September 16 2026
Graham Vidler, Chief Executive of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, reflects on the role buses play in keeping Britain moving - and asks us to imagine what life would look like without them.
Imagine, for a moment, that tomorrow morning there were no buses.
No familiar service pulling up at the end of your road at half past seven. No school bus. No connection into the nearest town. No way of getting from the railway station to the hospital, or from home to an early shift when the trains have not yet started running.
For millions of people, the first consequence would be very simple: they would struggle to get where they needed to go. But it wouldn’t stop there.
The café that relies on staff arriving before breakfast would feel it. So would the high street missing its shoppers, the hospital missing patients or workers, the college missing students and the community group missing volunteers. Roads would fill with more cars. Some journeys would become considerably more expensive. Others simply would not happen at all.
During Catch the Bus Month, we rightly celebrate bus journeys themselves. But we should also spend a little time thinking about everything those journeys make possible.
Buses are one of those pieces of national infrastructure that can be easy to take for granted precisely because they are so woven into everyday life.
Every day, around 11 million journeys are made by bus in Britain. Behind each one is a reason for travelling: earning a wage, attending a lesson, seeing a doctor, meeting a friend, buying the weekly shop or simply getting out of the house.
Put those millions of individual journeys together and their impact is enormous.
Independent research commissioned by CPT from KPMG found that bus passengers spend £39.1 billion a year in local economies. On average, a passenger spends £32 at their destination on a return journey, whether that is in shops, cafés, restaurants or leisure facilities. Remove local buses and KPMG estimates that Britain’s high streets could lose £9.2 billion of spending every year, because some of those journeys would not be made by another mode – they would simply disappear.
The same is true of work. More than two million commuters rely on buses, collectively earning around £72 billion a year and generating more than £15 billion in tax revenue. The bus industry itself directly employs more than 105,000 people and supports a further 53,000 jobs through its supply chain, contributing £11 billion to the economy.
Those are big numbers. But the smaller, less easily observed effects matter just as much.
A bus route means a teenager can get to college without needing a parent to drive them. It means someone without a car can consider jobs beyond walking distance. It gives an older person the freedom to see friends, go shopping or attend an appointment independently. It lets somebody volunteer at the local football club, visit a relative in hospital or spend an afternoon in town.
KPMG calculated that the better connections buses provide to work, education, healthcare and other activities are worth £8.7 billion every year. Bus services support voluntary activity worth more than £1 billion and deliver billions more in health and wellbeing benefits.
Perhaps the most revealing figure of all is this: KPMG estimated that the bus network is worth £3.5 billion a year even to people who do not use it.
Why? Because there is value in knowing it is there.
You may drive to work today, but need the bus when your car is in the garage. Your children may need it as they become more independent. An elderly parent may rely on it. Your employees, customers or neighbours may depend on it every day. A functioning bus network gives communities resilience and people choices.
And then there are all the journeys we need to move onto buses.
CPT’s Decarbonisation Dividend research with WPI Economics showed the enormous prize available if each of us made even a modest change to the way we travel. If everybody switched just over one car journey a month to bus or coach by 2030, the cumulative saving would be around two million tonnes of CO2e. Moving around two journeys a month by 2050 would deliver still greater emissions savings alongside billions of pounds of benefits from reduced congestion and improved health.
One full double-decker can take as many as 75 cars off the road. That is an extraordinarily efficient use of a finite amount of road space.
Which brings us to the frustrating part: we know how valuable buses are and we also know how to make them better.
Earlier this year, independent analysis commissioned by CPT found that increasing bus speeds in England by just 10% could generate £5 billion in economic benefits, while making 2.6 billion existing passenger journeys quicker and helping to generate another 147 million bus journeys each year. Measures such as properly enforced bus lanes, traffic-light priority and better coordination of roadworks are hardly revolutionary technologies. They are practical decisions about how we use our roads.
And previous CPT research has found that a typical package of investment in better bus services and infrastructure can return at least £4.55 for every £1 invested.
So perhaps “where would we be without the bus?” is the wrong question. We know the answer: poorer, more congested, less connected and with fewer choices about how we live our lives.
The more important question is: where could we be with better buses?
We could have faster journeys and more thriving high streets. We could give more people access to jobs and education. We could reduce congestion rather than simply accepting it as an inevitable feature of modern life. We could make it easier for people to leave the car at home occasionally – not through lectures or restrictions, but because the alternative is genuinely convenient.
Most importantly, we could protect and strengthen something millions of people already depend upon.
This Catch the Bus Month, I hope plenty of people who have not taken a bus for a while will give one a try. But I also hope we recognise the bigger point: the humble bus does an awful lot of heavy lifting for Britain. We would certainly notice if it were gone, which is why we should value it properly today.