As for @philg999's recollections of 1986, that was a moment in time. I was brought up in a rural shire county and there was a greater service provision in 1986 than now.
Moreover, it didn't change appreciably in 1986 as many services moved to tenders (having already had council support) AND arguably provision was better by 2000 because of various funding schemes; instead, it was post 2010 when the coalition government slashed the grant to local authorities so that services got chopped. I'd also point out that in 1986, my county had worse bus services than in 1981 (when various council cuts and MAP schemes were enacted), and they were worse than 1971 when government funding was cut back.
In 1986 that was certainly the case for me. The bus service was more or less hourly from Monday to Saturday between the hours of 7am and 11pm (with roughly a 90 minute gap between 8 and 10pm) and there were three return trips from town on a Sunday. That service pattern was the same as it had been for years before de-regulation and it remained so for a good while afterwards. The actual departure times were tweaked every now and again but, overall, the service pattern remained the same.
After 1985/6, the first run in the morning and the post 6pm services were put out to tender by the regional council. It didn't make any difference to begin with because the incumbent operator won that tender, but a few years later those services were re-tendered and were won by a neighbouring (nationalised) operator.
That was a pain for me because, while I had a season ticket to get me to and from school, it meant that my season ticket no longer covered my evening journeys to band practice/model railway club etc. I could mitigate against this by taking an earlier bus into town in the evening, but I would still have to buy a separate single to get me home on one of the last buses. The same would have applied for someone who had to be in town for an 8am start and finished work at 5pm - two different operators were involved despite them both being government owned!
After privatisation there was a brief improvement when the day services went half-hourly and two additional journeys were added to the Sunday timetable. This made a huge difference for getting to and from work - I had far less hanging around time between starting/finishing and leaving/getting home. The later Sunday services allowed me to go away for weekends more often because I knew I'd be able to get home without relying on unaffordable taxis.
My point was rhetorical (in part) and I was alluding to the fact that bus services don't exist in a vacuum but are intimately impacted by wider social trends. In those highly rural areas that were never viable (or at the very edges at best), you had generations where car ownership was limited and you had a coterie of women who had never learnt to drive and had little to no access to a car in any case. That has now gone, and we can say the same of the decline of the evening drinker in the 2000s, as we could in the 1950s when the refrigerator meant the end of the near-daily shopping trip or television spelt the end of the evening cinema trip.
The point about women who were unable to drive is a good one. On my evening return journeys, the majority of passengers were women who were coming home from the bingo (there were a few blokes too), but none of them could drive and, in those days, pensioners were still paying half-fare. When the bus company introduced minibuses there were a few occasions where I'd have to stand on the way home and as a result I'd often wait for the very last bus in order to make sure that I was able to get a seat!
So in the case of intensely rural services, the gig is up and it's about getting the most appropriate coverage for the lowest amount of financial support (i.e. not DRT). In the shires, there is probably the opportunity (in some circumstances) where there can be growth. Even in places like Wiltshire, there have been examples in the 2000s where partnerships between the LA and Stagecoach managed to generate patronage on certain corridors.
I agree about the gig being up. In the case of my local route, the main customer base literally died off. The increase in car ownership ensured that there wasn't another generation following. I have to admit that I played my own individual part; as soon as I passed my driving test I would drive because I no longer had to rely on lifts to get me to my ultimate destination and, more importantly, no longer had to hassle people to make sure that those lifts got me back to the bus station in time to avoid being stranded.
Latterly, the uncertainty about funding for the evening services was probably the final nail. They were initially cut back due to a lack of funding, reinstated after the council had a rummage down the back of the sofa and then cut back permanently.
However, it is really in those urban environments where buses can still play a major part in moving large numbers of people. What it isn't is to be sexy - it needs to be a viable alternative for major traffic flows. I had hoped that we might see the Labour government with a clear plan to wean the country off the 5p fuel duty holiday and perhaps tilt the balance to buses just a little. It really does need local politicians to be brave enough to make and keep with plans to improve bus priority to make buses more reliable and more competitive (as we've seen in Brighton and Reading amongst others). The "bring back control" mantra and caricatures of bus barons is just catnip fed by politicians; what I want to know is why there would be more people travelling from Farnworth to Bolton under Bee Network? What is BN doing to make buses fundamentally more attractive to passengers?
I still think that there's hope for some, if not all, rural services. I don't really envisage that there will be a return of evening services in my area but I think there's scope for Sunday services, even if it's only on a seasonal basis. It does require a bit of joined up thinking and some decent marketing. If nothing else, in an area where there's no natural competition between operators and tendered services are the norm on certain routes, there should be some effort to provide a multi-operator ticket or a common contactless system.
It doesn't really matter if a company is owned by a national government, a council, a large private group or a small independent; we should have a transport
system that allows people to make seamless journeys between point A and B without worrying about the cost of going via C, D, etc.
