Travelling Light Community Projects Officer Trish Maunder is studying for an MSc in Social Justice and Community Action at the University of Edinburgh. Last semester she took a module on policy, and decided to focus on a policy issue close to her heart: rural public transport.
“Until a couple of years ago, I lived my adult life in cities with abundant cycling, walking and public transport opportunities from my front door. We barely used our car. When we decided to move to the Peak District, we didn’t want to become car dependant, not least because I have a medical condition meaning I’m intermittently unable to drive. Finding places with good public transport availability narrowed down our choices significantly, and in the two years since we moved more bus services have been cancelled. We reluctantly drive more places, more often – simply because there isn’t a functioning bus service.
I don’t believe it’s right, or fair, that people who live in rural areas are forced to drive because the public transport system is inadequate. I also believe that a functioning public transport system is one of the critical solutions to many societal issues – not least because it would drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
Through analysing the UK government’s 2021 Bus Back Better Strategy – how it was created, publicised, and implemented – I wanted to discover whether it would live up to its claims of launching “a revolution in bus services”. Sadly, it didn’t.
The good news is that by establishing the flaws in the strategy, we can identify how to overcome them and insist upon an alternative approach.
My analysis shows that not only will the current bus strategy not improve things for rural residents, but it is unlikely to achieve its aims to improve bus services at all, and certainly won’t help to meet the UK’s climate goals. This is because the approach was fundamentally flawed in three ways.
Universalism
The current bus strategy assumes that everyone has similar problems and thus there are universal solutions. By aggregating feedback and then focusing on the “most popular” solutions, policymakers have failed to identify that those of us in rural areas don’t experience the same issues as city dwellers, and that some people in society have more need for buses, or are more likely to use them. This universalist approach led to the Bus Strategy setting out solutions such as all buses should have Wi-Fi, and there should be bus priority lanes to allow buses to bypass congestion. Neither of which are going to help if the buses don’t exist in the first place, or where the internet service is patchy, or where the only access to a village is through narrow country lanes.
Consumers, not citizens
Throughout the current strategy, policymakers have framed people as consumers – that we choose to drive rather than take the bus in the same way that we choose between different brands at a supermarket. This framing led to solutions in the strategy being limited to those that make buses a more attractive option. To use one of my favourite quotes from the course: suggesting that travel decisions are a consumer choice is flawed because in rural areas “users have no real choice, all they can do is accept the service offered or not” (Franco, 1996). Critically, by framing citizens as consumers, and reinforcing the narrative of us as individuals rather than as part of a community makes it less likely that we will take action or make decisions to reduce our impact on others and our planet.
Top-down
The bus strategy prevents Local Transport Authorities (LTAs) from being able to implement solutions that their residents need. This is done by providing a list of the solutions that they must implement, and also by restricting current and future funding to those LTAs who implement the solutions. To put it simply, even if Derbyshire County Council knew that they could reduce the number of cars on the road by creating shuttle buses to trains stations in Hope Valley, they cannot implement this as a solution because funding is restricted to those solutions provided in the Bus Strategy.
An alternative approach
We know that there must be different solutions and approaches – because other countries have fully functioning rural public transport systems.
A different approach would be bottom-up and community-based. It would consider people to be citizens first and foremost, focussed on enabling us to access the places we need – like pharmacies and train stations – rather than ensuring bus companies can make profits.
Luckily the government is open to this approach:
From: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-better-deal-for-bus-users/a-better-deal-for-bus-users
What my analysis showed me is that nobody else is coming to fix the poor rural transport system for us, but that we are ideally placed fix it ourselves. Those of us who live, work and travel in Hope Valley are the experts in the issues we experience, and the solutions that we need. If we can work together as a community to agree on the solutions, pilot them and prove they work, then we have an opportunity to improve public transport provision for ourselves.
To succeed, we need to work together, pooling our expertise and knowledge, and building the data needed to prove that people would use the public transport if only it existed and went where they wanted to go. By understanding each others needs we can create a system that works for us all, that reduces our combined emissions and keeps our villages connected for generations to come.”
You can read my fully referenced assignment here.
And you can get involved in helping us deliver our vision through the Travelling Light project.
