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The Case for Faster Buses

The Role of Speed in England’s Bus Networks

FastwayDrone 300An article about the nature and extent of the recently published CPT-commissioned research on bus speeds and the potential benefits of increasing them

This project was originally commissioned last summer as part of the preparatory work for this year’s Scottish and Welsh elections. The resulting reports were published last October, with an English version to follow, and this version was published earlier this month and coincided with the ALBUM conference in Blackpool, at which I was delighted to be able to speak.

The project had four objectives in mind: first, to make a qualitative higher-level argument for the advantages of faster buses, which it does in the form of a five-stage business case in the style of the Treasury Green Book, citing 20 benefits in five policy areas – strategic, economic, commercial, financial and environmental.

The second element was a focus on the local: to show at a local level the sort of difference that speed makes to our bus routes and to explain how journey time and speed affects the costs of operation. The report does this by taking a typical local bus route, and demonstrating the cost of running it at different speeds, and the implications of those speeds on the passenger revenue and patronage levels needed for the route to be financially self-supporting. We believe that this example will enable local transport and highway authorities, plus other stakeholders, better to understand the implications of their decisions, and how they can use traffic management techniques to improve – and in some cases transform – their local bus networks.

If the second element might be described as the “micro”, the third element is the “macro”. What difference could we make at the regional or national level if we could increase bus speeds by a given amount – say 10%? The report quantifies benefits in four main areas:

  • industry viability through cost savings and revenue gains
  • societal benefits
  • economic improvements
  • environmental gains.

The first of these was calculated using 2FM’s national bus finance model fed by CPT Cost Monitor data, whilst estimates for the other three can be provided using KPMG’s ground-breaking methodology for identifying the benefits to wider society of the bus network.

The fourth element seeks to ram home these messages by showing the effects of policy decisions in the real-world through a series of case studies – looking both positive actions such as infrastructure investment and traffic management measures but also at the effects of failure to act, which leads to fewer, poor and more expensive bus services. Between them, the reports look at the data on over 30 bus routes from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, and – we believe – fully back up the case we are making in the early part of the report.

The overall conclusions show that a 10% improvement in bus speeds across England could lead to:

  • 6 billion faster trips for current passengers
  • 147 million extra passengers a year (growth of 4.0%)
  • £674m worth of funds to reinvest in improvements for bus passengers through:
    • £511 million in annual cost savings (a cut of 7.5%)
    • £164 million in extra revenue every year (3.8% more)
  • £5 billion worth of extra economic benefits (an increase of 7.4%)

If you want to read more about the project, there are two options:

 

 

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