North Somerset Bus Improvement Plan

[Dai Corner]

North Somerset Council say

Bus services in North Somerset will be transformed over the next three years thanks to a major investment programme by North Somerset Council in partnership with the West of England Combined Authority.

These improvements will also accelerate the decarbonisation of transport – a key priority for the council as part of its commitment to tackle the climate emergency.
Following a successful bid to the Department for Transport (DfT), over £105m funding is allocated for improvements, with £48m earmarked for capital improvements in North Somerset alone. £57.5m will be used as a pooled revenue fund with the West of England Combined Authority to enable delivery of the Bus Service Improvement Plan. The final funding amount will be confirmed by the DfT later this year
At their meeting on Wednesday 22 June, North Somerset Council's Executive made a recommendation that the Council approves the commissioning plan to deliver the Bus Service Improvement Plan. This will see bus priority measures on key roads including the A370, A369 and A38.
Improvements will include:

• An ambitious fares support package to ensure that buses remain excellent value as inflationary costs impact on the bus industry.
• A significant increase in the current bus network, delivering a comprehensive network of services with frequency standards matched to the population densities and demands.
• Higher bus frequencies in our towns and urban areas, offering a good range of destinations and connections including with rail. Major towns should expect a minimum frequency of 60 minutes, with many increased to every 30 or 20 minutes on priority corridors such as the A370, A369 and A38.
• A range of bus services to support the 24/7 economy, providing improvements to the early morning, evening, night, and weekend services.
• A single bus network with every vehicle and bus stop identifiable as part of the network, through a common brand.
• Reliable, faster and consistent journey times.

The improvements will be delivered through an 'Enhanced Partnership' model, to be approved by the DfT. This is a statutory agreement between local transport authorities, bus operators and highway authorities under which each party makes legally binding commitments to improve bus services and the facilities associated with them. An Enhanced Partnership has the potential to bring about improvements quickly, and it puts in place a framework under which future bus service improvements can be delivered as the capital schemes are delivered.
Cllr Steve Hogg, North Somerset Council's executive member with responsibility for transport said: "We have declared a climate emergency and transport decarbonisation is an essential part of our action plan to reduce emissions to net zero in North Somerset. Around 43 per cent of our carbon emissions are from transport and we cannot continue to use the car in the same way as we have done for the previous 50 years.
"This funding package offers a truly transformational level of funding, eclipsing anything previously seen in public transport in the history of North Somerset Council. The investment represents a genuine opportunity to deliver many of the 2030 carbon reduction targets, by improving the effectiveness of public transport to a level that creates a genuine alternative to the use of private vehicles.”

North Somerset bus services to transform with £105m improvement plan

www.n-somerset.gov.uk

Having recently seen cutbacks the 'significant increase in the current bus network' will no doubt be welcome.

I wonder if the likes of @Citistar will get a slice of the action or will First and Stagecoach get to lap it all up?

 

[Flange Squeal]

@Citistar ’s response doesn’t sound hopeful.

BSIP Press: A Response

North Somerset Council have today released this press release regarding their Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) to create an Enhanced Partnership (EP) scheme they are enacting with the West of En…

citistar.wordpress.com

North Somerset Council have today released this press release regarding their Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) to create an Enhanced Partnership (EP) scheme they are enacting with the West of England Combined Authority.

In response:
Citistar have been forced to stop running bus services because our services were excluded from the scheme. This exclusion would give local government officers (at WECA and North Somerset) the choice to pick and choose which parts of the scheme we were included in. There was a possibility that we would have been excluded from any publicity (such as roadside displays and maps), statutory ticket schemes or even using bus stops or facilities upgraded with EP funding.

If we had wanted our services to remain fully integrated as part of the network, we would have been forced to upgrade vehicles to Euro VI or zero emissions with no financial support whatsoever. The capital cost alone of doing this spread over five years would have increased our standing costs around sixfold.

As a result, several villages in North Somerset lost their only links to local towns and in some cases their only usable bus services. These services were not empty, most journeys were carrying two thirds of the capacity of the bus or more. Council staff and elected members are fine with the loss of these routes because the services weren’t being operated by a major operator. Staff at the ITU decided that they didn’t need to bother with impact assessments on how these withdrawals would affect the most vulnerable members of their electorate because they’ve already decided they weren’t going to bother replacing them.

Senior council staff have also told us that they are only interested in supporting services which stand a chance of becoming fully commercial within three years, which presumably means that services such as the 53, 54, 55, 57 and 59 will all be running on a fully commercial basis without any subsidy in a few years.

Despite independent local businesses telling North Somerset Council that we don’t have the infrastructure to run buses 24/7, they persist in telling us that they need more operators on board to provide services, but that only those willing to run buses 18 hours a day, at least six days a week are of interest.

North Somerset Council: Proud to put local businesses off the transport network.

 

[ashkeba]

@Citistar seems a good guy and it sounds like state intervention in that area is being a bit strange but posts like https://citistar.wordpress.com/2022/06/09/ask-the-audience/ which seem to argue for focus on current users and ignoring unserved potential users like commuters and late evening returns, does not fill me with warm feelings, as someone who grew up with useful public transport to school and then work who has been astonished that bus travel to work is not possible from so many English villages. I am sure much of that is underfunding from councils failing to value the capacity increase of a bus compared to a traffic jam but these arguments against change and experiments from operators are saddening too. Of course, experiments and improvements should be tax funded as public benefits for us all from less jams too.

 

[Citistar]

@Citistar seems a good guy and it sounds like state intervention in that area is being a bit strange but posts like https://citistar.wordpress.com/2022/06/09/ask-the-audience/ which seem to argue for focus on current users and ignoring unserved potential users like commuters and late evening returns, does not fill me with warm feelings, as someone who grew up with useful public transport to school and then work who has been astonished that bus travel to work is not possible from so many English villages. I am sure much of that is underfunding from councils failing to value the capacity increase of a bus compared to a traffic jam but these arguments against change and experiments from operators are saddening too. Of course, experiments and improvements should be tax funded as public benefits for us all from less jams too.

My advocacy begins with the passengers we already have and the journeys they are making. Those who have been supportive and have come back since Covid should receive a usable service before we start building unsustainable mountains on the wishes of imaginary passengers. The trouble with public surveys regarding passenger transport is that they get hijacked by groups who think they know where the demand is and there will be multiple surveys under different names with identical responses which skew the results. The West of England Combined Authority (WECA) Bus Strategy consultation was a prime case of this. If we are to spend lots of time and money going out to consultations, then they need to produce meaningful results rather that just an echo chamber for what WECA and North Somerset's staff have already decided is what is going to happen.

I think the way that recent cuts to late evening services around North Somerset have been handled are ham-fisted and clumsy. Instead of drawing a line at 2100, why not extend the gaps between later journeys? Instead of 1915, 2015, 2115 on X7 and a half hourly frequency to Nailsea on X9, just run evening X7 hourly after 2015 until a 2315 departure. I honestly do not believe there is tangible, real demand for evening services to run as frequently as daytime services. But First and our overlords in Clevedon and Central Bristol cannot grasp this. Schedulers are not permitted to have brains any longer - if Optibus says that's what happens, then that's what happens.

In the past, i had advocated an "innovation fund" style form of tendering where underperforming routes or developer funding could be put to the market with a "come up with the best project" approach. This was summarily ignored, except perhaps by the larger operators who took their awards from the 2021 West of England Combined Authority (WECA) tendering and registered exactly what they wanted to operate instead of what was tendered.

Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant now as First and Stagecoach (perhaps HCT too) are busy having private meetings behind closed doors with councils to ensure that smaller operators are forced out of the market. There are token Enhanced Partnership meetings every fortnight (when they don't get cancelled), but none of the big operators will say a word at these in the presence of others.