Jonathan Welch attended a stakeholder engagement session in Cambridge which he says would be a good lead for others to follow
I could probably sum up a large part of what this feature is about in one word. It’s a word that’s familiar to every operator across the country, with maybe the exception of a few in locations such as Shetland and equally remote, tranquil places. Congestion. It’s the bane of operators’ lives. They moan about it, passengers moan about it, and just about every other stakeholder moans about it. Everyone has an opinion on it, but when it comes to bus services, they’re somehow expected to struggle on, get through and keep going.
It’s easy to see it as a cop-out word. Why is the bus late? Congestion. And yet, even when standing at a bus stop watching the bus crawl towards them at snail’s pace in a line of start-stop traffic, passengers will still question why the bus is late, and why the operator doesn’t do anything about it. We’ve heard so often recently that franchising is the silver bullet. It will mean that local transport authorities can take back control and somehow make buses run better, on the same streets, with the same traffic.
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