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
How well do buses integrate with other modes of public transport?
This is something the proposed reforms aim to address. It’s a technical matter; making sure timetables coordinate with each other and allow passengers to switch with minimal effort from bus to rail, vice versa or bus to car at a park and ride.
The first issue is connection time. Anecdotally, spending too much time swapping transport modes is one of the most offputting things about public transport (and something you don’t need to worry about when driving).
There needs to be headway between getting off a bus and boarding a train and vice versa. It can’t be too long (10 minutes+ would count as too long in my opinion) and it can’t be so short that even a small delay risks a missed connection.
Switzerland is a world leader in this, with train and bus timetables synchronised.
Another issue is that despite “integrated transport” being a holy grail in Wales for decades, interchange facilities at Welsh railway stations are often poor. Many stations aren’t accessible to people with disabilities either (Part II).
Who should run the buses?
The proposed reforms are set to allow councils and Transport for Wales to run bus services themselves. It’s worded in such a way to suggest this would be an option of last resort and wouldn’t happen very often.
A franchising system – as proposed for Wales, in use in London, set to start in Manchester – means private bus operators will be contracted to run routes under terms laid down by councils and Corporate Joint Committees/city regions.
One alternative option is a national arms-length state-owned operator (similar to Bus Éireann), which could be contracted to run certain local and long-distance routes that are unattractive to commercial operators (presumably under Transport for Wales branding). TrawsCymru is already this to a degree.
More councils (or councils working together) could take advantage of reforms and form their own bus companies (similar to Cardiff Bus and Newport Bus) – though this would put them in direct competition with existing private operators and it might not be the best use of public funds.
The bus fare debate: free, fixed or flexible
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Radical Wales: Free Public Transport
I’ve looked at the pros and cons of free public transport in the link above.
I’m not going to go over that in detail again. While it sounds attractive it has pitfalls – namely the loss of income to cover operating costs. My fag packet estimate at the time was that universal free bus travel for Wales would probably cost up to £300million a year (likely to be much higher now).
Universal free bus travel could work in some circumstances (such as free bus travel at weekends, which has been trialled on the TrawsCymru network), but there’s no evidence yet that free fares significantly boost passenger numbers where they’ve been tried in Wales.
The other option often discussed is flat fares, such as those used in London or the £2-per-journey trial (£2.50 from November 2023) in England. Daily (£5 for adults) and weekly (£21 for adults) price caps were introduced for the whole-England trial too, meaning passengers wouldn’t be charged more than the capped price.
Interim evidence from England suggests the trial shifted people onto buses from other forms of transport. Half of this was from cars (drivers and passengers) and the other half was from active travel6.
Some bus operators in Wales, like FirstCymru, have trialled “tap-on, tap-off” fares based on distance. They still use a price cap, but charge a set price per kilometre travelled in a straight line between the starting point and the final destination.
Any fare cap in Wales would need to be affordable at a time when subsidies for bus services are already being cut. Yet at the same time, they need to be set at a level where passengers believe they’re getting value for money (the current Deputy Minister for Transport, Lee Waters, told the Senedd in May 2023 that the Welsh Government were working on a £1 fare cap until economic conditions made it unviable).
Do concessionary fares have a future?
If we’re looking to invest more money in bus services, is free bus travel for the over-60s and MyTravelPass (16-21-year-olds) the best uses of public funds?
Do we continue to offer free or reduced-cost travel to select groups? Or do we try to set “fair fares” that bring in income to cover running costs but are low enough to increase passenger numbers?
There’s an important social argument to maintain free passes as they enable people, who would otherwise be isolated, to live independently.
The middle ground would be the introduction of an annual administration charge for free bus passes. Evidence given by witnesses to a Senedd inquiry in 20167 suggested charging between £10-20 per pass, raising up to £15million a year. That assumes everyone who has a free bus pass uses it; actual income would probably be lower than this.
Another option would be to increase the age of eligibility to match the retirement age to cut spending – though previous attempts were resisted.
6. UK Department of Transport (17th May 2023). “£2 bus fare cap evaluation: interim report January 2023”. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/evaluation-of-the-2-bus-fare-cap/2-bus-fare-cap-evaluation-interim-report-january-2023
7. Senedd Cymru (March 2016). “Bus and community transport services in Wales” (p20-22). Available at: https://business.senedd.wales/documents/s49886/Report%20-%20Bus%20and%20Community%20Transport%20Services%20in%20Wales%20PDF%20713KB.pdf
