The Bus Chronicles: High Frequency Buses

This week, TfGM revealed a map of 'high frequency' transport links around the ten local authority areas. While it undoubtably looks very impressive, when you come to examine it you realise that - aside from it looking very pretty - it's not actually that helpful when it comes to getting from A-B. 

In the Bee Network's quest to develop a London style integrated transport system, introducing tap and go (coming into effect tomorrow) is a realistic, and helpful, step because it gives people the option of paying by debit card on all their journeys but rather than paying individually for each journey and seeing the costs spiral, tap and go will cap your days travel at a reasonable price: Something that would have been unthinkable here even two years ago.

But when it comes to 'high frequency' buses the reality is, well, bollocks frankly.

As the Manchester Evening News report on the map reveals;

There are 41 high frequency bus routes across Greater Manchester, and despite accounting for just 7% of all Bee Network services, they carry the majority of bus passengers. Of the 13.8 million journeys made by bus in February, 7.4 million (54%) were on these routes.

Out of around 577 Bee Network services in operation, the 192, 143 and 43 high frequency services account for 10% of all bus journeys taken in Greater Manchester, with a quarter of all bus trips being taken on the top 10 high frequency services.

You can read a lot into those two paragraphs. 

Firstly, part of the reason why the 192, 143 and 43 are so popular is historical: These are routes where Stagecoach either fought lengthy bus wars to keep the route (very much the case with the 192), or which run along student routes involving the Oxford Road corridor (143) or go to Manchester Airport (43). That is, they have been cash cows for decades for Stagecoach (all of them were run by Stagecoach pre Bee Network) who put more buses on those routes because they could generate huge wads of cash from them all. That is the real reason why you can catch one of them every 12 minutes or less.

Similarly, if your immediate bus service runs less than every 12 minutes and you want to get somewhere faster than your local service allows, you will - if you are physically able to - walk a longer distance to catch a bus that is more frequent. As someone who grew up on the Offerton/Hazel Grove border, and whose local service was the notoriously unreliable, hourly, 375 I can vouch for the fact that the 20 minute walk into Hazel Grove to catch the 192 was usually a better option.

To celebrate such a small number of already established, greed fuelled, bus allocation seems really weird to me. Especially given the problems I'm having commuting from one end of Offerton to the other five times a week. And, no, none of those bus services are 'high frequency' buses.

By all means celebrate innovation and success but, really, can't we have something better to celebrate than the legacy of de-regulation and disproportionate bus allocation?