The poor bus service in Bristol - generally accepted to be the worst in the country - is a key factor in the social exclusion of older people. The free bus pass is a substantial step in the right, but free access to an unreliable and inconvenient service leaves much work to do. This paper sets out some of the problems, and some of the arguments for change.

Problem 1: The city’s geography makes Bristol a difficult place to run an efficient bus service. It has a lot of hills, and a double barrier of water separating south Bristol from the rest of the city. This means that all transport routes converge on the three main bridges across the river - at Ashton, Bedminster and Temple Meads. Add this to the usual traffic problems in city centres and severe congestion is almost guaranteed.

Problem 2: The problem of geography is compounded by the fact that Bristol is the most car-dependent of all the country’s major cities. According to the 2001 Census, over 71% of Bristol households had access to a motor vehicle. This is higher than in Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham, and substantially higher than in Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. It is higher than in no less than 20 of the 32 London boroughs. More people are in motor cars than in other places. And motor cars occupy proportionately more road-space.

Problem 3: History is against us as well. Most cities had a municipal bus service organised as a subsidised public service until privatisation in 1986. There was a tradition of the council trying to provide a good service, primarily for public benefit. Bristol has essentially had a private bus service since the 1930s, (though it was part of the publicly-owned National Bus Company for a time). There has been no tradition of a public service bus operation in the city. The bus service has always been second-rate and expensive.

Problem 4: Bristol’s bus service is now run for profit as a private monopoly by a huge multinational company, First Group. They have inherited most of the faults of the old Bristol Omnibus Company, and have added a few more of their own. Clearly Bristol’s bus service represents a very small part of their total operations. The city is not particularly important to them, except as a small contributor towards their profits. They will merely organise their bus service in much the same way, and with much the same resources, as they do in many other places. If this doesn’t happen to work in Bristol - because of the particular circumstances of the city - then, too bad. As long as they get their anticipated financial return, there is no reason why First Group should exert themselves to do anything about it.
Problem 5: The fares are very high compared with most other places. This is partly because they have always been high. But there are also reasons for thinking that First Group’s operating costs are likely to be higher in Bristol than in some other broadly comparable places - particularly because of traffic congestion. If this is true, then obviously they will try to recover what they can from the paying customer in order to maintain their expected profit levels. The Bristol bus service is generally viewed as offering very poor value for money.

Problem 6: The routing is poor. The routes don’t go to the places people want them to go to, and too many routes are very long and run right through the city centre, adding to and suffering from the traffic congestion. There is no proper bus station or transport interchange for city bus services. You don’t have to be Einstein to see that the more routes which have to cross one of those three bridges across the river, the more certain it is that the timetable will become a work of fiction. This is also a significant cause of the next problem.

Problem 7: The bus service is unreliable. Timetables exist, but few people believe them. Nobody in their right mind trusts them. On some routes at certain times of the day it is not uncommon to have to wait an hour for a service which supposedly runs every ten or fifteen minutes. Nobody is going to leave their car in the garage to depend on a service like that.

Problem 8: Though there have been improvements, at least on some routes, there are issues around cleanliness, convenience, comfort, security and accessibility on Bristol’s buses. Standards of customer care are inadequate. This is not a service many people would voluntarily choose to use. It is much more a service of last resort for people who can’t afford anything better.

Problem 9: First Group are not good employers in Bristol. Wages are comparatively low. Recruitment is very difficult. Staff shortages are commonplace. This obviously contributes to the unreliability of the bus service. While having a significant proportion of disaffected employees is not the best way to maintain customer service standards.

Problem 10: First Group’s local management is not up to the job. They provide a poor service and, over many years now, they have proved incapable of improving it. Worse still is the public relations strategy they have adopted to survive this situation. They seek invisibility. They hide. They do not respond to public criticism because they have tried to do that so many times before without success. So they just keep quiet and hope that criticism will tire and go away. It usually does.

Just how bad the situation is in Bristol compared with the rest of the country may be indicated by two survey figures. In 2003 the Department of Transport asked people throughout the country to assess their local bus service in marks out of ten. The average score was eight marks out of ten - a little higher in the main urban areas. In 2004, BOPF asked our older people to rate the bus service in Bristol on a similar basis. The score was just over three out of ten.

Problem 11: Bristol has no central bus station to act as a convenient interchange for city bus routes, or to encourage integration with other transport services such as rail or long distance coaches. Needless to say there are no suburban interchange hubs either. This means that journeys which involve more than one bus route are very complicated and potentially time-consuming. For most people they are just not worth the effort.

Problem 12: For most people in Bristol the only alternative to the bus is the private motor car. Bristol has no tram, no metro, and very few suburban railways. Some local railway routes have survived - but services are either poor (Severn Beach line) or non-existent (Portishead line). Others, such as the lines out to Mangotsfield and Whitchurch, have been lost and torn up. There was almost a new tram line to Filton, but the project was lost when South Gloucestershire Council obstructed until the Government changed its policy and decided it was no longer prepared to pay for it. Even cycling is difficult in Bristol because of the hills and the traffic congestion. All of this means that when people get completely exasperated with the bus service and tell themselves ‘enough is enough’, they have to use their car because there is nothing else - unless they can walk there.

Problem 13: The Council has no power to improve the bus service. Essentially the philosophy behind the 1986 deregulation was that the private market would ensure efficiency through competition. If a private bus operator was failing to provide the required service, then another one would step in and do it. Unfortunately the real world doesn’t operate like that in most places. When a very powerful multinational company has established a local monopoly it is very easy for that company to see off any potential competition. The monopoly rapidly becomes entrenched.

The Council’s powers and responsibilities have not been significantly extended by the present Government. Essentially they are limited to buying a few extra routes off First Group, those which wouldn’t otherwise be run because First Group says they are uneconomic; and organising and paying for the concessionary fare (free pass) scheme. The Council is also required by the Government to cosy up to First Group in a so-called ‘partnership’, which can produce some limited service improvements (mostly ones which First Group would probably have introduced anyway), but more often results merely in voluminous and mostly meaningless Council ‘strategy’ documents (also required by the Government) which few people read and which rarely get implemented - because the Council has neither the power nor the money to make them happen.

Needless to say most councillors and senior Council officers are not regular bus users.

Problem 14: The power and the money reside in London, in the control of Government ministers and senior civil servants. The bus service is a good example of how our over-centralised system of Government decision-making works to disadvantage a large provincial city like Bristol. We have an intractable problem in a particularly poor bus service which needs radical action to sort things out. In other countries the local authority would be able to act. But here the Council is powerless. Only the Government can do it. But Government ministers and senior civil servants have no reason to be concerned about poor public services in Bristol. They live in London. They are not affected. Bristol has no means to damage their interests by way of reprisal. With only four members of Parliament and the surrounding areas demonstrably unsupportive, Bristol is politically weak. Why should the Government worry? Of course, they don’t worry - and that’s why nothing is done.

Problem 15: People don’t understand what is going on, because nobody gains any advantage by explaining it. The Council would lose face if it explained just how feeble its powers are. So, understandably, people see the inaction as wilful. Over the years this builds up into a huge mountain of public cynicism. This makes it much more difficult to tackle the problem even if the opportunity to do so should actually appear.


We now turn to some of the arguments around what should be done about Bristol’s bus service.

Argument 1: ‘We elect a Council to provide public services. They should do something about the buses. Why can’t they run the service directly?’
As explained above, the Council has power to talk endlessly about the problems of the bus service - but not much else. A Council takeover would need an act of Parliament. And as both major political parties are now ostentatiously business-friendly, they are more likely to ask First Group for a donation to party funds than to get tough with them. This is a non-starter. It is not going to happen.

Argument 2: ‘This has gone on long enough. If only the Government has the power to act, the Government should do something’.
Under our highly centralised political system the local Council can do next to nothing without specific permission (and cash) from the Government. Accordingly it is only the Government which can resolve this local problem. In modern Britain all important decisions are made in London, and consequently nothing can happen without permission and money from London. But our political system is top-heavy. And London has far too many other things to worry about for it to be overly concerned about Bristol.

Each year the Government decides how much it will spend on public transport (always not nearly enough), and then uses incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo arithmetic to decide how much each Council will get from this national total. It then blames the Council if it fails to do the impossible with the inadequate amount of money which has been provided. Next to nobody understands the system, and next to nobody knows any better. So they usually get away with it.

This system is ingrained. Whitehall decision-making is remote and unresponsive to local problems and local circumstances. It will take a political earthquake to change it.

There is, however, one small ray of hope. The Government has noticed that bus services are not working well in quite a few places besides Bristol. In December new minister Douglas Alexander announced plans to increase council powers over bus services, perhaps extending the kind of powers the Mayor has in London. The problem of course is that he is likely to pick and choose where any new powers can be applied. And if they are not backed up by more money, then they probably won’t be sufficient. Any action is of course more than twelve months away - it needs legislation.

Argument 3: ‘This is a monopoly abusing its position. The Monopolies Commission should intervene’.
In the first place the Monopolies Commission was abolished in 1999. It has been replaced by something called the Competition Commission, which does look into allegations of monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviour. But it only does so when asked by either the Office of Fair Trading or the
appropriate Government minister. They are not allowed to listen to complaints from anybody else.

Looking at the Commission’s website, a high proportion of their work seems to relate to particular acquisitions and mergers (‘relevant merger situations’) which may or may not create an undesirable monopoly. But there are examples of them (or at least the previous Monopolies Commission) looking at local bus services. For example, those in Inverness (1989), Mid and West Kent (1992) and North East England (1994).

However, all of these cases featured aggressive and unacceptable behaviour by a large operator in order to kill off weaker competition, and in each case the remedies if any, amounted to little more than a slap across the wrist.

This doesn’t seem likely to be a very productive route to follow for Bristol. The Council would be unlikely to support it as they are told by the Government how important it is for them to stay friends with First Group. And, looking at the examples we know about, any possible action by the Competition Commission would seem unlikely to affect the overall situation very much.

In any case, many people would argue that it is not the monopoly that is the problem. They would suggest that we probably need a monopoly to coordinate and integrate public transport services effectively throughout the local area. Having rival operators behaving badly in competition on a few profitable routes is not likely to result in much additional public benefit. Experience from other cities tends to reinforce this view.

Argument 4: ‘We should bring in other bus companies to complete with First Group. That would shake things up’.
This is of course possible under the deregulated arrangements we have had since 1986. But if this has not happened in the last twenty years we may be understandably sceptical about the possibility of it happening now.

The reason is that the hoped-for competition after the 1986 deregulation only happened in a very few places. Elsewhere the bus industry consolidated rapidly into a small number of extremely large operators. These quickly saw off most of the competition, either by buying them out with offers they couldn’t refuse, or by other less acceptable means.

Four private companies, First Group, National Express, Stagecoach and Arriva, now between them control more than half the bus routes in the whole country. As direct competition between these huge companies tends to be very bloody and unprofitable, they don’t compete with each other unless they can see a good chance of replacing one local monopoly with another one (their own). Instead they have carved up the country between them, each having its own established territories.

The big companies all continue to grow, mainly by swallowing up the remaining smaller companies and independent operators which have managed to survive in a few parts of the country.

For simple financial reasons, none of the other three is likely to have the slightest interest in taking on First Group in a big city like Bristol.

Argument 5: ‘There are different arrangements governing the bus service in London. It seems to be working much better than here. We should have the London system in Bristol - a Transport for Bristol’.
London was missed out when buses were deregulated in 1986, because it was bigger and more complicated than anywhere else, (and, cynics would suggest, London is where MPs and senior civil servants live and they didn’t want to mess things up there).

There were Conservative proposals to look at this again, but they were delayed and finally fell with their defeat at the 1997 general election. In 2000 the Greater London Authority was created, with a directly-elected Mayor of London, and transport arrangements were brought together under a new body, Transport for London, accountable to the Mayor.

There is no doubt that these new arrangements in London have proved more successful than anywhere else in the country. The number of bus passengers has increased by 19% since 2000, and London buses are now carrying more passengers than at any time since 1969. Bus fares have been held steady (and have actually fallen in real terms). The total mileage
covered by London buses is the highest since 1963. Almost everywhere else in the country bus usage and bus mileage continue to fall, and fares continue to rise.

This has cause some observers to say that the system which works in London should be extended to the rest of the country. If it can work there, it can work in other places.

However, others have suggested that it is not just the additional powers available to the local authority in London which have made the difference. London is very different anyway. It is much bigger than our other cities and has a long-established culture of people choosing to use buses, trains and the underground as an alternative to the private car. Besides this, very substantial additional investment has gone into London buses in the last few years. The extra money has been crucial.

To illustrate this, Belfast is often cited as a counter example. Bus services are still municipally-owned and regulated in Northern Ireland. The council in Belfast has probably more power over its local transport than does the Mayor of London. But in Belfast there has been a lack of investment in the city’s public transport, an increase in the number of city centre parking spaces, and, in consequence, a fall of 9% in the number of bus passenger journeys between 1999 and 2003.

The suggestion is that a ‘Transport for Bristol’ may not be sufficient for the city’s needs unless it is backed up by a substantial amount of additional investment to improve the bus service. It is unthinkable that Bristol could exert anything like the kind of leverage exercised by the Mayor of London in the competition for Government cash.

Argument 6: ‘We must stop building new roads and pretending that they will solve the problem’.
Most informed observers now accept that building new roads does little to alleviate urban transport problems. The growth in car ownership has been so phenomenal in recent years, and the potential for further growth in car use is so obvious, that it is clear that new road building will simply result in more traffic, more congestion and more pollution. Extra road space is extraordinarily costly and simply provides the space for more traffic jams. There is also the little matter of the contribution of the private motor car to global warming.

People argue that if, as a country, we have a limited amount of cash to invest in transport, it ought to go towards improving public transport rather than into the self-defeating folly of road-building.

But there are powerful economic interests in Britain which continue to argue the case for more roads, principally to facilitate ‘economic development’ and ‘business competitiveness’. Despite a lot of words about the importance of improving public transport, the policy of the present Government has drifted back towards priority for roads. The recent Eddington Report supported new roads as long as they are ‘targeted’ and ‘strategic’.

There is a current controversy in Bristol over the proposed South Bristol ringroad. The Government has money available for new roads. So almost inevitably the council bid for it. Because it was there.
Even though any significant public benefit from this road scheme is very doubtful.

Argument 7: ‘We must have greater priority for public transport across the board - more dedicated bus lanes, public transport interchanges and park and rides. And if everybody knows that road pricing is coming, and if we could use the proceeds to improve the bus service, we should bring it in now rather than later’.
These are mostly tried and tested proposals which do result in significant improvements in public transport. But inevitably they are costly, and the problem is cash. The local council doesn’t have it. The Government does, but it is spending it on other things.

The most controversial of these proposals is of course road pricing (congestion charging). But, once again, the case has been proved by its success in London. It is only a matter of time before it is replicated elsewhere.

Argument 8: ‘We need a range of public transport alternatives - tram, rail and even underground - we need to be less dependent on the buses’.
However much money can be identified, and however much the bus service can be improved, it always has to run on the roads. It can be segregated to some extent, but it will always be in competition with other users for road space, and it will always be at risk from traffic congestion.
Dedicated bus lanes are of course a partial answer to this argument. But there are many places where bus lanes simply will not fit, and problems will continue to grow.

The ideal solution is to have a range of complementary alternatives to the buses - tram, rail and underground. The potential contribution of the bicycle should also not be overlooked. But to pay for the ideal we are talking billions of pounds of public investment. How to pay for it in a city like Bristol, and in a country like Britain, is the sixty four thousand dollar question.

The present Government briefly encouraged urban tram systems, and some cities such as Manchester and Nottingham managed to clamber onto the short-lived bandwagon. But it has now baulked at the cost, and no more will be approved in the foreseeable future. It is a sad reflection on progress that when a hundred years ago we could readily build the whole of the London Underground, a single tram line in Bristol is now too difficult and too expensive for us to contemplate.

Argument 9: ‘We should copy the best transport arrangements in other European cities such as Munich or Barcelona. If they can have transport systems which actually work, we can have them too’.
Other countries with different priorities do spend these huge sums necessary to create efficient and integrated systems of public transport. Barcelona and Munich are good examples in this context as neither of them are capital cities. Both have excellent transport systems. Both have fully-developed underground systems.

But if you would like an illustration of what is really possible on a Bristol scale, take, for example, the French city of Lyon. It is only slightly bigger than Bristol (445 000 population). It has over a hundred bus routes, with another (additional) hundred school bus routes. It already has an underground system (four lines). In 2001 it opened the first two lines of its new tram system. Two further lines are currently under construction. It clearly can be done if the commitment is there. Unfortunately, in Britain, the commitment needs to be in London.

Argument 10: ‘The key is the amount of public investment. Like everything else it comes down to money. We can have a good transport system in Bristol - if we are prepared to pay for it’.
It should be stressed again that even just in Bristol, we are talking enormous sums of money if we want an effective system of public transport - it will cost billions of pounds to do the job properly. Raising such sums is possible in other countries. Here we just shake our heads and say it is too expensive.

Despite all the nonsense put around about high taxation in Britain, it should be observed that most west European countries have higher overall levels of taxation than we do. However, it is not just a question of higher taxation to pay for higher public spending. Total tax revenue as a proportion of national income was slightly lower than the UK in both Spain and Germany in 2001 (OECD figures). Both of these countries have examples of first class urban transport systems.

It has also been pointed out that in Spain, Germany and France supportive regional governments appear to have been significant in raising the cash for investment in urban public transport. Even that probably couldn’t work for Bristol. The south west of England is so small-minded and parochial that even if there were a regional government it would probably spend most of its time trying to keep investment out of its largest city.