Why is the UK completely incapable of treating public transport as a whole?

[markymark2000]

Then why bother with route numbers at all, since we are apparently going to accept duplicated route numbers in the same small city?

Bus usage is continuing to crater, the current state of affairs is untenable if you actually want a functioning public transport system to meet climate commitments etc.
A lot of people here seem to want integration without actually having integration.

Duplicated route numbers don't happen often, they are generally long standing route numbers which date back a long time.

I can say with 100% certainty that bus usage is not declining due to the bus numbers and if you say that, you are delusional. Changing route numbers in the way you suggestion will significantly reduce passenger numbers because of the confusion. What might seem confusing to you right now, works. What you deem not confusing will confuse the vast majority of passengers. I can say with 100% certainty,

As I have said above, integration DOESN'T WORK. Those which have it firstly have huge debts trying to make it work and also, it is used as a chance to cut back bus routes and push people onto mass transit. Competition is making people choose between the trains and buses and that simply doesn't work and people stop using public transport then. People want choice and they want a direct journey. All forms of full integration result in buses being cut back on the trunk routes and increased journey time for bus users.

I think it's fair to say that everyone supports very basic integration but it will not happen until attitudes change. The system isn't broken, it's the councils and PTEs idology which is broken. TFGM for example being petty and not supporting System One because it's an operator led ticket, not a TFGM ticket (so they make no money from it), CWACC choosing not to sell National Express tickets at Chester Bus Station because 'it's too much extra work', SYPTE having completely different day and night routes for no reason. Then you have Councils who won't install bus priority which makes bus journeys faster and won't fund proper bus facilities to encourage usage. Oh, then you have Whack a Mole councillors. Pop up to complain and slate buses when down their street of 30 people and when something is rectified (the whack), they pop back into the hole.

The issue with all public transport is that you, MPs, Councillors and so many others just sit there criticizing it and coming up with completely useless ideas on how to 'fix' it. No one with half a brain cell tries to make any improvements. The lack of positive press gives public transport a bad name and that is how it gets looked at as 'poor people transport'. There are many people who would rather drive millions of miles than use a bus for 10 minutes because it isn't seen as a nice form of transport. All public transport operators are trying to improve things for passengers and make the system better, this is overshaddowed though by irrelevant people shouting louder and slating it.

So multiple buses going to different places having the same numbers is particularly user friendly?
K370 is not really much harder to remember than 370 is it?

Or remembering which of the number one buses you are supposed to board, in a town you may never have visited before.
People don't want to bother with this stuff, so they take a taxi.

The bus system is so badly broken that in the vast majority of the country its going to have be torn down and built again, if it even exists.
There is not much to disrupt, and as I said, cities would continue as they did but with a letter on the front.

4 character numbers firstly need more space on bus destination displays meaning less space to display information which people use, you know like the destination. Cross boundary buses (like the X5 coach which is registered as a local bus), end up having 1 area code assigned while travelling through many other zones. Then you have prefix letters which are used to show off the type of route. 'X' is an Express route, 'S' is a School route, 'N' is a night bus for example. Suffix letters are used to show off diversions to the main route. 217 is used as the 'core' route with a 217A running in the evening under a tender going different to the main route. There are some examples of routes having a few different variants with different suffixes.
Chester used to have lots of suffix route 1s. 1A, 1B, 1E, 1J, 1K for example. These got scrapped and reduced to 1 and 1A to simplify things because letters and numbers complicate things.
A final thing to add is that you can't use some letters. I, O, S and Z can't be used because they are so similar to the numbers that people can't differentiate so your 26 letters is then down to 22. Work that with some of the already well established prefix's. You only actually have 19 letters to work with and you have letters then completely unrelated to an area.

Your plan is literally fix something which isn't broken.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

As a modest improvement in route numbering, perhaps operators could move away from names and decimals?

TrentBarton run the "Sixes" - a set of routes from Derby numbered 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and (inconsistently) 6X. A bit too clever to be useful.

What happens to this approach when you have ten routes in the family - would you have both 6.1 and 6.10?

And where do you look for the 6.1 in a list of routes? It could be after 6 and before 7, It could be before 1 or after 999 along with other non-numeric routes, perhaps under "S" for sixes. It could even be after 600 and before 602 (according to a computer system I once encountered which expected whole numbers and interpreted decimal periods as zeroes).

 

[Bletchleyite]

As I have said above, integration DOESN'T WORK. Those which have it firstly have huge debts trying to make it work and also, it is used as a chance to cut back bus routes and push people onto mass transit.

While Sunderland was a bit of a silly example, this does make sense where you have a good rapid transport rail network (like Merseyrail). Done right, as it is in Germany, it will give people a quicker journey and cost the same price as a through bus ride. And it avoids the blight of polluting buses and ugly bus stations in your city centre.

ENCTS is a big part of the problem here - free bus travel but not other local modes.

 

[edwin_m]

Seems to me a national route numbering system is completely unnecessary, but there should be a policy of no duplication within the same community. Each local authority could maintain a register and bus operators would have to choose a number that doesn't clash with any existing ones along the route. If there was a franchise or similar system for buses, which I personally favour as the single best enabler of integrated transport, then the franchising body would probably allocate the numbers itself.

 

[corfield]

The vast majority of places that would have to undergo renumbering make up a tiny fraction of bus journeys nationwide.

The vast majority of passengers would not see their route numbers change beyond a prefix letter appearing.




Hate to break it to you, but if you want public transport that is properly integrated, it has to be in a national system.

Local authorities are reticent to spend money on "cross border" connections, even when they are the ones taht people might actually want to use.
So Grantham gets endless buses to Lincoln even very few people want to go to Lincoln because they can go to Nottingham on the train or by car instead.
Or the Nottinghamshire CC bus service stops a few miles short of Grantham because thats the end of the county.

There are very few if any natural boundaries in England, it is one continuous developed zone and has to be treated as such.
It's a single organism and its transport system should be organised as such.

Ahh, the great “centralise the power” fallacy. Whitehall would snap you up!

Tempting but never works as it becomes even more insulated from the people it is supposed to serve and drives (hah!) promptly into the “greater good” fallacy of prioritising its agenda over that of what the people on the ground want. This is why more “close to the user” Authorities, for all their (many) faults, will always be more helpful to the actual people.

Note we had decades where things were organised and run nationally, it was a disaster and as this thread evidences, no such joined up thinking occurred, all that happened was “managed decline”. Since all that was (brutally) ripped apart we have seen a renaissance of public transport. Seemingly disorganised yes, but a lot better than what came before.

Let natural organisations evolve at the appropriate scale, and people’s political representatives at those scales, move it forward. If people don’t, ie. the citizens of Grnatham and Nottingham - either they are lazy or don’t care, but it is their problem and I suggest that trying to solve it by creating and organisation who is also then responsible for a 1000 other similar issues - will solve none.

 

[mpthomson]

Lancaster is another interesting one, it has a nice fancy new bus station...which is also nowhere near where anyone wants to go, what I think most people consider the "bus station" is the set of stops down the side of Primark - indeed for a long time I thought it was too! (That set of stops, going more on topic, is reasonably convenient for the railway station). To be fair the old one (now converted into an ugly block of flats) wasn't in a useful place either.

The new bus station is where the old one has always been, for many decades. The block of flats you refer to was built on top of the old Lancaster City Transport bus depot, it was never a bus station. And no, most people from Lancaster think the bus station is the bus station, not the stops on Common Garden street.

 

[BayPaul]

Seems to me a national route numbering system is completely unnecessary, but there should be a policy of no duplication within the same community. Each local authority could maintain a register and bus operators would have to choose a number that doesn't clash with any existing ones along the route. If there was a franchise or similar system for buses, which I personally favour as the single best enabler of integrated transport, then the franchising body would probably allocate the numbers itself.

I agree completely! At the moment I can catch the 17 into town, 12 to the next town or the 22 in the other direction. Nice and simple and easy to remember, and easy to distinguish at a distance. If these were numbers 3817, 3812 and 3822, as they would probably have to be under a national system, then it would be much harder to remember which is which. A simple rule that there must be no overlap of any routes with the same number (e.g. they should not pass closer than 1 mile to each other), with the newer route needing to change its number, would seem to solve any potential confusion. I would also advocate for a system that encouraged consitency of numbers - i.e. X--- for long distance routes, S--- for school routes, H--- for hospital routes, U--- for university routes etc, would make it easier to identify these types of busses in unfamiliar towns.

 

[corfield]

Regarding Preston, it's less about when it was built in the 1960s than what has happened since. There have been proposals to build a bus station adjoining the Fishergate Centre (I believe their surface car park was considered, with that being replaced with a multi-storey) over the years and to replace the existing one, keeping the car park and using the downstairs bit for something else e.g. community use. These have however repeatedly come to nothing.

I suppose you could alternatively argue that Preston doesn't really need a bus station and could instead do MK style[1] cross-city operation, with everything starting and terminating in outer suburbs (or further away) and running along Fishergate, serving maybe 3 sets of stops. While that's now been made one-way (something I don't agree with, though I would agree with banning cars from it) that is still I believe how most people actually use the service, they don't walk down to the bus station. If I was designing a Preston tram service (no, not the silly Trampower garden shed job, a proper one) it would definitely be based on a Fishergate core.

[1] You could argue that the stops outside the railway station with fully covered shelters (a bit 1980s-GMPTE-like) are a bus station, but they're designed for through use rather than terminating, and very little does terminate there - and even one of the few routes that per the timetable does (the 4) mostly changes the number to 14 and carries straight on, for some reason someone somewhere no doubt found made sense.

I think Preston Bus Station was the topic of my first post here.

It is a grim building that should have been torn down, the listing is insane.

It makes no sense as you say - it isn’t where people actually want to go any more than the train station was. 90% of pax get off at stops in Friargate, Fishergate etc.

All it does is offer parking, but for 1960s sized cars, the busses cut off surface foot movement to town necessitating a grim underpass, and it wastes town centre periphery space.

The 2000s Tithebarn plans were equally daft, that being a great lost opportunity to do something at the train station.

Having spent a lot of time on busses in London, the idea of a centralised bus station seems fundamentally wrong, multiple small ones dotted about (many of which are simply rows of stops on a main road) is far more efficient use of space and gives much better travel options.

Busses given they use a (necessarily vast) road network and are physically small (vs train length) do not need a specialised large station like trains do. Distributed stops are their bread and butter given they are orientated around more local short range than trains surely?

 

[al78]

My guess is the government can't be bothered, because it doesn't need too, because public transport users are not a key to government power (by that I mean it is not something that is highly important for a political party to get votes in a general election).

 

[nlogax]

Taking a slightly different look at this thread today; what pressing problems would an integrated transport policy actually solve, and how far up the list of government priorities are those problems?

 

[swissrailpassion]

The climate crisis and green transport are pressing problems. They are becoming political too and after Covid the climate emergency will become crucial as it impinges on daily life.

 

[al78]

Taking a slightly different look at this thread today; what pressing problems would an integrated transport policy actually solve, and how far up the list of government priorities are those problems?

It increases the utility of puiblic transport, which will result in more people using it in preference to driving. This will have the positive side effect of reducing traffic congestion and the associated economic costs, as well as slightly reducing road deaths and serious injuries.

 

[AlbertBeale]

It increases the utility of puiblic transport, which will result in more people using it in preference to driving. This will have the positive side effect of reducing traffic congestion and the associated economic costs, as well as slightly reducing road deaths and serious injuries.

In fact, when the lockdown started and traffic levels dropped, the behaviour of the remaining drivers - at least in London - went from bad to worse overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if deaths and serious injuries, as a proportion of people on the road, turns out to be massively higher during that period. So reduced traffic congestion might not significantly cut road deaths; the best way to do so is, of course, to take private cars out of urban areas completely.

 

[nlogax]

Environment / climate change.. yes, totally rational
Reduction of driving / increasing utility of public transport.. again, totally rational.

Having studied the 'Decarbonising Transport' plans set forth by DfT, the government's take on it almost misses the point entirely. The majority of their plans appear to revolve around a shift to electric vehicles, routing renewables into the charging grid, and removing diesels from the rail network by way of battery tech and electrification. Modal shift is one of the listed strategic priorities, but this is only a part of an integrated transport story.

There is further reference to the 'Future of Transport Zones' but..

£90 million of funding was made available at Budget 2018 to create up to four Future of Transport Zones (FTZs). Each FTZ will be a globally significant demonstrator of new mobility services, modes and models. The FTZs will create a functioning marketplace for mobility, combining new and traditional modes of transport. The zones will introduce measures to tackle local issues and will contribute to decarbonisation by: using mobility credits to incentivise sustainable travel; limiting dead mileage (particularly for logistics); providing people with integrated travel choices; and incentivising mass transit/active travel. Up to four FTZs will be created, including the West Midlands region, which has been allocated £20 million, and will be home to the first FTZ. The four designated FTZs sharing the £90 million of funding will be located in: the West Midlands; Portsmouth and Southampton; Derby and Nottingham; and the West of England Combined Authority.

..these are local FTZs for local people. Nothing integrated considered on a national basis. We're back to regional silos once more, as well as a continuation of modal silos. So what's it going to take for someone to take that logical leap of thinking towards a true integration plan that covers all of the England? I would assume that the devolved parliaments hold the bulk of responsibility for Scotland, Wales and NI.

 

[Tetchytyke]

In fact, when the lockdown started and traffic levels dropped, the behaviour of the remaining drivers - at least in London - went from bad to worse overnight.

It did everywhere. The island brought in a 40mph speed limit (instead of no speed limit!) during lockdown, but not immediately; it was a response to some joker getting drunk then taking his car out for a bit of fun. He offed at the Bungalow, part of the TT course, at 100mph. The 40mph limit put a stop to that.

And how much money does Translink lose each year again? Someone who has the right idea shouldn't have so much losses.

The railway industry in mainland Britain "loses" about £9bn a year, so what does that say about the trains?

Far more than methods of ownership, this fixation on public transport being revenue-neutral is what causes the lack of integration, both on a local and national level.

Look at the issues London Transport had getting BR to embrace the Capitalcard and look at the repetition of those same issues with Oyster on National Rail and those stupid Oyster Extension Permits.

It's the same elsewhere. Tyne and Wear's excellent Transfare scheme was neutered by the bus companies. In most areas a multi-modal ticket is significantly more expensive than a single operator's ticket; if you have the misfortune of needing to use two different bus operators for your commute in Tyne and Wear, your travel costs will pretty much double.

This is all because nobody wants to get a smaller slice of pie, even if sensible changes would increase the overall size of the pie.

Translink losing money is not an issue if we appreciate that the benefits to society outweigh the costs of the subsidy.

 

[py_megapixel]

In most areas a multi-modal ticket is significantly more expensive than a single operator's ticket; if you have the misfortune of needing to use two different bus operators for your commute in Tyne and Wear, your travel costs will pretty much double.

I would like to live in a world where I shouldn't have to care who operates my bus. London is already pretty much at that point, but the rest of the UK is nowhere near.
There is absolutely no reason in my view why private competition should still be considered a good thing if it is increasing travel costs. Which in a sizeable number of cases, it is.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Seems to me a national route numbering system is completely unnecessary, but there should be a policy of no duplication within the same community.

There mostly isn't, though those 3 1s in Chester require the operators concerned to be bashed around the head and not be so stupid. One of them should probably be an X1, not all X routes are limited stop, it's used more widely to mean that it crosses numbering schemes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There is absolutely no reason in my view why private competition should still be considered a good thing if it is increasing travel costs. Which in a sizeable number of cases, it is.

Bus competition exists only in a very small number of places. In practice bus operators are mostly monopolies in terms of the service(s) any given individual is going to use.

Bus vs rail competition is larger and is basically throwing subsidy up the wall.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Bus competition exists only in a very small number of places. In practice bus operators are mostly monopolies in terms of the service(s) any given individual is going to use.

Yes, but in bigger cities you'll find one company has one side of the city and another company has the other side of the city. They're not competing, but the effect is still that you have to pay twice if you have to go across town.

Take Manchester. Stagecoach and Go North West don't really compete. But a Stagecoach day ticket is £4 and an any-bus day ticket is £6. If you can take two Stagecoach buses you're laughing, but if you have to cross town onto a Go bus your commute is an extra two quid a day. It's the same in most areas. It's that lack of integration that becomes a problem.

Certainly when I lived in North Tyneside the fact a Metro day ticket was £4 but a Dayrover was £8 made me think twice when travelling off the Metro network. I normally drove to places like the MetroCentre instead.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yes, and that's where we could do with regulating the system. Indeed, in MTL days Merseyside basically had no operator specific tickets other than singles and returns at all. Then along came Arriva and Stagey and mucked with it.

The thing is, like TOC specific tickets[1], operators could get the same income if there was just one ticket, and it was priced only a small amount above the individual ones, as most people aren't making those cross-operator journeys, they're mostly just going to town (or Toon, in your case )

[1] I'm thinking of the situation where Northern and TPE have their own tickets on a flow where they basically offer the same value proposition. I'm less bothered about market segmentation which has its uses, such as "LNR Only" long distance fares are mostly tempting people out of cars, not off other trains, because the offering is really very different to Avanti's offering, having only in common the fact that it's done in an air conditioned tin tube with 8 wheels.

 

[RT4038]

Yes, but in bigger cities you'll find one company has one side of the city and another company has the other side of the city. They're not competing, but the effect is still that you have to pay twice if you have to go across town.

Take Manchester. Stagecoach and Go North West don't really compete. But a Stagecoach day ticket is £4 and an any-bus day ticket is £6. If you can take two Stagecoach buses you're laughing, but if you have to cross town onto a Go bus your commute is an extra two quid a day. It's the same in most areas. It's that lack of integration that becomes a problem.

Certainly when I lived in North Tyneside the fact a Metro day ticket was £4 but a Dayrover was £8 made me think twice when travelling off the Metro network. I normally drove to places like the MetroCentre instead.

But you are assuming that if there was only one ticket in Manchester that it would be less than £6. I am not so sure. You might just lose the cheap ticket for Stagecoach only. What advantage would that be for anyone?

 

[RT4038]

Yes, and that's where we could do with regulating the system. Indeed, in MTL days Merseyside basically had no operator specific tickets other than singles and returns at all. Then along came Arriva and Stagey and mucked with it.

The thing is, like TOC specific tickets[1], operators could get the same income if there was just one ticket, and it was priced only a small amount above the individual ones, as most people aren't making those cross-operator journeys, they're mostly just going to town (or Toon, in your case )

[1] I'm thinking of the situation where Northern and TPE have their own tickets on a flow where they basically offer the same value proposition. I'm less bothered about market segmentation which has its uses, such as "LNR Only" long distance fares are mostly tempting people out of cars, not off other trains, because the offering is really very different to Avanti's offering, having only in common the fact that it's done in an air conditioned tin tube with 8 wheels.

But is this really anything to do with integration? In all these cases there is a multi-operator ticket available, so if you want that flexibility then just buy it!

Out of interest, you asked the question 'Why is the UK completely incapable of treating public transport as a whole?'. Have the responses answered your question? Do you need deeper responses to anything that you are not satisfied with? There have been all sorts of tangents confusing Why with How and all sorts, even the good enthusiast chestnut of a single bus route numbering scheme!

 

[Bletchleyite]

But is this really anything to do with integration? In all these cases there is a multi-operator ticket available, so if you want that flexibility then just buy it!

It's typically overpriced. It would have no need to be so were there no operator-specific ones.

Out of interest, you asked the question 'Why is the UK completely incapable of treating public transport as a whole?'. Have the responses answered your question?

I'm not quite sure. I'm kind-of inclined to say "because of classic British managerial and organisational incompetence at every level" - which coronavirus is demonstrating nicely, too. With a bit of a side of "because people in Britain love their little fiefdoms and are largely incapable of collective thinking", which has also pervaded the coronavirus crisis.

In many ways, this excellent novel sums up Britain to a tee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompetence_(novel)

 

[RT4038]

It's typically overpriced. It would have no need to be so were there no operator-specific ones.



I'm not quite sure. I'm kind-of inclined to say "because of classic British managerial and organisational incompetence at every level" - which coronavirus is demonstrating nicely, too. With a bit of a side of "because people in Britain love their little fiefdoms and are largely incapable of collective thinking", which has also pervaded the coronavirus crisis.

In many ways, this excellent novel sums up Britain to a tee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompetence_(novel)

It may or may not be overpriced. I'm not really sure what that has to do with integration - nobody has ever said that integration would be cheap!

I am disappointed at this answer - it is a bit of a 'cop out'; like saying the Second World War was lost "because of classic German managerial and organisational incompetence at every level". This does not really get at the roots of 'Why?'
I believe that every country has its national culture and character traits, good and bad (wasn't it Napoleon who described us as a 'nation of shopkeepers'?) and our institutions and decision making is bound up with those traits. All of us, to a greater or lesser degree, have them, even if we also get angry with our fellow countrymen for displaying the selfsame traits that we have ourselves. Perfidious Albion indeed. Been fairly successful in the round though, in spite of ourselves!
Very few countries in this world have integrated transport systems - not that we shouldn't strive for it, but you are perhaps correct that our culture is really against this becoming a reality. We wish we had it, but don't want to pay for it nor make the institutional reforms that would be necessary to implement it.

 

[BayPaul]

I'm not quite sure. I'm kind-of inclined to say "because of classic British managerial and organisational incompetence at every level" - which coronavirus is demonstrating nicely, too. With a bit of a side of "because people in Britain love their little fiefdoms and are largely incapable of collective thinking",

My answers to the question

• Bus deregulation was poorly implemented, and has made it difficult and expensive to co-ordinate busses
• Transport minister is not seen as a good position in government, so tends to get short term occupants who want to be somewhere else
• Public transport still seen as second class to cars, though I think this is improving
• DfT always seem pretty incompetent - both on my fairly irregular dealings with them, and on what I see on this forum.
• The structure of public transport in the UK does not seem well set up for coordination, with different bits managed by DfT, local authorities (of various types), Welsh, Scottish & NI governments, commercial businesses.
• Big mega-projects attract more interest than things like integrated ticketing
• Bus passes suck so much money out of the system that local authorities have little money left to deal with other aspects of public transport, and would tend to suck more money from an integrated system (e.g. in London where they are also valid on the tube)
• General resistance to change
• Differing staff Ts & Cs - if train drivers are paid more than tram drivers and the two systems are separate it isn't a problem. If the two systems merge, then there will probably be a move for the tram driver's pay to move up to the train drivers'. Great for them, but a big dis-incentive to combine systems.
• Too many proprietory systems introduced before standardisation is considered too late

 

[Statto]

Yes, and that's where we could do with regulating the system. Indeed, in MTL days Merseyside basically had no operator specific tickets other than singles and returns at all. Then along came Arriva and Stagey and mucked with it.

The thing is, like TOC specific tickets[1], operators could get the same income if there was just one ticket, and it was priced only a small amount above the individual ones, as most people aren't making those cross-operator journeys, they're mostly just going to town (or Toon, in your case )

[1] I'm thinking of the situation where Northern and TPE have their own tickets on a flow where they basically offer the same value proposition. I'm less bothered about market segmentation which has its uses, such as "LNR Only" long distance fares are mostly tempting people out of cars, not off other trains, because the offering is really very different to Avanti's offering, having only in common the fact that it's done in an air conditioned tin tube with 8 wheels.

That's wrong, MTL on Merseyside did have there own weekly/monthly ecc, ticket in the Supersaver introduced late 80s or early 90s[i know this, as i brought & used a few of them] MTL tickets including the weekly ones had to be first purchased & registered at the MTL shop, as they came with a photocard, but could be renewed at post offices ecc, MTL had no MTL specific day tickets for there buses, you could not buy tickets other than single on board MTL buses, Arriva done away with the photocard issue for weekly tickets, introduced day tickets, & introduced buy on board.

 

[Tetchytyke]

But you are assuming that if there was only one ticket in Manchester that it would be less than £6. I am not so sure.

As I said, it is indicative of a fiefdom attitude. Operators would rather have a bigger slice of a smaller pie than a smaller slice of a bigger pie.

"We would get £4 per person on our own ticket so we will oppose any integration that reduces this, even if overall passenger numbers would increase and we'd have more revenue with integration that doesn't penalise multimodal travel".

In my real world example, the bus operators set the Tyne and Wear multimodal fare at pretty much twice the single mode fare, so they don't lose out compared to their own tickets. But instead of getting 50%-60% of £5 they get 0% of £8, because I won't pay the multimodal premium when I've got two cars parked on the drive.

And away from the PTEs, you don't get multimodal or multi-operator tickets at all. So the multimodal premium is even bigger. Precious wonder bus usage in the provinces has fallen off a cliff.

 

[nlogax]

Lesson I've learned via this forum; when you think there's just one relevant Yes Minister scene, there are invariably two.

 

[edwin_m]

Which one of those includes the phrase "Transport Muggins"?

 

[RT4038]

My answers to the question

• Bus deregulation was poorly implemented, and has made it difficult and expensive to co-ordinate busses
• Transport minister is not seen as a good position in government, so tends to get short term occupants who want to be somewhere else
• Public transport still seen as second class to cars, though I think this is improving
• DfT always seem pretty incompetent - both on my fairly irregular dealings with them, and on what I see on this forum.
• The structure of public transport in the UK does not seem well set up for coordination, with different bits managed by DfT, local authorities (of various types), Welsh, Scottish & NI governments, commercial businesses.
• Big mega-projects attract more interest than things like integrated ticketing
• Bus passes suck so much money out of the system that local authorities have little money left to deal with other aspects of public transport, and would tend to suck more money from an integrated system (e.g. in London where they are also valid on the tube)
• General resistance to change
• Differing staff Ts & Cs - if train drivers are paid more than tram drivers and the two systems are separate it isn't a problem. If the two systems merge, then there will probably be a move for the tram driver's pay to move up to the train drivers'. Great for them, but a big dis-incentive to combine systems.
• Too many proprietory systems introduced before standardisation is considered too late

I think an important answer, which is not really adequately covered by 'General resistance to change', is the fear of the effects of change by the players in the transport industry, both owners/management/staff/government - loss of earnings, loss of status, compensation for these losses, increase of subsidies. This is such poisoned chalice, coupled with general disinterest from voters who see other areas of life far more important, that no one is going to tackle it sometime soon.

So my answers would be:

• Insufficient interest by voters. If asked, most would express desire for integrated transport but actually have other priorities for Govt. and for themselves (owning private transport), and certainly don't want to pay extra for it.
• The structure of control and financing of public transport is too fragmented. Integration will be well nigh impossible until funding and operational control is brought under the same Authority ( and not a BTC type organisaton where the modes acted separately under a remote umbrella). Making this Authority financially locally accountable as well as nationally co-ordinated will be very difficult. Integration will also require difficult decisions on the role of each mode, and there will be winners and losers, in different areas . There is no reason to think that the BTC experience in the 1950s of attempted integration in some quite small areas will be any less fought over now! This could mean rail lines shutting and subsidies moved to bus networks, as well as bus routes competing with rail being reduced or withdrawn.
• The bus and rail modes have totally different histories and financial models. Systems are not compatible, which makes low level integration problematic. (Mainly 'who spends the money to upgrade and harmonise').
• Resistance by the vested interests in the industry, caused by the fear of the effects of change, both owners/management/staff/government - loss of earnings, loss of status, compensation for these losses, increase of subsidies. Examples of this would be Owners losing their businesses entirely or part, or reducing their profitability; Management of operations & Civil Servants losing their jobs and/or status through re-organisation; Staff losing jobs and/or t's & c's through movement of business between modes; National and Local Government having to increase subsidies, and pay compensation to the losers.
• The huge (and not easily quantifiable) costs involved in bringing true integration (timetables, fares etc)

Your views of the competence of DfT, and of standing of Transport Ministers is probably an effect of the insufficient interest by voters, coupled with the competing demands of everyone (both public and private transport). As far as public transport is concerned, it is never going to be satisfactory in the eyes of the most voters (as most really want private cars, and cheap public transport as a backup [which will never be as convenient]).