Bus routes need to be kept going in some form says Hunts mayor

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Board will vote [October 19] on making £1.7m available to keep the bus routes cancelled by Stagecoach going. I hope and expect that the district and county council representatives, and the business board chair, will vote to keep most of those routes going in some form.
This is a stop-gap measure until March. It gives the mayor and the Combined Authority time to review buses across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough more broadly. Huntingdon mayor, Cllr David Landon Cole writes his monthly column for The Hunts Post. (Image: HUNTS POST)There is an emerging consensus about two things to do with buses. Firstly, they’re really important. They’re a front line service that keep people connected – to jobs, to shops, to doctors, to friends, to family, to community. Secondly, we need a better way of organising buses in our area. Less people have been using buses. That’s partly because of Covid, and more people working from home. It’s also because the level of service we have isn’t good enough to make it a viable option for lots of people.
Buses start too late and finish too early for commuting to work – if you finish work in London at 6pm, you want buses running until perhaps 8pm in the evening, and also early to get the train in the morning.
Bus stops and shelters are often in a pretty sorry state and lack timetables. Routes themselves need a lot of rethinking, with express routes between major centres. In short, if you want people to use the bus service, give people a bus service they would want to use. That would increase passenger numbers – and fare income.
We need to move to a bus franchising model. At the moment, nine in 10 routes in Cambridgeshire are just run commercially by companies.
They run buses where they want to – which isn’t always the same as where they’re needed. Franchising would be more like buses in London, where routes are set by the mayor.
Franchising would allow cross-subsidy of less profitable routes by more profitable routes, which would help in itself, but it means that we could more easily have a sensible, integrated public transport system with single ticketing, better online timetabling and route planning, and giving people that bus service they would actually want to use.
Some of those changes are already happening. I'm glad that there seems to be consensus across political parties that that's the way to go.
One of the effects of Stagecoach pulling out of so many routes is that the effective monopoly they have enjoyed over buses in Cambridgeshire may be coming to an end.
We’re also seeing improvements to the Ting demand responsive bus, and I hope that in due course we will see Ting buses stopping in Brampton, in Huntingdon, and then the north and east of Huntingdonshire and beyond.
The big question is, of course, money. Covid subsidies are ending, Bus Back Better had already been cut, and we know that the economic outlook for the country is, frankly, grim.
We need to see what settlement local government is going to get, and there will be lots of competing priorities. The importance of buses has been highlighted by the response to the potential loss of the Stagecoach routes, and they are worth funding with public money – they’re a lifeline, figuratively and often literally.