National Bus Strategy ...doing the same thing over and over again..

It is clear to me, based on research and experience that we need to change the blend of bus services available to passengers in the UK if we are to improve ridership performance. The Government seems to agree but have excluded small accessible buses by limiting funding to vehicles with over twenty-three seats.

I am concerned that despite the Governments efforts to consult with industry and the public alike, we are about to make the mistake of maintaining a bus service model that when applied unilaterally will continue to fail the public and deliver only as the passenger system of last resort. This does not need to be the case.

With the new National Bus Strategy we genuinely have an opportunity to deliver an exceptional passenger service by introducing specially designed smaller low floor buses that can introduce size appropriateness, reduce private car use and drive down inefficient private hire.

Prime Minister Johnson, in his introduction to his 'BUS BACK BETTER' paper, says this.

"In places unserved or barely served by conventional buses, such as rural villages and out-of-town business parks, we want more demand-responsive services with smaller vehicles".

Yet smaller vehicles are defined in the bus funding programmes as buses with a seating capacity that exceeds twenty-three seats.

This seating number constraint eliminates the opportunity to create transport models such as the MOIA service in Hamburg and other App based sharing services. MOIA is a successful DRT service attracting the aspiring young out of cars both at work and at play.  

Flexible transport systems for rural and urban applications need a go-anywhere ability, just like a taxi. 

Twenty-three seat buses are neither one thing nor another. They are too small to be viable as an extensive bus and too expensive to operate in the flexible transport arena where the competition is not a bus; it is the shared private hire segment.

A minimum seating level at twenty-three forces operators to adopt larger buses if they expect funding driving an apparent disconnect between modern passenger transport thinking and money to deliver it, it does not engage with the ideas of flexible transport, does not provide an alternative to taxi's and offers a poor passenger experience and absorbs the funding at the expense of flexible services.  … "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

The plus twenty-three seat model also fits subversively with industrial strategy that benefits larger bus building organisations and bus operators.

I believe that we need to debate the unfairness and unnecessary errors built into the Government future bus strategy and the opportunities for the Government to create a genuinely innovative passenger transport component within the demand-responsive element of the Governments bus strategy, a simple change in the definition of 'Bus' would do this and provide operators and authorities with access to funding. Nobody is listening !