How Bus Usage Will Change After Lockdown?

[whole diary]

[southwest]

It might turn out that our current ideas of sustainable and unsustainable are unsustainable.

Meaning what?  You can run a 80 seater double decker around with 2 passengers on board it won't make any money. The only reason these services are still operating is because the taxpayer is paying for it.  That's not sustainable, so maybe you'd care to explain your rationale?

I'm wondering whether, in the long term, we might not find it better to define sustainable and unsustainable services in non-financial terms.

That's a fair point, but unless bus services become nationalised, they are commercial operations and have to be run as a business. My point was that the 48/49 bus in Bristol is running every 5 minutes with only 1 or 2 people on board, whilst these services are currently being subsidised by the government, what will happen when that funding dries up? Service cuts?

[Robin Summerhill]

Public transport is running around virtually empty at the moment because the government is actively discouraging the public from using it. And, I suspect, there are many people who would be “allowed” to use public transport but currently won’t because they are afraid they will expose themselves to COVID-19.

What happens in the future is, at the moment, anybody’s guess. It may return to pre-pandemic levels, it may not, or indeed it might start an exponential increase. We won’t know until the government’s policy and the concerns of individuals change, and until then there is in my view precious lilt point in speculating about it. In order to predict anything you need facts and/or trends, and at the moment these are things we are severely short of.

The matter of commercial operation versus nationalisation has been raised. Neither is a panacea. The former requires sufficient bums on seats to make services commercially worthwhile. Nationalisation suggests government direction and possibly subsidy and, as many of us are old enough to remember, when governments think they need the money for something else (as some members of any government always will), you run the risk of lack of investment and the state decreeing what services will run where. The history books tell us what happens when governments start meddling, and the newspapers still tell us what happens when governments meddle with a franchise arrangement they specified theselves.

[CyclingSid]

No more early trips for some people. Reading Buses have said that some LAs are reverting to normal rules on concessionary passes from June 15th
https://www.reading-buses.co.uk/changes-concessionary-pass-times

I would assume that there will be other areas doing the same, and the Reading Buses might be updated before then.