The new government and regional leaders must take decisive action (not just offer empty promises) on public transport. For me, that means buses in particular. In my area, FirstGroup operates bus routes along the main A646 road through the Upper Calder Valley between Halifax and Todmorden, and on to Rochdale or Burnley. It’s essentially the major artery through this section of the valley and provides a vital lifeline to many people, so the effects of run-down services on quality of life are widespread and debilitating.
Five years ago, buses along this stretch of valley ran every 10 minutes. This gradually eroded to 15 minutes, then 20 and now, during the day, outside peak hours, buses only run every 30 minutes. Pensioners, a big proportion of passengers, can only use their bus passes after 9.30am, so their first opportunity to travel could effectively be 10am, after factoring in delays and cancellations. So, the reality is that for anyone with an appointment in a nearby town, extra travel time has to be built in. This may involve setting off over an hour earlier than necessary, plus an awful lot of waiting around.
People can ill afford to waste so much of their lives trying to get to appointments, and with shopping, children or wheelchairs to wrangle, they end up finding another solution if they can.
Endless roadworks aren’t helping
Not all of this is down to the bus company. In mitigation, the A646 has had a varied collection of semi-permanent roadworks for a very long time. It’s a frequent cause of sardonic comments on local Facebook groups, and the bane of anyone trying to keep to a schedule. But there is also a systematic malfunction in the bus timetable. It simply doesn’t work. Buses coming from opposite directions from Rochdale and Burnley funnel into Todmorden and end up unevenly spaced, frequently ‘bunching up’, with two arriving within five minutes of each other and then nothing for 40 minutes or more.
Standing at freezing or sopping bus stops I’ve heard so many tales of people (many of whom are elderly or infirm) waiting between one and two hours for a bus to turn up at all. One carer recently spent 55 minutes with his disabled charge on a journey that should take 20. He’d been waiting 40 minutes for his bus home at the end of the day when he told me this, and he looked drained.
The tired bus infrastructure
Adding to bus travellers’ woes is the FirstBus rolling stock. Buses are often antiquated and dank, smelling as if they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. One driver said it’s because they are kept outside at the local depot, with no protection from adverse weather. At least the leaky windows mean you always know when it’s raining, because you’re getting wet inside the bus. Windows are often also filthy on the outside, to such a degree that you risk missing your stop because you can’t tell where you are. The roar of the straining engines and frequent breakdowns suggest they’re not in the best mechanical order either.
There is a mobile phone app, which ought to help, but doesn’t. It claims to offer real-time geo-location, but is so unreliable as to be useless, and it’s just started to strip phone battery at a terrifying rate (around 10% per use). The real-time GPS data and the ‘time until due’ displays frequently disagree – so which one to trust?
Answer: neither.
Once a bus has passed its timetabled time, it vanishes off the map, so if it’s running late, it’s invisible. Cancellations have been added as a ‘feature’, but the cancelled bus may still in fact be very much live. Conversely, a bus that appears live will simply disappear without trace. Or the map freezes, and the bus still showing as over a mile away suddenly whooshes by at speed.
FirstBus compares unfavourably in this respect with TransDev, another bus company whose mobile app works and whose buses are modern, clean and warm, with wifi and phone charging points. They aren’t perfect, but compared with the daily FirstBus grind, it’s a pleasure to travel on their buses. If FirstBus don’t want to run this franchise anymore (as local rumour suggests), they should have the decency to withdraw gracefully.
The kindness of drivers
A positive word must be said for the many kindly drivers who treat their passengers well and are friendly and empathetic: I’ve witnessed and received many small gestures of kindness from drivers, who mostly just want to do a good job, yet there’s a resigned air about them too. They are unhappy with constantly malfunctioning ticketing machines; one said it was the worst part of the job. Small consolation to us glum passengers – despite the unexpected perk of an occasional free journey.
Others are more of a problem, treating parts of the route as a Formula 1 circuit (a casual shrug when they’re going too fast to slow down in time to pick up passengers, or stopping so late it requires a scramble through the roadside hedge to reach the doors) with no regard to the timetable. A kind interpretation is that they are simply desperate to get to their next comfort break.
The cost to the local economy
Buses now run only hourly in the evening, after 8pm, so going for a night out, and thereby supporting the local economy, has suddenly become more difficult. Now, I might make a 50-minute walk each way to and from my local cinema (when it’s not raining too hard) because the bus times are inconvenient and the service so unreliable. Long gone are the days when we used to happily nip up and down the valley in the evening. Going out is now a major planning mission.
It might seem as if there are potential beneficiaries from public transport cuts: Uber and taxi companies. Yet, in these financially stretched times, even getting an occasional cab may be beyond some people’s means. Night workers, like bar staff, may not feel they earn enough to warrant the extra costs, and local recruitment suggests hospitality roles are already tricky to fill.
Some local people have glumly accepted that they will just have to use their cars more. Oh well, there goes the environment – again. But accepting this is a circular argument, and a self-fulfilling prophecy: as fewer people travel by bus because of irregularity and unreliability, the bus company cuts services again, and so fewer people will travel on them. It’s not a sustainable answer.
What next for buses?
Currently, a £2 flat fare applies on our buses, but this national fare ceiling is only guaranteed until December 2024. Just over the border, in Lancashire, TransDev is still operating a £1 night fare which came in during the pandemic, and which FirstBus abandoned as soon as possible. So, what happens to fares in 2025 is crucial, and politicians must ensure that public transport remains affordable and accessible for all.
A great many people don’t have the option to drive, for a range of reasons including cost and poor health, and really depend on the bus services. My family is among the non-drivers: bus services stripped bare to the point of unusability will eventually force us out of a place we love, and where we contribute to the local community and economy.
Tracy Brabin, mayor of West Yorkshire, is keen to adopt the Manchester model, taking buses into public control and reintroducing a tram network that will connect Leeds, Bradford and beyond. Great news, but these are mid to long-term goals at best and public transport and the people who use it are struggling right now. We desperately need an urgent solution.
Talking to a Dutch friend recently, we suggested using public transport when he visits the UK soon. He just laughed out loud. Our public transport is not just a national embarrassment, it’s an international joke.
