Great Western Coffee Shop

Is there such a thing as a parliamentary bus equivalent to the parliamentary train? Of course there are plenty of rural routes and stops only served once or twice a week which are effectively the same, but I'm interested in the legal process. Is there anything equivalent to the "skeleton service to avoid the legal time and expense of officially closing a station" for bus stops? Or is it just a matter of planning permission to remove a post and sign? Maybe not even that, just leave the stop but remove the service?

Thanks in advance for the useful knowledge that I'm sure is about to be revealed...

As far as I’m aware, there is no legal requirement to ‘close’ a bus stop. The local transport authority needs to give permission to site a new one after a risk assessment, but nothing needed to stop using one other than to give required notice (6 weeks?) of withdrawal/change of route to the bus commissioners.

Do you have a particular reason for asking/specific example in mind, Bmblbzzz?

If so, then now would be the time to lobby your local authority about it, as they are about to move into the Enhanced Partnership Plan phase of the Bus Back Better process, where the real nitty-gritty detail of timetables, fares, infrastructure etc will be hammered out between now and March 2022.

There is a bus stop near me which hasn't had a service for over 10 years.  A couple of years the lamp-post the flag is attached to was replaced and the flag was re-affixed to the new post!

This has occurred for years. The council in Reading replaced the Henley Road terminus stop some years back on a stretch of road that you would struggle to get a single deck bus down as it’s so overgrown. There doesn’t appear to be much communication between the bus operators and the local councils with many infrastructure mistakes happening. Kassel kerbs on the wrong side of the road of a one way terminal loop and the changing of the road layout at a terminus so buses could no longer turn without a reverse is two I can think of locally.

Thanks all. No specific example in mind, just wondering in general.

I also recall that bus operators are not obliged to use newly installed stops if they don’t want to. Most of course do to avoid confusion but that has its problems when you have two stops unnecessarily close together which obviously slows the service with people boarding or alighting at both.

Similar happened in Bristol, close to where I lived. The bus route had been changed some years earlier, but when the road was resurfaced, the now long redundant bus stop markings were repainted, and again 20-odd years later.

Similar story to the above replies near me.  One of the closest bus stops to Johnneyw Towers hasn't been used for many years.  It used to serve a handy bus route sometimes, in the far off days when I worked in the city centre.

We have a western greyhound flag outside our house. No buses have served my road since western greyhound stopped operating to Liskeard in December 2014!

Although it's probably not what you're after, the bus that serves Barlaston and Wedgewood is technically a parliamentary replacement bus, although in reality it's just a regular bus service that happens to accept rail tickets.

There used to be an actual parliamentary replacement bus for Watford West and Croxley Green stations that ran for seven years before the stations officially closed.

That's even better than what I was after! Thank you.