Why I love writing about bus re-regulation campaigns

Image courtesy of Better Buses for Greater Manchester's Twitter feed

It's late April and, amidst working my day job as a Teaching Assistant and revising for GCSE Maths, I am - not for the first time - sitting down in front of my laptop to read and try and make sense of the Bus Services Act 2017. 

Not the most well known piece of recent England and Wales legislation (Scotland has it's own legislation: The Transport (Scotland) Act 2019), this slice of legislation is important because it's what allowed Greater Manchester's Mayor, Andy Burnham, to announce on the 25th March 2021 that he was planning to take the regions buses back into public control. As such, it's very important when writing about the Mayor's actions, and the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign of the past three years, to ensure that I definitely understand what the law does and does not allow, and how the Mayor intends to use it. As I remarked on Twitter at the time, tricksy though the legislation is, it's still much easier for me to get my head around than the GCSE Maths syllabus for 2020/21.

I love writing about bus re-regulation campaigns. 

I probably love writing about bus re-regulation campaigns even more than I love writing about music. 

Partly this is because the people I want to speak to about bus re-regulation want to talk to me (not often the case where music is concerned) but also because they are so joyously enthusiastic about their campaigns and I find their enthusiasm infectious and inspiring. As someone very interested in buses and bus re-regulation myself, and who has been involved with the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign, it's always nice to be in the company of people who are geeky about buses and re-regulation and who believe in the social good of buses, which is not always a given. 

My latest piece is a blog post for the Act Build Change site, which discusses the tactics used by the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign as well as talking to the legendary Ellie Harrison about Bus Regulation: The Musical! and to activists from BB4GM's sibling, Better Buses for Yorkshire. You can read it here.