GIVING BUSES PRIORITY

• Quality Partnerships, Bus Lanes, Tough Politics.

Buses Need Tracks Too

The arrival of Nottingham Express Transit has helped to focus the issue of public transport priority.

Here at last, in Nottingham’s tram system, a firm precedent has been created.

The tram shares much of its route with other road vehicles but it has undisputed priority.

No-one is going to be allowed to leave their car on the tracks while they go and fetch a paper, or stop in front of the tram to drop off a passenger, or deposit a building skip over the rails for a few days, or park a delivery van for half an hour with two wheels on the pavement and the other two over the tramlines, or come along without warning and dig up the tram tracks for a week or so, leaving the route completely severed.

But on bus routes, all of these are everyday phenomena.

So our message to government now is that the same respect needs to be applied to our ‘tracks’. Our routes don’t have the high visibility of rails in the road, but in Nottingham alone, buses account for over 73 million passenger trips a year.

There’s no disputing the need for bus lanes and other robust priority measures, but we can and must put an immediate end to the flagrant abuse of bus routes by contractors and other road users.

Great Britain might have one of the lowest levels of car ownership in Western Europe, but we drive our cars more than any other European nation.

Take a look at traffic on the roads today and you will also see that many cars contain just their driver.

The simple argument for bus priorities is that when road space is in short supply, we should concentrate on moving the maximum number of people rather than the maximum number of vehicles.

This is the thinking behind bus lanes which reward those who choose public transport with a more reliable journey. They are also a visible signal to motorists that bus users have priority.

There are other measures too which help buses make headway through the traffic. In some parts of the country buses are fitted with transponders that will activate special filters at traffic lights and busy junctions. Bus stops can be redesigned so that the bus will not lose its place in a queue every time it pulls up for passengers. In some places where traffic queues regularly bring things to a halt, but roadspace is too limited for bus lanes, these queues can be relocated to a different place so that the bus can still get in front.

These measures are amongst a number of strategies enshrined in the Transport Act 2000 and amplified by the Secretary of State for Transport in his December 2006 paper 'Putting Passengers first'. The Act strongly supports the concept of Bus Quality Partnerships - teamwork between bus operators, local authorities and other interested parties to deliver top quality public transport. The idea is that bus operators will invest heavily in the latest buses, market research, staff training and quality of service. This will be done in partnership with the local authorities who in turn will invest in bus priority measures, public transport information and improvements to bus shelters and waiting facilities. We have a number of Quality Partnerships locally.

It must be said, however, that progress with bus priority measures is very slow indeed. We need continuous bus lanes and other measures if we are going to deliver consistently reliable service and grow the bus market to match.

One of the main reasons for this is that the decision to allocate priority road space for buses is a political one. There is nowhere near enough public pressure on politicians, or through the pages of the local press, to bring about such change.

After all, the vast majority of the electorate drive cars, so without public support for bus lanes, politicians run the risk of losing votes.

As a Company we took the view many years ago that the industry needed to sharpen up its act and vastly improve its quality of service if it was to be given much needed priorities that would help deliver the customers' top requirement of reliability.

However, for as long as bus companies remain, largely speaking, the only ones receiving complaints about reliability, politicians will be reluctant to vote for major change. Ironically, we can do very little by ourselves to make timekeeeping any better, on roads which we do not control.