Friday Reads – 7 June 2019

1. The Northern Ireland bus article cites use of buses increasing across the whole of the province and then focuses on particular services in Belfast. It does not say to what extent the growth in traffic is within Belfast or across Northern Ireland as a whole.

   Public transport in NI is a bit different from the rest of the UK, because the rail network was cut back far more drastically than in Britain. While there are some important towns in Britain without a rail service, a much higher proportion of towns are without trains in Northern Ireland. Of the 50 largest places in the Province, 32 do not have a railway station and rely on inter-urban buses for public transport to Belfast and elsewhere. That incudes important towns, such as Newtownards, Omagh, Eniskillen and Armagh. In general, a good service is provided, with high-quality vehicles.

   Therefore, some of the factors which have led to growth in rail travel in Britain may apply also to bus services in Northern Ireland.

2. The new Tokyo subway train has steerable bogies (17:45) which could be adopted elsewhere once proven in service.

3. Has NI really lost more rail services than comparable areas in the rest of the UK, such as the West Country or Lincolnshire?

   “Of the 50 largest places in the Province, 32 do not have a railway station ”

   https://web.archive.org/web/20140401113858/http://www.nisra.gov.uk/archive/demography/publications/urban_rural/ur_gaz.pdf

   This government article lists places in Northern Ireland with their populations. To find the fifty largest I had to include places with populations as small as 3,000.

   The largest place in NI without a railway station is Newtownards, (pop, 28,860). Wikipedia lists eighteen places in England that are larger than that and have no station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_towns_in_England_without_a_railway_station, the largest being Gosport (82,622), similar in size to Northern Ireland’s second largest city.

   The other rail-less towns you list have populations of 21297, 13823 and 14777 respectively. There are over thirty rail-less English towns larger than these.

4. @LiS – and yet, before and after research following rail closures suggests that bus services are no substitute for trains for a whole variety of reasons. It is also the case that the demographics of bus useage are rather different to those for train services – at least in GB – so it is likely that some other factors are at work in NI.

5. Do Northern Irish oldies get free bus travel?
   This hugely skews bus and train patronage in England.

6. THe NI closures were the result (Pre-troubles) of an attempted deal between various “parties” – the intention was to leave only the Bangor suburban & Belfast-Dublin lines open, with the latter handed over to CIE. “Ulsterbus” & the M-way-builders were looking to clean up, as were the politicians whom I have not named.

   There was an enormous row & the English chief of NIR spoke out – he was sacked, but they “only” managed to close the ex-GNRI line from Portadown to Derry, via Armagh & Omagh.

   As an aside [SNIP -asides not welcome]

   [Slightly modified to be less inflammatory. Malcolm]

7. @timbeau – nor is it clear how many of these 50 ever had railway services (a challenge which will take some time to check….)

8. Free bus travel for pensioners does “skew” bus patronage in England, not necessarily a bad thing though. It has no effect on train patronage outside London though – and about 6 in every 7 Englanders live outside London.

9. @ Timbeau

   Enniskillen (pop ~14k) is 54 miles from the nearest station. The furthest large town on the mainland (nearly said UK!) is Fraserburgh at 35 miles. I think it is probably also fair to say that of the significant towns in NI, more of them lost service than elsewhere, even if they are proportionately smaller.

   Gosport is a bit of a red herring, being 500m from a station, with a bit of a geographical impediment to reaching it! Some of the other places on the list like Dudley and Halesowen are also a bit dubious, both town centres are less than 2 miles from a station. The good people of Tring have to travel that far to get to the town’s own station!

10. Do 32 of the largest places in Great Britain not have a station? I suspect not. I understand that a Northern Ireland top 50 list gets to some quite small places, but isn’t the point being made that as a percentage of the population the coverage for NI is much worse than for GB?

11. @Robert Butlin
    You may be right about percentages, but in this instance actual numbers may well be more important 50% of a small number may well be a lot smaller than 5% of a larger number. If we consider absolute numbers then many of the places listed in England are far more deserving than those in NI. Even with percentages, you could then argue that it’s not Engalnd that should be considered but the English regions or counties.

12. @Malcolm

    “Free bus travel…has no effect on train patronage outside London”. Can’t really agree, because I’m an example where it does have an effect. I live four miles from the centre of a city, and I have the luxury of being able to access it by train or bus. The fares are roughly equal, but I have a bus pass, valid after 0930. If I’m pressed for time or it’s before 0930, I get the train. Otherwise the bus wins (and the train loses) every time: it takes longer, but it’s free.

13. As Robert Butlin says, the point is that a large tract of Northern Ireland has no railways at all and the bus/coach provides a “railway” type service to much of the Province. As an example, the hourly service from Belfast to Enniskillen averages about 40 mph, is limited stop and at quite a few towns stops at a ‘park and ride’ adjacent to the main road without going through the town centre. Services to other places, such as Omagh, are similar. This is an attractive alternative to driving quite a long distance and then finding somewhere to park in Belfast, so my observations have been that the service is used by a wide sector of the population – hence the suggestion that longer-distance services may account for a fair amount of the growth in bus patronage in NI.

14. @LiS – it depends what you think the growth drivers are, of course.

15. @Jim R

    Conversely, where I live, before 0930 you pay peak rate on the trains but flat fare (or free for over-60s) on the buses. So I go to work on the bus, and go home on the train

    @LiS

    There are some P&R coach services like that in England to – for example the “Oxford Tube” calls at Junction 7 on the M40 (and a large number of cars park at the side of the B4009 there), serving rail-less Watlington, Chinnor etc. The Humber Bridge is another example – people park on the south side and get the bus (or car share) into Hull to avoid the toll

16. @ Jim R & Malcolm
    I can’t think of the basis behind Malcolm’s statement. Look at the map of the English rail network and there is a parallel bus route for the vast majority of rail lines.
    We travel from York to Leeds by bus although it’s slower than the train because it’s free.

17. @RogerB – that used to be the case, but sadly, for the last 30 years, many longstanding parallel bus routes have vanished – for example, in Devon and Cornwall , it has long ceased to be possible to travel between, say, Penzance and Exeter (other than by express coach on which concessions are not available). Other major parallel routes that have vanished include Penrith to Carlisle, Shrewsbury to Swansea, Haslemere to Portsmouth, and many others.

18. @Graham H: yes, but you’re citing relatively long distances, and traversing zones of low population density. All Roger B and I are saying is that where reasonable parallel bus services do exist (Liverpool-Manchester and intermediately, Coventry-Birmingham-Wolverhampton and intermediately, Bath to Bristol, Stoke to Stafford, etc) there will be some abstraction of passengers from rail to bus because the latter is free for them. So there is an effect on train patronage, contrary to Malcolm’s original assertion.

19. Roger B, Jim R, Graham H.
    My experience is mainly Lowestoft to Norwich. Obviously with a pass the cost is weighted to the bus but time is another consideration. In general I would use the bus with my pass for choice. Therefore I support the assertion that the bus passes do abstract passengers from the railways.
    For those without passes the train is often cheaper.

20. @Jim R – I wouldn’t disagree with that. It would, I suspect require some fairly close grained analysis to understand the causes. Anecdotally (dangerous, I know), I have both free bus and free train travel but in the Guildford -Haslemere corridor, I almost invariably prefer bus over train, even though the train is half the stop to stop journey time because buses stop within 100m and are twice hourly, whereas the train is hourly and the station is 1200 m away. There will be a lot of micro decisions like that – but the case in question involves only short journeys of 10-20 minutes. Over longer journeys, comfort and reliability begin to count. Train is also cheaper.

    One of the interesting features of the bus network is the general assumption that it comprises a mix of trunk interurban routes complemented by rural/suburban services radiating out from the centre. The NBC Market Analysis Project and – again, anecdotal evidence – suggests otherwise, and in practice, the entire network comprises just the centre to village/suburb routes, which happen in some places to touch the networks from neighbouring centres and thus can be run as a through trunk route. It is arguable that the decline in traditional retail hierarchies has reinforced this trend. Away from the conurbations, this seems to be the way the former networks will go. The French experience is relevant, where the much lower density of population has reduced the bus network outside the towns to just a few market day operations, with virtually no interurban services at all – not even when there is no rail competition.

21. The difficulty may arise from the use of the word “skew”. I didn’t think that the original statement was mainly about journeys where either bus or rail is possible and vaguely sensible. I thought it was about the way bus timetables and fare schemes are constructed around the recognition that a significant part of the income comes from payments by local authorities for journeys made by pensioners. For instance, many Stagecoach fares are very high for single fares, compared with various forms of day ticket, weekly tickets, return tickets etc. This is because the negotiated amount for pass users is based on the normal single fare (although flattened because technology cannot yet determine where pass-users alighted). Except perhaps in London, such distortions do not apply to train timetables and fares, because passes are not valid there.

    I do concede, of course, that trains are in fact affected to some degree, as people have pointed out, from abstraction of journeys where there happens to be a reasonable bus alternative. But any resulting distortion of train timetables, fares, or income, I would submit, is probably quite minor.

22. It can be argued that some of those using the bus free of charge to them would not be making the journey otherwise, so loss of traffic to the railway may not be as great as at first sight. The bus from Glasgow to Largs (fast via the M8 in a high-quality Citaro, four buses an hour) is well used by people 60+ for a day at the sea. Undoubtedly, many would go by train if the bus was not free, but there are sure to be some who can only have a day out because they don’t have to pay the fare or who would not travel so often.

    It is interesting to note from the latest Transport Focus survey of bus passenger satisfaction in England outside London that 13,981 (49%) of the 28,567 passengers surveyed were using a free pass, though that would include people other than 60+.

23. The very high percentage of users travelling free on buses has now led to some unusual approaches by bus operating companies. For example, there is very little impedance to raising fares as there is no price elasticity of demand for holders of travel passes. Operators see this as a way of gouging more income from local authorities (who have no choice but to pay), while fare paying passengers are reduced. It would be interesting to see how the percentage of concessionaires varies between suburban and rural bus routes. My guess is that it will be much higher on rural bus routes, where a vicious spiral of fares increases driving away fare paying passengers is quite apparent .

24. Is that why a day ticket is often not much more expensive than a single.?

25. To bring this thread a bit closer to London: I live outside London and am of an age where I have a concessionary pass. When I travel locally, and in other parts of England, I invariably put the pass onto or into some form of reader which registers my journey and, I assume, charges my local authority for it. Depending on the area and the bus operator, sometimes the driver wants to know where I’m going and sometimes it doesn’t matter; sometimes the machine or driver prints a ticket and sometimes not. But within the TfL area it’s different. I show my pass, or attempt to, but the driver is usually supremely indifferent: I’m sure I could get away with showing anything vaguely bus pass-shaped, or nothing at all. I never get the impression my journey has been registered, so I can’t see how the operator or TfL get any revenue from it. Is this a false impression ?

26. Data from the Transport Focus survey of bus users does show a higher percentage of passengers travelling free in rural areas, but it looks as if an important factor may be the extent to which buses are used by people paying to travel to work. Within the areas in England surveyed by TF the highest percentages of concessionary travel were in Lincolnshire (67%), Northumberland (61%), Worcestershire (59%), East Sussex (59%) and Bournemouth (58%). The last two are, of course, popular retirement areas, but the are numerous people other than the elderly who get free travel. The lowest percentages were West of England (38%), Leicester (38%), Manchester (37%), West Midlands (37%) and South Yorkshire (35%).

    These figures are based on the sample who completed a TF survey, but with 28,567 respondents the result should be reasonably representative.

27. @Jim R

    Interesting – I always seem to be expected to touch in on London buses with my Over 60s Oyster, and it seems to register something.
    Maybe the drivers have no way of recording non-Oyster Freedom passes.
    Or perhaps I don’t look old enough to be allowed free travel (!)

    (The average age of the passengers on the bus I use is about 14)

28. Private bus operators set their fares as a commercial decision, not usually explaining anything to the public (apart from vague phrases like “rising costs”). And if they did explain, we would have no way of knowing whether they have told the truth.

    But in answer to Purley dweller, it is often suggested (and so far as I know, not denied) that the reason for higher single fares (compared to other fares) relates to single fare levels being used in the (secret) negotiations between bus companies and local authorities.

29. The reimbursement to the operator for conveying a pass holder is made by the LA where the journey commenced, not by the holder’s home LA. This has caused issues in touristy places. In London, the operators do not keep any revenue, they are paid an agreed amount to operate the route, therefore they are less bothered about recording usage. It does, of course, skew usage figures to some extent.

30. Current DfT guidance points to using a ‘basket’ of fares, so that return and day ticket prices are included in the broad reimbursement calculation.
    However, many larger operators have agreed with their local authorities to accept a fixed annual sum for reimbursement, which at least gives financial certainty for both parties, if no incentive for the operator to carry more passengers. Nonetheless, as there is still pressure to reduce public spending, I’ve heard that some operators are going (back) to “floating” reimbursement, which is linked to the actual number of trips made, believing that they will be better off from this approach, and which places financial risk with the local authority.
    A large proportion of all authorities pay a flat fare for reimbursement, and various published figures suggest it is hovering around the £1 mark, far below a figure that leaves an operator ‘No better, no worse off’ as the guidance puts it.

31. In London, TfL and London Councils conduct a large scale survey of use of concessionary fares, which is used to provide a total sum to be paid by the local authorities. The data gathered by touching in Freedom Passes is then used to apportion the costs between the 33 London boroughs. Al is correct that the journey is paid for by the authority where it starts, outside London, but in London the journeys are paid for by the borough where the pass holder resides. This does not work, of course, by concessionary pass holders from outside London, which are apportioned between boroughs by formula. Because the totality of these costs are calculated from survey data, there is no need for bus operators to use the readers to collect data from pass holders from outside London. This is why Jim R does not get his pass scanned.

    Interestingly the DfT insisted that Freedom Passes are of a unique design with two chips inside, one which operates Oyster and the other ITSO, so that operators outside London that use ITSO can read them. I’m not at all sure that this was money well spent.

32. Particularly not as Oster Readers can read ITSO cards. I use one every day on Oyster Readers at both ends of my journey.

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