At the start of this year we had the opportunity to be part of an extremely exciting project initiated by Gloucestershire Community Rail Partnership: designing and trialling a brand new bus service linking rural communities with local transport hubs and amenities.
The wider aim of the project was to work in partnership with community transport providers in rural Gloucestershire to deliver substantive community benefits, such as inclusive access to essential services, leisure and nature, with funding support from Cross Country Trains’ Customer and Communities Improvement Fund. Community transport providers are something of an outlier in our transport system, in that they tend to offer quite specialised services in areas underserved by other forms of transport. To put this in context for anyone not familiar with the dire state of rural public transport, less than 5% of people in rural areas live under 15 minutes’ journey by public transport from their nearest hospital. Nearly 40% live over 15 minutes from their nearest GP. This means that car dependency is very high in these areas, and for anyone who doesn’t drive, community transport can be a lifeline.
Percentage of population living within 15 minutes of essential services by public transport/walking (DEFRA, 2022). If you live in the countryside and need to get to almost any of these amenities, you’re probably going to want a car.
The first part of the project was a detailed research and engagement exercise. We had one-to-ones with many community transport providers in the area, who ranged from traditional “dial-a-ride” providers, to community bus companies, to operators of innovative DRT schemes. What was clear was that while some were restricted to one type of activity by their organisational structure, or in some cases, their governance, some providers were keen to diversify and operate community-focused services for the general public.
At the same time, we were looking at the study area for potential connection points between community transport and rail. Small rural railway stations can often be underutilised for many reasons, ranging from poor frequency of service to limited accessibility. One station in the area, Cam & Dursley, showed potential for increased use, averaging around 700 entries & exits per week despite being on the main line between Bristol and Gloucester. The time to get to the station from the surrounding communities was half an hour or more for most residents, which appeared to be acting as a deterrent to potential users.
Accessibility analysis of Cam & Dursley station showed how difficult it was to reach from nearby villages. Source: Podaris.
The station sits just 3 miles from one of the area’s most popular tourist attractions, the Wetland Centre at Slimbridge, but from previous engagement with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust we knew that less than 1% of visitors arrived by public transport, with a similar pattern for staff. The reason for this was the lack of any public transport connection between the station and the Wetland Centre, meaning a long walk along narrow country lanes with no pavements. The bus services to the surrounding villages were also infrequent. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust had previously pledged to support more sustainable access for visitors and staff, but without better transport links there was little chance of delivering this.
Slimbridge Wetland Centre (c) Ben Kenobi/WWT
As part of our engagement with community transport providers, we’d got to know Community Connexions, a local CT operator with a broad portfolio including some fixed line public services. After speaking to our client, stakeholders and our potential delivery partner, it was considered best to use the remainder of the project budget to commission and launch a new minibus service, to run at weekends during the summer tourist season, which would link up the station, the Wetland Centre and the surrounding villages.
Design decisions
Rural Gloucestershire is peppered with bus services that call at a village once or twice a day, covering long routes at the expense of frequency. From the outset we wanted to make sure that the service was genuinely useful to local residents, which meant the highest frequency possible. With just one vehicle we couldn’t manage “turn up and go” levels of service but we wanted to get as close as we could.
The other parameter for timetable design was the mainline rail service. Connections between bus and rail services are one of the weak points of the UK bus network and we wanted the service to address this directly. The rail station at Cam & Dursley is small, with no waiting room and poor mobile reception - not a great place to get stuck for an extended period of time. But the service timetable was regular enough, with a train to and from Bristol or Gloucester every 30 minutes. This gave us a framework to design the service around, with the aspiration that passengers would be able to turn up on the train and jump on a bus to Slimbridge or nearby villages with minimal waiting, then catch a train home at the end of the day with minimal fuss.
When designing the route, we had to bear in mind that bus speeds on rural roads are low - typically 20 mph average. This meant that the maximum length of route we could cover with one vehicle, while still offering an hourly connecting service, would be just 10 miles or so. Coverage would also be affected by the distance users were willing to walk to stops. Initially we’d looked at a much longer service, connecting up more villages and tourist destinations, but a quick sanity check meant that we had to abandon this idea as it would have impacted the frequency and the connections with rail.
Timing the connections turned out to be a demonstration of the old adage that it’s impossible to please everyone. Tight connections with one service (for example, arrivals from Bristol) meant longer waiting times for connections with another. In the end we aimed for better connections with the Bristol service (due to the longer overall journey time, plus a bigger pool of potential passengers) and longer waits for passengers to and from Gloucester.
The next step was to register the service with the local authority and the Traffic Commissioner (thankfully with an abbreviated timescale due to it being a community bus service). Shortly after getting confirmation that the service was registered, we were informed by our delivery partner that we needed to delay the start of the service as it still hadn’t managed to recruit both the drivers needed. That meant another application to the Traffic Commissioner, and a bit of a nervous moment as the time ticked steadily towards our original launch date. Registering a bus service sets in motion several events, including the publication of timetable data and its appearance on route planning software, and slipping timescales might mean people turning up to catch a non-existent bus. Fortunately everything went through in time and we were all ready to launch.
Publicity for the new service was very low-key, as after paying for the bus the total marketing budget was around £500. We’d hoped to draw on the marketing might of the train operators, but it became apparent that this wasn’t going to happen - understandably, as we were looking at a service that would run for a limited trial. Fortunately we had a number of allies to help us launch the service. Gloucestershire Community Rail Partnership acted as a central point of communications and information about the new bus. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust had pledged to support the service and advertised it to their huge social media following, and the town and parish councils that we’d engaged with while designing the route were also extremely helpful. It also turned out that when you launch a new bus service, a nice chap from the council goes out and puts up timetables at every stop.
Happy bus users on launch day. Photo: Jon Harris/GCRP
Success… And snags
With word spreading, the service hit the ground running, and on its second weekend of operation 50 passengers used the service. The bus wasn’t full every run but also we weren’t exceeding the capacity of our small vehicle. Positive feedback also started coming in: local residents were thrilled to have a regular bus service, and car-free families jumped at the chance to visit an attraction that was previously out of reach.
“This is a great service allowing us to visit Slimbridge for the first time as we are car free. We previously walked the long distance from Cam and Dursley and used a taxi for the return trip - this shuttle means we can visit much more easily.”
“Very good much-needed service. I use it most weekends.”
“Absolutely fantastic for someone like me with a child but no car, meaning we can get around to places like Slimbridge. It has made all the difference and means more than I can tell you! Thank you so much!”
Not everything was perfect: drivers couldn’t take contactless payment on the service at first thanks to a fault with the ticketing machines, which also meant that our hopes of e-ticketing and live journey tracking were scotched. It also turned out that the transport team at the local authority had registered the service with more stops than we anticipated (Something that’s fairly usual for rural bus services, apparently) . Our compromise was that we would pick up or set down at any stop on the route, which made both drivers and passengers very happy, but probably didn’t help with punctuality
There was also the issue of a low bridge on the Sharpness Canal near the end of the route, which needed to open to let through any boat bigger than a canoe - up to 80 times a day at the height of summer! Although there was generally enough leeway built into our timetable to ensure that passengers could make their train connections, it affected service punctuality more than any other factor. User numbers continued to be healthy, but unseasonably rainy weather, rail strikes and replacement bus services kept the tourists away, meaning that around two thirds of the users of the service ended up being local residents.
Slow clap to whoever designed this swingbridge. Photo: Roger Kidd/Geograph.org
A further blow came in July when the access road to the station was closed with almost no notice. This meant that passengers had to walk some ten minutes past the closure to the station and effectively scuppered its connectivity with trains. After a month of operation in this way (with predictably reduced user numbers) we had exhausted our funding and the trial came to an end.
Cost challenges
Early on the design process we decided that the best approach would be to keep fares low and simple, to maximise passenger numbers and align with GCRP’s values of inclusivity and access to transport. Prices were set at £1 for a single journey anywhere along the route, £2 for a return. This definitely helped us achieve good user numbers during the first phase of the trial, but meant that we didn’t recover enough in fares to extend the trial past the core funded period. Fare recovery was also complicated by the fact that a third of users were bus pass holders and travelled for free at the point of service. Overall fare recovery was about £0.80 per passenger, versus an overall daily cost of around £350. This put the service up in a similar cost bracket to “expensive” DRT services (Figures of £15 per passenger journey are sometimes used to criticise DRT, but that’s almost exactly what a similarly convenient fixed line service was costing on quieter weekends). It also meant that without being heavily subsidised it wouldn’t have happened at all, and we were extremely fortunate to have financial support from Cross Country Trains.
How the costs of the service were split
Lessons and learnings
The project has generated a lot of findings for us which we’re hoping will inform the direction of future bus services locally. These include:
People in rural areas will use a convenient bus service, even if they have private transport available. Nearly 50% of passengers we surveyed said they would otherwise have used a car as a driver or a passenger, which is an extremely encouraging result.
Like any bus service, staff wages made up the majority of the cost. Would it be possible to run a similarly regular service with volunteers, cutting costs further? It’s not an option we got to explore for this trial, and we also believe that bus drivers deserve to be paid!
It’s quite possible for a community organisation or parish council to commission its own bus service if they can find a suitable operator, plus the funding to pay for it. An example not far from the Slimbridge project is buses4us, which has been successful but has also required a sustained effort over many months on the part of a volunteer community group.
Fixed line bus services are easy for users to understand, show up on route planning software like Traveline and Google Maps, and come with perks such as free roadside publicity.
But fixed line bus services also have some major drawbacks. They suit some users at the expense of others, and as we’ve written before, they are operationally inflexible. We couldn’t vary our timetable when the road closed as the lead times for registering changes were just too long. Would a DRT service have achieved as much ridership over a few short months? Probably not. But there are lots of ways in which it could be better than a fixed line service for its users, from connection times to coverage.