April 29 2025
CPT's Director of Policy and External Relations, Alison Edwards, looks on the bright side of the political airtime buses are receiving.
As the English local elections loom, buses are basking in the political spotlight – with candidates up and down the country jostling to pledge improvements to routes, frequencies and fares.
It’s good to see the importance attached to Britain’s favourite way to get around - buses, after all, account for two thirds of public transport journeys.
But sometimes, the language can be a little fast and loose – or indeed, unnecessarily gloomy. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, for example, this week claimed buses are in a “death spiral”.
Few bus operators, or bus users, will recognise that characterisation. In fact, over the last year, bus travel has been enjoying one of its biggest growth spurts for years.
In England outside London, the average person caught the bus 27 times in the year to June 2024, travelling a total of 136 miles. That’s a 15% increase in journeys, and a 13% rise in distance on the previous year according to the Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey.
That’s no flash in the pan – another set of data, the DfT’s annual bus statistics, found that journeys had risen by 8% to 4.04 billion across the entirety of Great Britain in the year to March 2024 – the fastest growth since 1955.
England’s national bus fare cap has helped, as have policies such as Scotland’s free travel scheme for under 22s. But so, too, have initiatives by commercial bus operators working in partnership with local authorities – in Portsmouth, for example, journeys are up by 17% year-on-year through a combination of bus priority schemes and frequent turn-up-and-go services.
Norfolk, Brighton and Leicester are all examples of places where buses are thriving, and in Manchester commercial operators have worked closely with Andy Burnham to make the Bee Network a success.
Those who catch the bus tend to be impressed – 83% of passengers are satisfied with their journeys, according to the consumer watchdog Transport Focus.
Gloomy stories about buses are sometimes based on a drop in routes registered with traffic commissioners. This is misleading and doesn’t tell the whole story. There are multiple reasons why routes are deregistered – many have historically been double counted because they crossed different local authority areas, and some have fallen out of centralised statistics as part of devolution deals to local mayors. Others are reclassified when they are no longer considered ‘local’.
It's absolutely true that the bus network has challenges. The financial environment has steadily tightened – with austerity-hit local authorities trimming back funding for socially important routes. The pandemic, and rising wage inflation, haven’t helped.
But the Government has identified buses as a priority, viewing them as fundamental to fulfilling its central mission of kickstarting economic growth. Soon-to-be-elected metro mayors have an opportunity to be champions of bus travel.
And there is broader momentum for buses internationally as industrialised countries pass ‘peak car’ and shift towards lower carbon forms of transport.
There are lots of reasons to be cheerful about buses. Don’t let the doomsters puncture your tyres.