I love buses, and I have never quite understood why so few governments before mine have felt the same way. A couple of years ago, I unintentionally broke the internet with the widelymocked, but true, statement that one of my hobbies is making models of buses. As mayor of London, I was proud to evict from the capital that mobile roadblock, the bendy bus, and to replace it with a thousand sleek, green, streetgracing New Routemasters. Buses are the country’s favourite mode of public transport too – used for twice as many journeys as trains, from thousands more stopping-places across the country. They get teenagers to college. They drive pensioners to see their friends. They connect people to jobs they couldn’t otherwise take. They sustain town centres, they strengthen communities and they protect the environment. They are lifelines and they are liberators. Some people ask what levelling-up means in practice, and what difference it will really make to people’s lives. This is part of what it means. As we build back from the pandemic, better buses will be one of our major acts of levelling-up. As successive mayors showed in London, buses are the easiest, cheapest and quickest way to improve transport. In only a few years, policies started by my Labour predecessor and which I built on transformed the service. With frequent buses, low fares, and priority lanes to glide past traffic, we made London’s bus network a natural choice for everyone, not just those without cars. Usage rose by more than half.
Outside London, with a few exceptions, that lesson has not been learned. For governments of all colours before this one, the bus has been last in the queue, with a fraction of the investment and political attention given to other, shinier things. Traffic has increased, but bus priority has stagnated, and some councils are actually taking bus lanes out. As services get slower, they become more expensive to run and less attractive to passengers. It is a classic vicious circle, which we intend to break. Last year, we announced £3bn of new funding to level up buses across England towards London standards. This strategy describes how we will use that money. Just as we already have in the capital, we want main road services in cities and towns to run so often that you don’t need a timetable. We want better services in the evenings and weekends, to reflect people’s 24- hour lives and to provide safe, reliable transport for key workers. In places unserved or barely served by conventional buses, such as rural villages and out-of-town business parks, we want more demand responsive services with smaller vehicles.
We want simple, cheap flat fares that you can pay with a contactless card, with daily and weekly price capping across operators, rail and tram too. We want a network that feels like a network, with easy-to-understand services, consistent high standards and comprehensive information at the touch of a phone. We want 4,000 new green buses, and many others, running faster and more reliably in special lanes. As in London, all that will need councils, who control the roads, and bus operators to work together.
Our job has changed because of Covid. In some ways it is harder. Bus use has dropped, though by less than on the railways. In some ways it is easier. The industry has had almost £1bn in emergency funding, and will need significant public support for some time to come. The deal for operators is that we will give you that support, and the measures to unstick traffic that you have wanted for years – but in return, we need your cooperation and partnership to deliver the policies in this strategy. In every way, the pandemic has made our job more urgent. We must build back greener, minimising pollution and tackling the congestion that clogs up our towns and cities. But as the country recovers, this strategy looks to the long term.