I live in a small rural town where the last bus now arrives at 9pm and last departure is at 8.15pm. Before Covid, the last arrival was 10pm. Historically there were on Saturday nights late departures at 10.30pm, however with the closure of the local cinema and changing drinking habits, when the last late evening bus was withdrawn, there was just one regular passenger. A waste of money. Covid has further changed peoples habits with many clubs and societies folding this depressed demand further.
Bingo halls have rapidly declined too which used to be a popular place for people of the older generation. Older people would then use the bus to get home as the bus was free with their pass. Theatres and cinemas as you say also closed down or in some cases, moved to out of town places.
The problem is I can't think of any examples of routes where two operators are competing and where that is actually providing a good passenger experience. Usually it makes it worse.
Competition in Liverpool brought about investment in newer, higher spec vehicles and even the introduction of Stagecoach Gold into the area. Because of competition in Bolton, the 125 had a very cheap return ticket. Thanks to competition in Crewe on the 84, D&G and Stagecoach have introduced cheaper tickets and the frequency is now higher than when Arriva ran the route on their own, is that not better for passengers?
In most cases now though, there are ticket agreements in place between operators which has huge benefits for passengers connecting onto other buses (yourself and others often say about how connections are important and should be made easy for passengers). The Activ8 route in Salisbury has a great system where there is ticket acceptance between Stagecoach and Salisbury Reds. If people want to connect onto other buses at either end, they can do so with the operators own tickets. Is that not a good thing? If this was Salisbury Reds only, connections onto other buses in Andover would require an additional payment and similarly if it was ran by Stagecoach, connections in Salisbury would require additional payments.
TfL is in the remit of the Mayor of London, an elected position, and is a public body which makes it subject to, among other things, Freedom of Information regulations. This is already vastly more accountability than FirstGroup or Stagecoach has, for example.
Just because TFL is under the Mayor of London, they are by no means accountable. Mayors do what they want and no amount of public backlash stops that. Are you actually keeping up with what has been going on in London? Back in 2019, 79% of people objected to TFLs plans to reroute buses in Croydon, the plans went ahead anyway. As with almost everything political these days, it doesn't matter what the public want, the elected officials are never held accountable and staff within the public transport authorities are never, ever held accountable. More and more Freedom of Information requests are being refused as Authorities don't want you to have the information. IF you call them out for anything and they either ignore you, run off crying, blame someone else, or poorly justify their decisions for mismanaging public funds. It's happening all around the UK right now. No elected position is accountable anymore. You can attempt to vote them out but then they are all as bad as eachother, nothing changes.
I don't think the service provided is amazing but I think it's usable. This is because every time I have tried to catch a bus in London, one has turned up within a sensible timeframe and not been an ancient rattling piece of rubbish. It has also had clear information on board so I know which stop to alight at and the fares have been reasonable. This is far more than I have come to expect from anywhere in the UK outside London.
'Ancient rattling piece of rubbish', most of Londons buses are also available outside of London and the bodies built to the same specification. You have also been lucky in London to not have a rattling bus because I assure you, there are many.
Fares are reasonable outside of London generally (yes some exceptions), as we have been through many times before on this forum, bus fares outside of London reward regulars as the weekly ticket prices can often be cheaper than the London bus cap! I also notice that you haven't mentioned anywhere that since the Bee Network in Manchester, a good number of people are paying more for their journeys. Diamonds SuperSaver for route 37/38 was £15.60 for a weekly. It's now £21 for the Bee Network ticket. 33% price increase due to the network being publicly ran. That is on top of the mayoral precept which has gone up to cover the costs of this operation so people are paying extra, twice, for this bus network, once through council tax and also through fares. Wonderful system, let's all dance around the campfire and sing positive songs.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make here. Of course councils can subsidise bus services but this has nothing to do with holding the commerical operators to account for the standard of service they are providing.
There are things that they can do and things that they are going. Not all make them popular with operators but it's happening. Warrington Bus Station operates on a slot based system and, unless you are Warringtons own buses, if you miss your slot due to not being on time, they have the right to refuse you permission to stop at the bus station. The bus station manager could get away with fining an operator as well for using a bus stand not in their allotted time slot. Merseyside have started to charge departure fees at bus stations depending on which 'euro' rating the bus is (so emissions based charging) which encourages companies to use more environmentally friendly buses. OF course this isn't seen in the public eye though.
In general though, councils can do hold commercial operators to account, they choose not to. As Exeter Council did, councils can monitor performance and report operators to the Traffic Commissioner which can result in large financial penalties for the operators. The regulatory body for enforcing punctuality should be higher up than local authorities, not least because some authorities have a very 'anti bus' approach and will fine operators constantly and the area would have no buses left at all (To throw an example out there of how 'anti bus' councils can be, Milton Keynes reported all of the operators for not running a full timetable during Covid)
en.wikipedia.org
Many firms still thought moquette was a luxury. High floors were not uncommon from the SBGs conservative approach (Y type Leopards on local bus services?), NBC firms buying LHs or Fords, or independents gaming the bus grant by getting new coaches that were employed on bus work for a proportion of the year. Off bus ticketing was uncommon outside PTE areas, and even exact fare in places like Carlisle! That changed massively with deregulation. Then you had the myriad of restrictive service restrictions about when and where you could pick up/set down passengers. The Explorer ticket in the North East couldn't be used for journeys wholly within Tyne and Wear, for instance. Once the massive upheaval began to settle down and investment plans made, you had firms actually getting better vehicles than in the past for the most part... A Dennis Dart with Plaxton body may not have the kudos of an ECW bodied RE but they were better. Go to bus rally (I don't but if you want to) and look at some poppy red National... then imagine it a bit faded, and cold, and a gruff driver ringing off tickets with an Almex machine... that was the reality behind much of the regulated era.
"
