COMMENT: This is not an industry I recognise

Dear Louise,

I was both glad that you chose to speak up for buses at the Labour Party Conference, and depressed by the narrative.

I should background myself first. I was a Labour voter for 45 years and a Labour Party member for 10 of those, and if you were to analyse my DNA, it would shriek socialism. For 35 of those years I have documented the bus and coach industry as a journalist and, in those three decades, got to know a great many senior bus company managers and directors. I do not recognise your characterisation of them.

To a man or woman, they have been absolutely consumed by the desire to get more people to travel on buses. Every one of them has taken huge commercial risk to launch, revitalise or extend bus routes. Not a single one of them has simply ‘cherry picked’ the best routes and ignored those which were less profitable. That is a lazy trope, and you should not repeat it.

It is also untrue that commercially-run bus companies have not been innovators. The comfort afforded to UK bus passengers is the result of bus operators and our remarkable, world-class UK bus builders collaborating to create that environment. Cashless ticketing has been created almost entirely without the intervention of the government, for sound commercial reasons which also benefit passengers.

While I can reflect on many localised but unseemly and counter-productive failures of the bus industry, they are not the cause of decreased patronage. There is one, and only one, reason that the bus industry has struggled; cars. We live in a country which has prioritised the smooth, free passage of cars into our cities to such an extent that it has overtaken common sense, and we have local politicians caught in the headlights of the car driver vote, unwilling for selfish reasons to even attempt to fight back against appalling congestion, pollution and road safety.

This is not an issue which will be solved by painting buses the same colour, having a fat controller in the Mayor’s office or having new ticketing systems. This will only be resolved by pushing back against cars. Not by charging drivers so only wealthy people get free reign on city streets, but by actively restricting all needless car journeys. We need modal shift out of cars, and this can be achieved without the cost of franchising – indeed, with virtually no cost to the public purse.

Brussels had a car-free day today [22 September]. It was barely mentioned in the European media. It was unremarkable because our neighbours bit the bullet a decade ago and began to change the bad habits of commuters. Many mainland European cities are now way ahead of us in tackling car congestion. It’s time British politicians stepped up to the plate and saved us from ourselves.

Mark Williams, Editor, Bus & Coach Buyer