Bus priority infrastructure is essential. It delivers on reliability, passenger satisfaction, modal shift, and helps to create a virtuous circle of investment for operators.
Campaign body Greener Journeys estimated in 2014 that every £1 targeted to bus priority measures and infrastructure generates £3.32 of economic benefit.
With much improvement work now falling under the ambitions of local transport plans, Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIPs) and other partnerships, the targets for success have never been clearer. routeone looks at some examples of best practice.
Allied approach in Aberdeen
The North East Bus Alliance, formed in 2018, comprises Aberdeen City Council, Aberdeenshire Council, Nestrans, First Bus Aberdeen, Stagecoach Bluebird and Bains Coaches. The Alliance aims to deliver improvements for bus passengers across the region and attract more passengers onto services through development and delivery of a regional Bus Action Plan. Over the last three years, the Alliance has been working with Transport Scotland’s Bus Partnership Fund (BPF) team to deliver new bus priority measures in the region.
There was criticism when that Bus Partnership Fund was paused for 2024/2025, and concern that it would jeopardise the introduction of planned priority projects, particularly given good work that had already been achieved in Aberdeen.
Kirsty Chalmers, Programme Manager — Bus Partnership Fund for Aberdeen City Council, highlights a legacy of declining bus patronage and an Aberdeen city centre rife with congestion having negative effects on bus journey times. This was particularly acute around the bus station, with buses suffering lengthy delays accessing and egressing the facility.
The Alliance was awarded £12m in 2021 from the BPF to develop a solution through bus priority measures. The first of these were completed in August 2023, with South College Street improvements and, with co-funding by Nestrans, a new city centre active travel and public transport priority loop.
The works had been identified as a priority in the Aberdeen City Centre Masterplan (CCMP), and improved the operation of a key corridor to and from the city centre for all modes while enabling the introduction of “significant traffic restrictions” within the central core.
The result is a network of active travel and public transport priority streets in the area that support safer walking and cycling and more efficient passage of buses to and through the area, and improved accessibility of the bus station.
The Alliance says the measures complement a forthcoming Low Emission Zone and wider CCMP objectives that aim to develop a “more welcoming and attractive city”.
That has brought improved punctuality (over 95%), and faster journeys, with times in the city centre reduced by up to 25% following delivery of the new measures, based on operator data.
“People can now be confident they will get to work or into town on time and this is reflected in a recent passenger survey that found that 81% of respondents were satisfied with bus services, 86% were satisfied with journey times and 65% were satisfied with punctuality,” Kirsty says.
The changes were introduced via an experimental Traffic Regulation Order which allows for refinement in response to feedback. Aberdeen City Council has also worked with bus operators to implement supporting interventions such as traffic signal adjustments to further improve performance.
First and Stagecoach committed to reinvesting savings achieved from the new measures to directly encourage new passengers and benefit existing ones, offering, for example, free weekend travel across Aberdeen and the wider area throughout January. The Alliance also worked with the BPF team to co-ordinate messaging around the benefits.
“Partnership working has been invaluable,” Kirsty adds, “with Bus Alliance partners working together and with Transport Scotland to deliver, and achieve public awareness of, new infrastructure with demonstrable benefits, and adapting measures in response to feedback to ensure benefits are maximised for all.”
This is the first step of the delivery of a wider package of bus improvements across North East Scotland as set out in the Alliance’s Bus Action Plan. Aberdeen Rapid Transit (ART) is key to a strategy to reverse historic decline in bus patronage and achieve modal shift. It will connect residents of both Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire to key regional education, employment, healthcare, retail, and leisure destinations, according to the Alliance. It adds that ART “will also support broader aspirations for the region in terms of economic revitalisation and making a city that is attractive, accessible and well-connected.”
Despite the pause in BPF, the Alliance says that alternative funding has already been secured to enable work to continue on the development of the business case for ART and the corridors.
Genuine commitment to partnership
In Portsmouth, efforts to improve bus priority are being led by Portsmouth City Council with its operator partners via an Enhanced Partnership and the recent mobilisation of its BSIP.
That work builds on a strong legacy of bus advocacy and ambitious headline targets for 2034 that aim for faster journey times, 95% passenger satisfaction, 99.6% of scheduled mileage operated, and a 90% on-time percentage. This comes from a desire to target straightforward customer wants: Better journey times, reliability, satisfaction, and lower fare prices.
Paul Walker joined as the council’s National Bus Strategy Delivery Manager in January last year. Paul is former Head of Highways and Transport with Southampton City Council and brings seven years’ experience as Head of Strategic Development for Go South Coast to the role. He is overseeing an overall programme of £48m with a capital programme of some £33m, with bus priority infrastructure originally developed as part of the Transforming Cities Fund (TCF) basket of projects. He says the “crisp and simple” approach of the Portsmouth BSIP process, and a “proper, real partnership approach to the operators involved” is what attracted him to the role and helps Portsmouth stand out among other local authorities as an example of best practice.
An example of that partnership approach came when COVID-19 disrupted travel patterns. The council was proactive in consulting with operators on what needed to change in the BSIP. Portsmouth is one of the most densely populated cities outside of London, with huge demand on parking space, a shortage of driveways and high congestion at busy nodes. A heat mapping exercise (pictured, left) was conducted in May 2023. By the summer it showed all delays on the network, gathered from each of the operators’ ticket machines.
“Due to the nature of the settlement, being the only island city in the UK, the highways are more susceptible to delays on the network,” says Paul. “What we did was use the operators’ own data to identify where there were delays. Some of those were the same as before COVID-19, but some had changed because of the different travel patterns.
“We used that heat mapping work to inform a revised programme of capital schemes, now being agreed with the Department for Transport (DfT), that would better meet the post-COVID situation, so we could deliver projects that were competent and that operators were supportive of.”
The specific solutions to those congestion nodes have been the introduction of bus gates and sophisticated bus priority at traffic signals. A ticket machine server link is being implemented with traffic signals that will enable bus priority and that is being delivered with Stagecoach and First Bus. “The benefit of that is it makes best use of the available highway,” Paul adds. “We’re also putting in revised bus lanes and gates at these locations and re-kerbing to make the highway better. We have a big programme of minor works that mean to improve efficiency at stops that may not be suitable for modern buses. We are also introducing tap on, tap off payment, which should speed up journeys.”
Paul says the council is confident of achieving its initial targets, but figures will be revised mid-term to see whether “something more challenging” is needed. A programme of TCF projects in the city centre is being delivered on key points on the network. Customer satisfaction is already high, and when combined with 62 zero-emission buses being rolled out through the Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas scheme, he believes the authority will easily hit its customer satisfaction target.
Taking a ‘one-team’ approach
Engagement with the operators takes place through formal meetings and weekly check-ins every Monday. Focus is given to understanding the drivers of what operators want to achieve, alongside what authorities want to achieve, and where concessions need to be made.
“This is about not ploughing through with projects that are a local authority initiative, but actually working with operators to understand in real life where there are constraints on the network and trying to overcome them together with a genuine one-team approach,” Paul explains. “This is our approach. One of genuine commitment to partnership where operators, local authority and contractors all understand each other. Operators are part of the project team and that requires a lot of resource on their part. But it means they understand clearly what is going on, have a voice and are heard. The first item on every week’s meeting is the issues operators want to raise. They’re not shoved to the end. We’re trying to make things better for bus companies.
“We believe in modal shift and reliability improvements. If we give operators that confidence of what we’re trying to deliver, that gives them — especially groups — the confidence to invest. They have a city with a track record on delivery, a city with a confirmed programme that they are part of and part of the project team for, and they have people on both sides that trust each other and can have honest conversations they need to have.”
Making bus the most attractive mode
Greater Manchester (GM) currently enjoys 55km of dedicated bus lanes. There exists an ambition through the GM Bus Strategy to make bus the default choice for journeys as part of the Bee Network, with low fares, frequency and reliability again laid out as key targets in the strategy. Installation and improvement of bus priority measures are part of a package of initiatives to improve the bus offer in the city; a 9% increase in bus speeds is targeted on corridors that account for 25% of bus trips by 2030, taking it to 13mph (up from 12mph). An average of 3-4% is targeted on other routes.
The biggest change to date in GM’s recent history with bus priority was the delivery of the Leigh-Salford-Manchester guided busway and Cross-City Bus Package, jointly funded through DfT and local funding with £122m of investment delivered between 2012-2017. Not just infrastructure, the scheme also introduced a brand-new high quality service that created a model on which Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) would base its next level of investment.
“It introduced a whole package at the time and wasn’t just infrastructure but new vehicles, a high frequency service and affordable fares,” says Anthony Murden, Deputy Head of Projects Group at TfGM and Senior Programme Lead for the bus infrastructure project. “That approach is what led to behaviour change, and made it a mode of choice. As a result the guided busway achieved a 25% modal shift away from car. That was incredibly successful and gave us a platform to launch the next round of investment across a much wider geographical spread of GM.”
Hence TfGM now has £219m to spend through the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTS) programme for bus infrastructure. While that will not deliver all of its ambitions, and thought is already being given to the investment rounds beyond March 2027, it will fund the next tranche of improvements and covers five city centre radial corridors and seven orbital corridors, addressing both city-centre connectivity and some of the towns in the outskirts of GM. A 30% increase in patronage across the conurbation is the aspiration for 2030, alongside increasing frequency to 12 minutes on key orbital and radial routes as a minimum standard, while TfGM wants 90% of the population to have a 30-minute frequency bus or Metrolink tram service within 400m of their home.
Bringing the public along
This is all hugely ambitious, and individual business cases for each of the infrastructure schemes will detail tangible, quantified benefits that TfGM will look to deliver as part of those schemes. They include journey time, reliability and forecast patronage benefits from their delivery. Each has its own budget allocated, with the Rochdale, Oldham and Ashton corridor being a showcase project with £50m attached to it from CRSTS.
Naturally, this all builds on the recent launch of franchising in the city, and data from that will inform further investment. TfGM recognises that to make the Bee Network an attractive offer and generate a virtuous circle of modal shift, reliability is key. Anthony says reliability can only be achieved through those infrastructure improvements.
The biggest challenge to these proposals remains public buy-in. Anthony warns benefits can only be delivered if the move of people out of cars is secured, as was achieved with the guided busway. That requires difficult decisions around road space reallocation.
“There’s no getting away from that,” he says. “Engagement and consultation on what are the problems, and proposals to solve those problems, is absolutely key, and is going to take time. We need to build schemes through which we can take the community along with us. Time is a challenge and there is a huge amount of investment to deliver. The value of this programme is the biggest TfGM has ever had in terms of bus infrastructure, and with a street programme local authorities have to deliver alongside active travel proposals, this is a huge amount of investment across the network within GM. Trying to deliver that within CRSTS timescales without causing disruption to the travelling public requires careful coordination.”