frequent buses, later and earlier services and better connections to trains and trams.
During the recent mayoral campaign, then-West Midlands Conservative mayor Andy Street attacked his Labour opponent’s plan to take buses back under public control, saying the party had not said where the money to do this would come from.
Eventually it should be self-sustaining service.
If a company is publicly owned, it is the taxpayer that is taking on the risk if it goes bust, he points out.
The tax payer is taking on the risk anyway, since any private company deemed too big to fail gets bailed out by the government anyway.
See: Thames Water
Any service that requires a government bailout when things start to look bad should be claimed back into public ownership at that point. Businesses shouldn't get bailouts for providing a substandard service they can't maintain themselves.
Individuals that file for bankruptcy can't take any loans for 5 or so years because there's fear that they will just do the exact same shit again, why do we look at big companies any differently?
Any service that are vital to the running of the country, where we don't get an option to pick the provider as there is only the infrastructure for a single provider shouldn't be a private service. Busses in general are fine to be a private service, however I do think that each region should have their own public sector bus service, with private bus companies dealing with travel across different regions.
We look at big business differently cause we live in a kleptocracy run by the same people running the businesses
The only exception I know of should be banks in specific circumstances.
A bank following all the rules and that would otherwise turn a profit can fail because people thought it would.
Especially when you remember that a bailout is just a loan from the government, and that depending on the interest rates over the period of the loan the government can actually profit it on bailouts.
Thames water hasn’t been bailed out, and there is zero chance it does get bailed out.
Unless by bailed out you mean, someone, potentially the government, potentially another water company, takes over the remains of Thames water so that people won’t go without water.
The company is already worthless, i don’t remember which fund, but a Canadian pension fund has already written off their 31.7% stake in thames water to be worth 0.
The shareholders will not get bailed out, the company will be stripped to pay debts and if they can’t cover it the debt will be written off.
I know the tories like do give handouts to their friends but it would be monumentally stupid politically (not even talking about in terms of the taxpayers money) for the government to bailout thames water. Every single person hates them, bailing them out would seal the fate of the conservative party.
Rishi would be dumb enough to brand it as ‘focusing on your priority of having water’ if he thought it would get him any bounce. Announcement by the end of the week?
There’s no way they bail it out in any shape or form. The investors don’t even expect it to (see this FT article.
Bailing it out would serve no purpose other than to kill the conservative party, they are already on the thinnest sheet of ice in existence. Bailing out Thames Water would end the party.
I'm fucking shocked that a service that can reinvest in itself does better than one that has to constantly be at the whims of odious middlemen and constantly has to hand away its profits to shareholders
Why just limit yourself to the profits? You can also take on debt to get money to give to shareholders, like Thames Water.
Eventually it should be self-sustaining service.
While I am in favour of public ownership, it should be noted that public transport is rarely financially self-sustaining.
We just need to reframe 'self sustaining'. People who can reliably get to work on time earn more, spend more, and pay more in taxes.
I recently turned down a promotion because I'd have to commute to London four days a week instead of one. I can't be the only one not earning their max potential because train tickets cost thousands of Pounds.
Just all these people going to work, the shops, participating in the economy while reducing pollution and other negative externalities... But yeah, the bus fares might not cover the cost to run the bus service. Such a terrible view of infrastructure the UK has.
It's a very simple way of thinking, and sadly it's quite persuasive to a certain type of voter.
While I am in favour of public ownership, it should be noted that public transport is rarely financially self-sustaining
Yes, you are correct. It’s just my wishful thinking. On the other hand, TfL isn’t far off (I think they were before the pandemic). Of course, the scale of them is in different league too.
London buses had a deficit of around £700m a year before COVID. The only reason TfL broke even was because it made a lot of money off the Tube and Trains.
So that means that the tubes and trains are profitable which negates the point that public transports cant be self sustaining
I wonder though what the wider impact is of a well used public transport system. Although not directly self sustaining, are indirect savings made e.g less road damage from fewer vehicles, also leading to less roadworks and delays, more foot traffic near transport stops increasing footfall to shops and improving community health through exercise and community spirit?
Better mental health for young people, those who can't drive, and the elderly too.
Yeah bus services get about 50% subsidy and the trains about 60%. It's unlikely ever to break even. If a better bus service causes people to stop driving, that's actually a double whammy for the treasury as they've now lost all the tax money from the motoring too.
An extra £3m a year goes into the town's bus network because it does not pay out dividends to private shareholders
There is only one reason why a private operator takes over a public service : to make profit
Where does that profit come from?
Raising prices, cutting pay, redundancies, cutting services, cutting investment, lowering standards, taking loans which are paid as dividends.
There's the magical "efficiency" that is always sold to the public as the alleged reason WHY public services should be privatised
It's not fucking rocket science.
And then they either sell it on, or let it fail and be taken back into public ownership after they've fucked off with all the money.
One area bucking the national trend is Reading
I suspect adding bus lanes to roads like Kings Road made the biggest difference. When I lived there the park and ride scheme was a joke as you got on a bus and then just sat a traffic jam. I think seeing a bus fly by makes people think, hmm maybe that is an idea. Buses also need to be really regular so you don't need to care about the timetable.
An extra £3 million just for one town!
If you scale that up to the population of Greater Manchester, buying the buses back will pay for itself within a few years.
This isn’t a widely applicable rule, unfortunately. Poor operational governance can result in bloated and poor services when run by government/councils, same as poor operational governance can result in profit-driven, service-deprecating businesses when ran privately.
Equally, the reverse is also true; you can find excellent l local services that exceed the results of private enterprise when good governance and management is involved on the side of local government (here, Reading is given as an example). It can also been found in the private sector as an improvement over poorly governed services too.
In my field of work, I’ve been able to work with a mix of council ran and privately ran businesses within the same industry, doing the same jobs. You find some council ran enterprises to be incredible services with passionate people doing things properly, whilst in another area having the complete opposite experience of expensive & wasteful government-run enterprises with bureaucratic, indifferent staff. Speaking with insiders here, they know what the problems are but are powerless to do anything about them.
You find the exact same on the other side of the fence too - amazingly well ran private enterprise businesses that have reasonable rates with passionate hard working talented people working for them, or absolutely dreadful penny pinching profit-only-driven shoddy service with poor equipment, owners exploiting incompetent and cheap labour, greedy business people who should have no place in the industry but do so through capital alone - and I have no doubt that you might probably know insiders that work within these types of companies that are powerless to affect change and solve the root problems in these private enterprises too (I’ve certainly got my own fair share of experiences in this situation as well!).
It’s the way it is in reality unfortunately, and only politics hammers away at the idea that one way is right and good and the other is bad and wasteful. The pendulum swings both ways, over time, and from situation to situation.
but it is self-sustaining, because the benefit it provides to private businesses (in terms of employees being able to get to work and be productive) is greater than what they could all achieve separately through individual initiatives.
(public) transportation and healthcare are services, they shouldn't be confused with industries. America doesn't have a healthcare service, it has an industry. At every stage along the care route, someone is there with their hand out (for signing a pdf or something equally benign), that person isn't a doctor and doesn't improve the level of care, they just take a cut.
private bus companies will commission studies and lobby the government about how we need to be profitable and not be a drain, because they're competition so it's good for consumers, while they lobby to have public services removed so it can be good for their profits.
Maybe not “quick”, but well worth it. Besides, what does he think will happen to those depots and busses currently owned by private companies?
The problem is that if a council has to invest a lot of capital it will have to borrow that money, and pay interest. This defeats the goal of avoiding paying dividends and reinvesting that money into service provision.
To avoid this debt the council either has to run a surplus (difficult to justify presently) and probably introduce council run services piece meal (hence the slow statement).
Running a surplus, aside from the political challenge, any council should also do a cost benefit analysis to ensure that spending the money on buses is the best use of that money. My guess is that is probably isn't given the state of our schools and elderly care services.
there was a really good bit on Radio 4 about this. Just commenting to remind myself to look for it again
I come from Reading.
Most houses are always 25-50 meters away from a bus route that will take them where they need to go.
I lived a 25 min drive away from the town centre. Not because it was far. Without traffic it would take 10-15 tops, but there was always traffic
The bus takes the same amount of time, but is less than £2 for the journey.
On the major roads where all the traffic was, bus lanes and bus only roads are prevalent and shows the investment in public transport.
It felt weird moving to a new place for uni, and the buses being awful. Then in the many years since then, nowhere has come close to the level of service and activity than Readings buses.
Everyone uses them. If I go on a night out, I know I can get a bus there and back. Their night time service is great too, and I used it often.
Gee it's almost as if running a service for public convenience and not profit actually makes things better.
Private companies only care about profit and dividends going to their shareholders. Public sector is supposed to look at wider societal benefits (unless you're the Tories and want to axe them, then you complain about cost). A bus line might cost £20000 a year to run (as an example), but if it lets 30-40 people access their job, or into town for a shop, that benefit isn't seen on a balance sheet.
There are also other benefits that are less economically direct. A good range of local bus services gets people out of the house, we've seen a bit increase in pensioners basically housebound and left to rot as their local bus routes were their only means of independent transport.
The list is endless.
Look at the healthcare benefits alone of a city (theoretically) switching entirely to buses.
Fewer traffic accidents. Less pollution in the air. Less congestion equals less stress and fewer incidents of road rage. More sleep. More time to read, listen, chat, and otherwise live your life.
All of these things have knock-on effects on things like happiness and productivity. All of these things have knock-on effects on the NHS' ability to handle other problems.
Now we could talk about whichever other metric we wanted - economic, productivity, innovation, lifestyle and culture...the whole thing is a reinforcing cycle. Fixing transit in our urban areas should be a priority alongside fixing housing. It is fundamental to our ability to thrive as a community.
Completely agree, and a thousand upvotes to you for saying this so succinctly. As it happens, I not only live in Reading but actually worked for the council in a strategic role [not transport] for many years, and underpinning everything was the anti-poverty/social inclusion/economic development agenda... and a reliable, accessible, affordable and comprehensive bus service was absolutely at the core of that. It's good to see Reading's Labour administration getting wider positive recognition of its long-standing commitment to this, outside of the specialist/professional press.
As someone from Glasgow who works in Edinburgh often the difference is night and day. Glasgow’s transport (particularly its buses) is shockingly bad. Very rarely turn up on time (especially true of First Bus), overpriced, little to no night services. Edinburgh in comparison is very good. Lots of night services (at least it did - unsure if this is still the case now), cheap tickets, usually on time, etc.
Agreed. As someone from Edinburgh I've been spoilt. It's such a first world problem but the buses here are so good that I get stressed out whenever I have to take the bus anywhere else in the UK!
Absolutely agreed. One of the biggest things I appreciate about Edinburgh is its public transport. The fact that your travel pass covers both the buses and the trams is just the cherry.
It's actually a crime that this article didn't mention Lothian Buses.
To be fair the article is in the England section of the BBC site and presumably the sorts of powers local councils have as well as patterns of bus use also varies across the UK nations.
There's also more devolution currently being rolled out across England so it makes sense to compare what existing council areas have already managed there. I don't think Scotland would make a good comparison, having a different devolution settlement and patterns of public transport use. Because all over 60s and all under 22's get free travel, the Scottish government effectively part subsidises bus travel (not to mention publicly owned Scotraul have also scrapped peak rail fares) meaning passenger numbers have likely recovered more post-Covid than they have in England.
It makes more sense to compare potential public ownership in England with existing English models. If only because they are operating within similar conditions.
I've seen it before though where there's articles talking about something happening or changing in England and they have a little section that mentions Scotland (if there's relevant examples). Lothian Buses have been in operation for over a hundred years though, so it well predates devolution for Scotland.
And wouldn't those examples help bolster the case for public ownership? "Here are the potential benefits of public ownership over a long term"?
The only advantage Glasgow has for public transport is the subway, and that doesn't cover nearly as much as it should. Of course if it got bigger it'd probably get worse!
Also its urban rail service. It’s the largest suburban rail network outside of London. But, similar to the subway it largely benefits the South and West.
Is it? I didn't know that! Aye the rail service varies pretty widely from area to area. It's not bad where I live - was better pre-covid - but the rest of the South Side has it better.
I live in reading and had never really thought about the bus's ownership, but always thought they were really well run and fairly priced. This shines a lot of light on why.
Last year they temporarily made bus travel free on Saturdays in the summer. Which you can imagine reduced congestion in the town. Only possible due to a joined up thinking approach you would t gey with private enterprise.
I got the app a few years ago and it was pretty buggy. Just downloaded it again today and it's pretty good! It's a great service.
Readings bus service is great, but the company relies on central government funding to buy its buses. This hides the economics a little. I believe all the gas buses and new electric ones come from grants.
In general public ownership is way better (downvote if you disagree) but don’t pretend it will solve all the problems.
I’m a Cardiff resident where our main bus service has been run by the council for many years. It has all the same problems as any other city and is widely criticised by residents as being worse than the private sector rivals that operate locally. There’s obviously a multitude of reasons why.
Selecting Reading for the article just reinforces the story the author was already going to write anyway. There are/were both good and bad council owned bus companies, just like there are good and bad private bus companies.
Reading is one of the best, Nottingham and Lothian are good as well, some of the others like Cardiff, Newport or Warrington are nothing special. Many of the worst council owned bus companies disappeared years ago, either because the council weren't interested or because they couldn't afford the losses they made.
In general, one of the options has to be better though?
Trust me I live in an area dominated by Stagecoach, Cardiff bus is is a dream compared to those idiots.
I live in a small town and it's cheaper to buy a network rider to travel to the next town 4 miles away, the same ticket I can use across S Wales. Local fares are horrendously overpriced because people have no other option.
That's definitely true as someone who lived in a stagecoach area for a while.
I've actually never really had issues with Cardiff bus. Especially since the app started showing you where the next bus is. The biggest issue used to be needing exact change but modernity has fixed that issue.
Trains for Wales is far, far worse for commuting. Late and randomly cancelled far more often than the buses. Trains are more comfortable and faster.
For buses and other monopolies I agree. However just look at the mess some councils have made of creating energy companies, house builders, solar farms etc. resulting in massive losses for the taxpayer. I would rather competitive businesses are left to the private sector where shareholders take the risk.
shareholders take the risk
hilarious
Nobody considers that when shareholder succeed they fuck up the planet and everyone on it.
Shareholders? Come on man, imagine you were a shareholder and you have 16% in a company that give you $250,000 in the first quarter would you want to face such a hit???
You know anyone can be a shareholder. Your own mother can too
Services that are run as an essential service instead of a [profit seeking endeavour work better for the people.
Our family want to get rid of our car. But it is still impossible for us as public transport is just not dependable. A combination of cycling and buses would do it for us, but the lack cycle infrastructure and the awful attitude so many people have against cyclists means I'm just not confident enough to make it my main mode of transport.
Hubby takes the bus to work, but it's such a ball ache. Never on time, many cancellations...
Same story for my family and probably millions of others.
It's a problem of collective action - the Government needs to get its arse in gear and sort it out.
I'd love to use cycles for day time travel (wouldn't risk it at night personally) but it's just too dangerous, especially with kids. People seem good about cyclists where I live but the roads are an absolute mess, the chances of hitting a pothole or a drain or something and e ding yo under a car are high no matter how civilised drivers are.
Public transport should be well, public owned. We don't call aeroplanes public transport, nor most ferries, but we do call buses, trams and trains that. Clues in the name. You can't run a service for profit and cheaper than a public owned model as long as corruption doesn't come into it. And corruption will always be in the private model
Works for a private company
I remember as a youth. Busses was like 33p for a child 66p for an adult within the region and evert 10 mins now you have to wait a hour for one sooner council's take back over the better.
It's weird to think that there was a time where you'd just walk to the bus stop and wait for a bus the same way you might do for the tube in London. These days you'll be lucky if a bus is scheduled within half an hour if you really want to travel.
Anecdotally, my local bus service isn't publicly owned. A return ticket from my home town to the city where I currently live (about 10 miles away) is actually cheaper now than it was when I was in college, almost 20 years ago. Adjusting for inflation it's significantly cheaper.
You can ride that route back and forth all day for a fiver. I'm not sure how much cheaper it could possibly be.
Really???
And where are you from?
North East.
A day pass with Go Northeast costs £6.80 and covers the entire North East of England (Tyne, Wear, Durham and Northumberland)
It also includes the metro train service and the south shields ferry apparently (news to me).
A return ticket on my local route was about £4.70 last time I got it.
The sheer horrific state of public transport in this country is why I own a car. Did some work in France, had to do something in Paris but then be literally the other side of the country for something the same day. No problem, took the high speed train and I was there within a couple hours. My socks were fully blown off. And I also got in trouble with the sterwardess lady for taking a work call on my phone because I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed and then I realised how nice not listening to people shout down the phone also was and then it really hit home how wank the infrastructure in our country is.
UK experience - Main bus route through my local town. Supposed to run every 10 minutes. Don't think I ever waited less than 20. Close to an hour was not unusual as oftentimes when it did come it was full to bursting so wouldn't stop, leaving me to wait and hope the next one wasn't also full, which it often was. Spent about a month arguing with the company trying to find out how many buses they actually had running the route as clearly it was not enough to meet their 10 minute target, but never got anywhere with them.
Experience in rural Spain ffs - Waiting at a stop to take me back to the nearest city. Locals start properly kicking off when its 5 minutes late, calling a number displayed on the stop to contact the head office and sort them out. Driver when he turned up was super apologetic. Bus was also much more modern and clean than anything I've seen in the UK.
The infrastructure in our country is wank and it is a failure of Government and private industry that has been in the works for decades now. A whole host of European countries do public transport better than us, and it's not just the Northern Europeans, it's almost all of Western and Central Europe.
That said, it really is a self-perpetuating cycle. Take your case for example. You own a car because public transport is not sufficiently good enough.
Every person like you who has made the same calculation is inevitably competing with public transport every time they use the road. It's inevitable in any urban area, where the vast majority of the population live.
I think of my own home village. One main road with one bus route that goes up and comes back down and into town. The bus is roughly every 30 minutes if you're lucky.
The vast majority of people in that village own a car because once every 30 minutes is frankly shite, and it still takes ages to get into town because the bus is slow. The bus is slow because it has to navigate around roads that have cars parked all alongside and it always gives way to other cars. There are tonnes of other cars on the road because nobody wants to get the bus. This only gets worse the closer you get to the centre because other villages all have the same problem.
It's the same story everywhere except, apparently, Reading, London, and Edinburgh. It'll always be the case until Government steps in.
I’ll also add cleanliness is a big driving factor for private transport for me. I’d be way more inclined to use public transport if it wasn’t so fucking grim. Another travel experience that hit me was travelling out of Düsseldorf on a local service train. It was so so much less disgusting than our filthy local services (you know what I mean, with their massively outdated carriages with upholstery that hasn’t been cleaned since the 90s)
Who would have thought...
I mean, privatising trains and water companies has worked wonders, so why should buses have been any different? We have the cheapest, fastest, most reliable trains of the whole of Europe. The best water, provided in the most environmentally friendly way, without ever polluting rivers nor the sea...
Our trains have not been privatised. When they were genuinely privately owned (i.e. by members of the public) they were the envy of the world.
Someone from Reading here. I can attest that council-owned buses are the way to go, and I’m really proud of the services we have offered here which are not only nice but expanding.
They work.
It's odd what happens when public services are run by committed public servants instead of gouging capitalist parasites.
As a Sheffield resident fuck first bus and fuck privatisation. When you have to walk 30-40 mins cause it’s more reliable than taking the bus, you know it’s utter shit.
Looks like the experience with first bus is universal!
You lot are selfish.
Why you no think of shareholder. He need boat and sports car.
/s
There are a lot of retired people who like the bus. They can't drive for whatever reason and the bus is where they meet similar people and they go into town and look around the shops and they may not even buy anything but the reality is it is that or stare at the same lonely four walls at home.
If you take the bus away from them then mentally life becomes harder. They likely won't exercise as much and their health declines faster.
I am not saying the bus is some magical cure for the elderly but I am also saying it probably is saving money in the long term in the sense of people's health declining more slowly as the quality of life can hinge on something like a decent bus service.
The biggest difference when the buses were privatised was that discounting tickets for return journeys or season tickets meant the customers’ choice of times for travel was heavily restricted. In effect you either paid full fare all the time or you bought into only a few of the available buses.
Pre-pandemic I commuted via bus from a relatively big town out in the countryside to a larger city about an hour away. It worked fine, services ran every hour, it was reliable enough and generally packed. To be honest they could have upped it to every half an hour to cope better with demand. We actually got rid of our second car because we no longer needed two for the commute.
After the pandemic, buses just didn't show up, the schedules kept getting changed around and they differed depending on where you looked. I got stranded multiple times because buses failed to show for hours at a time or I'd turn up before the posted time and be told it had left 20 minutes ago.
In the end I stopped getting the bus and I imagine a lot of other people did too.
Now the bus companies want to run less services because "nobody is getting the bus". Well no shit.
Nottingham's has been publicly owned for over a century. It's got its problems, but is one of the best public transport systems in the country outside of London.
Nottingham City Transport pays a dividend of around £2m a year back to the council. Meanwhile Leicester Council, who privatised their buses in the 90s, have to pay around £500k to subsidise their provider (and the service there is far worse than Nottingham's).
I worry that the current problems with the council will be an excuse to force them to sell NCT off to get a quick injection of cash, regardless of any long term cost that would result in.
I agree. Sometimes the buses could be a bit too early, but there tended to be quite a few, and a number actually ran past midnight in some places. Granted, this was a few years ago, so I don't know if much has changed or not.
Not having to pay ever increasing profits to shareholders means you also have more capital to invest in yourself and develop? WOW
Manchester's buses have been taken over, and it's been good so far. £2 flat fee, joint bus/tram/ticket def saving more quids.
Public transport should be public.
We're so far down the neo-liberal rabbit hole at this point that the concept of a public service being in public ownership and actually therefore providing a service to the public is seen as revolutionary thinking!
So... They've highlighted how good this has been. The Tories will come for it... Should have just been left alone to succeed in quiet.
I wish Arriva would fuck off from Milton Keynes, they have completely wrecked the buses in my area.
Where I live specifically there are two bus services, they both go from Bletchley to Wolverton but take different routes in-between while hitting the same major hubs on the way. I would take bus A to go to work as bus B goes nowhere near it.
Last month they changed the route for both bus A and B to go down a new build housing estate and for both to take the same routes to the major hubs so I can no longer get the bus directly to work.
What was previously a 20 minute bus journey has now become a 52 minute trip when taking into account the new housing estate being put into the route and having to walk to the office from the closest bus stop.
I work from home 95% of the time so it hasn't done me over that badly but the place the bus use to go to is an industrial estate with offices and use to have tonnes of workers on it every morning, and now it simply doesn't.
Unfortunately Milton Keynes Council are equally fucking useless so even if they did take over the buses they'd likely reduce it from my area entirely.
Cardiff Council runs Cardiff bus, and it's a shit show, cancelled routes, not enough drivers, and running only single deckers on most of the routes. Not to mention the constant fare rises every year.
"We're able to take a longer term view, we're not constantly being chased to make sure our profit margin is a certain level, because our brief is just to provide the best possible service we can..."
This needs to be plastered on every government department room and said out loud instead of prayers at council and Westminster meetings
I’m convinced that there’s this private-public stewardship of public transport is circular in nature.
Going private sometimes, sometimes, injects capital, innovation and management shake up on otherwise crumbling business.
But when that’s over and the business is making progress, then it’s all shareholder value comes first, I.e. extracting capital from the business at the risk of public services.
Then it’s back to public control, where the goal is to steady the ship. Things gets good. Unions are happy. Then it gets bloated, too much red tape, lack of improvement, innovation suffers.
Just my take.
Well of you live in a semi-rural are where transport used to be part funded by a council who actually cared about their residents.
Low use routes being served, actual buses on time and not cancelled left and right, stops that made sense, reasonable fares.
Now stagecoach have the monopoly it costs £6 for a 2 mile journey.
This can't possibly work, Something something nationalising sausages
“Anything can affect your passenger numbers, whether it's in your control or outside. If councils get it wrong or put out the wrong service level or don't get the growth they're expecting, the taxpayer has got to pay for that.”
Last bit of the article. However, it fails to point out we are already subsidising the private companies with taxpayer money for every single non-profitable route while they extract the profits from the rest.
Think tanks and franchises being sold as the solution. if adding bus lanes and making the ensuing congestion a charge that car drivers must bear, then I don’t see how the alienation of car drivers is a long term and scalable solution. That said, for profit services isn’t a long term and scalable solution either. Good job Reading for this sanity check.
Every public service should be owned by the government. Shareholder value fucks everything it touches!
They get better. Look at buses on London & the improvements in Manchester
"people on lower incomes and those without a car disproportionately affected" No duh. The BBC is trash.
It’ll go to shit under Tory gov.
Council given money, not even close to what private companies was using for expenditure of operations.
“Council: we haven’t even got enough money to fund for W, X & Y. How do you expect us to fund Z too?”
“tories:Shrug”
If my only option is Stagecoach in my area, what is the point of privatisation? Where is the free market?
Unfortunately this kind of stuff is highly council dependent. Some councils are absolutely excellent at providing services. Others make an absolute dogs breakfast of it.
Consider me shocked. As someone from the Scottish Highlands, which is dominated by Stagecoach, the service is absolutely terrible. Sometimes only two busses per day from Sutherland North, to Inverness. That doesn't even include all the smaller communities that don't have a hope in hell of ever seeing a bus.
Hopefully, when I'm planning to get a bus it'll actually show up at the bus stop. In fact, I waited for the next one to come and it never did.
who would have thought, uk must be the geniuses, doing it as a first country in the europe /s
About the only good thing the Reading council have ever done for the community. That place is fucked up and it mostly lies on the neglect the community has suffered from a terrible money hungry council
They actually run the service? Not cancel at a moments notice like Stagecoach do after theyve taken the money for fares paid on line for school children and workers
Sheffield council recently took over ownership of the tram service and since then they're planning routes to the cities hospitals which was stupidly never done under private ownership. Additionally, they updated the card readers to be faster which means that 100% of my fares are now taken in rush hour vs like 50% before. I'm out of pocket but I'm happy the service is sorting it's shit out.
The busses run on time. Depending on whether it's a right-wing council or not.
I expect the electronic update boards on bus stops will STILL BE FULL OF LIES!!
London buses imho are too expensive to build.On the c3 last Friday evening going to Earls Court it only had 3 passengers 1 of which was the driver.Staircase was lit on every step;plug ins for your mobile.These must cost over a million ?
Probably ~£500-400k
Tl;dr: Guy who runs a public-owned bus company and campaign group who campaigns for public ownership say service is better when buses are council owned....
... Except it probably wouldn't work in most places and full public ownership isn't the best solution....
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Public ownership of services improves outcomes for customers?
Fuck me, who'da thunk it.