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Phil Bulman has fallen into the trap of taking a coarse, unquantified, broad-brush, sweeping statistic and presenting it as an absolute truth that applies universally. I’m referring to bus use falling steadily over the last decade. Overall, maybe, but there are a fair number of places where the opposite is true, where energetic, enthusiastic, enterprising, astute operators have increased bus use, have upped frequencies, have improved the offering, character, status and style of their bus services. We’ve worked on a fair few of them. Some are completely new enterprises and not just existing routes.
Phil goes on to say that because private bus operators (by which I assume he means the private sector) are responsible for managing local routes and ensuring profitability of their services, this model has ultimately resulted in a negative spiral of route cuts, leading to reduced service quality etc., etc. Again, not ultimately, not axiomatically, not always. This sort of reporting is sloppy, biased, point-scoring and doesn’t give the full picture.
There are even cases where a ‘private’ operator with balls, guts and vision has taken on a tender and improved the service in all sorts of ways by making it more appealing to potential new users and a better offering all round, even to the point where they have turned it into a commercial proposition not needing public subsidy any more. Private doesn’t always mean greedy, money-grabbing, cold and nasty, just as public doesn’t always mean bureaucratic, inefficient, soulless and we-know-best.
Also, using data wisely is great, but don’t let it replace enterprise, vision, belief, passion and gut instinct based on experience and knowledge. They can be equally sophisticated tools. You certainly need both but please let’s be careful at how we present statistics. They can be so misleading when we want to make a specific point.
