Milton Keynes has a grid of fast flowing roads. However, it is also notorious as the most car-dependent town in England.
As Milton Keynes has a grid, why don't all bus routes run straight direct from the centre to the destination on the grid roads, with a ring of orbital routes which also run rectangular on the grid as well?
The current network map doesn't see a grid of bus routes at all.
First of all this is the current map - notice just how sweeping the cuts have been now almost all subsidy has been moved to the (useless) MK Connect demand responsive scheme:
A few reasons in my book as a resident for the last 21 years (who never really uses buses these days):
First, and most importantly, Milton Keynes (MK) is and was constructed as the "city of the car" (and finally having city status can properly adopt that moniker). Car travel is very, very easy on wide open main roads most of which still carry National Speed Limit (60/70mph). Congestion is compared with other comparable places light and short-lived, with a 5 minute delay considered to be a long one. Thus, the mode of transport of choice is the car - if you have one, you will use it - and secondarily the taxi. Taxis are cheap because their main cost is the driver and journeys are very quick. Thus bus travel is a distress purchase, and it is incredibly difficult to make it otherwise. For instance from my house to the centre takes about 5-6 minutes, and it's always possible to park next to where you're going at very low cost - a bus simply can't compete with that.
The second mode of transport of choice, if you can't afford a car/taxi or can't drive for other reasons, is the bicycle. MK has a network of shared cycle paths not dissimilar to the Dutch model which means utility cycling works quite well, if a bit of effort because of the hills, notably where roads are crossed. Perfect for e-bikes and e-scooters, for what it's worth, and scooter trials are ongoing. Cycling is however lower than you'd think with the quality facilities, largely because of how easy driving is.
So where this leaves us is the bus being a mode of transport mostly used by people who have no other viable option - which means a very high proportion of passholders. The city was actually designed for solely grid road bus running, with "station" like infrastructure at underpasses (comparable to the various busways to an extent though with lower quality shelters), and in many locations you'll see from the map buses do run on the grid roads. However there are a few issues with this.
The original grid squares were all about 1km x 1km, which meant a walk of no more than 500m to a stop, with typically one by each roundabout on each leg and one in the middle. However, more recent grid squares were larger, with Furzton being the largest at about 1.5km across. This means that the "magic figure" of 500m maximum walk is breached. But the majority of users, being elderly/infirm etc, wouldn't be able to walk 500m+ and so this isn't an option. Add to that that the access paths to these "stations" tend to be overgrown and dark and so people perceive them to be unsafe. The crime stats don't actually bear this out - there is very little crime in underpasses - but it's how people feel, and if they don't feel safe they won't use the buses. (This also acts as a dissuader to cycling).
It has been suggested that buses should just run along the grid - e.g. a V1 bus, an H1 bus etc as they do in say Barcelona. The problem of course there is that only a few routes would have direct access to the centre, plus you've got the "skew" of needing to serve the old towns of Bletchley, Stony Stratford, Wolverton and Newport Pagnell. And while MK is distributed, it's nowhere near
as distributed as a typical European large, sprawling city centre full of residential and business properties. Also, your outer buses would be non-viable - hardly anything along some of the outer grid roads like the V1 for example. Also, Barcelona's system is designed for connecting with the metro, which MK doesn't have.
FWIW one thing that was tried a while back (by now-long-gone Stansted Transit) was the idea of dedicating a bus to an estate or pair of estates and using it to run half-hourly around the estate then into the centre fast, and the same in reverse. This really didn't work - loadings from one estate were way too low to be viable - it was basically little more than a village bus, the kind that runs every other Thursday.
I think that probably sums it up? In short, the design of MK is not viable for commercial public transport, and so what services there are are making the best* of a bad situation.
* Noting that Arriva MK is a shoddy operation which probably does put people off by way of its lack of quality "feel"** and poor management - however that doesn't really impact substantially on the main problems.
** It would be very interesting indeed to see what effect on viability adopting an Alex Hornby style quality look-and-feel in MK would have - this isn't that costly, it just requires a bit of thought and an attitude shift. He has made big inroads into bus usage in Harrogate, about the poshest place in Yorkshire and one where you'd think people would just use one of their Range Rovers or Jags in preference.
