The previous piece looked at roads and independence. This time, it’s buses (including community transport).
The current situation (though arguably it’s deteriorated since then) was overviewed in a bit more detail here:
Hammered by the pandemic and cuts, much-maligned and seeming unfashionable – are buses being unfairly overlooked in discussions around transport...
How Wales Works: Bus Services – Funding & Future
Â
The first thing to note is that transport statistics gathering in the UK is better than in most other places (at least on this list). There were a lot of metrics that were difficult to compare or were otherwise absent or hard to nail down.
There are similarities in how bus services are run in Wales, Scotland and New Zealand – namely a deregulated/privatised system. It should probably come as no surprise that all three are pursuing re-regulation as of 2023.
Few bus services are fully nationalised. Those countries with publicly-owned bus services often run them through arms-length companies – Transport for Wales being our equivalent. Based on some of the figures, there could be a loose relationship between public management/administration of bus services and higher passenger numbers – though there are likely to be a number of other factors at play.
One of those is a relationship between large metropolitan areas/urban density and higher bus use – just under half of bus journeys in Ireland (about 48%) are with Dublin Bus (pdf – p7).
Similarly, bus use is proportionally much higher in Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury compared to the rest of New Zealand. It’s a similar case for the Copenhagen area compared to the rest of Denmark and in the Central Belt (83% of all Scottish bus journeys in 2022 – Table 2.2b) compared to the rest of Scotland.
Bus journeys also seem to be proportionally shorter in Wales, Scotland and Ireland (lower passenger kilometres) compared to the other three.
All six countries saw falls in passenger numbers during the pandemic that, in most cases, are yet to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. There are signs that Ireland has had more success, with the Irish Government using the pandemic restriction period to overhaul fare structures and routes.
Another interesting fact is that while Wales has the highest operating cost-per-passenger5 in Great Britain (£3.21), it has the highest operating revenue-per-passenger (£2.81; almost twice the London figure) and one of the lowest operating costs-per-vehicle km (£2.00).
However, routes in London make far more revenue per passenger, per km (£4.55 compared to £1.77 in Wales) because more people use buses. That’s also despite having flat fares (£1.75 for an hour’s worth of journeys as of 2023) and a daily price cap (£5.25 as of 2023).
5. UK Department of Transport (January 2023). “Costs, fares and revenue for local bus services: at 2021/22 prices [adjusted for inflation]”. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/bus-statistics-data-tables#costs-fares-and-revenue-bus04
