Hammered by the pandemic and cuts, much-maligned and seeming unfashionable – are buses being unfairly overlooked in discussions around transport in Wales? What does the future hold?
Whenever public transport is discussed in Welsh politics, the conversation usually ends up drifting towards rail.
Rail ticket prices make the news. Rail delays are reported more often. Investment in rail travel is usually trumpeted more enthusiastically than investment in the smelly old bus; case in point, the push for a reopened Aberystwyth-Carmarthen rail link (rightly or wrongly) when the pre-existing TrawsCymru bus service barely gets a mention.
Yet in raw numbers, buses are more important than rail as of this moment. According to the Welsh Government, in 2019-20 there were 88.8million passenger journeys on buses within Wales compared to 29.9million by rail.
The underlying trend, however, couldn’t be more different. In the few years immediately pre-pandemic, there were year-on-year increases in rail passenger numbers, while the proportion of bus journeys in Wales saw falls of up to 13% a year and fell by 41.2% in total between 1989-90 and 2019-20.
If people believe privatisation of rail services hasn’t worked out, then you have to argue that privatisation and deregulation have been catastrophic for buses (and probably very good for car manufacturers).
Buses do have an image problem. There’s that apocryphal quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.”
There’s snobbishness about buses because they’re stereotyped as a form of transport for people who either can’t afford cars, can’t afford rail travel or are too old or ill to drive anymore (in 2019 up to 47% of all bus passengers in Wales used free bus passes).
As a result, buses have perhaps been undervalued as a means to making public transport more appealing. For example, a properly funded bus rapid transit system with segregated on-road infrastructure should be as good as light rail at a fraction of the cost….but then you remember the failure of Swansea’s Ftr Metro scheme.
Aside from the attitude issue, there are other more practical concerns. Senedd committees have undertaken several inquiries on this.
Some of their findings and commonly-cited problems include cuts to routes and public funding, inconsistent support for volunteer-run community transport services, inconsistent ticketing and pricing policies, the impact of congestion (it’s said a 10% increase in journey times by bus results in a similar fall in passengers) and timetables that don’t connect with other forms of public transport like rail.
