THE Scottish Government must take on unregulated bus companies if it wants to get more people using public transport, a leading campaigner has said after a major rail discount scheme was scrapped.
Ministers have axed a pilot which temporarily got rid of peak rail fares after it failed to sufficiently boost passenger numbers to pay for itself.
But Ellie Harrison (below), the founder of the public transport campaign Get Glasgow Moving, has argued the root cause of people not using public transport was the bus system.
She pointed to research which showed that bus use across England had declined since services were deregulated in the 1980s, except for in London where buses remained regulated.
An integrated model, something which is being considered by the Scottish Government, would allow passengers to use one card or ticket across buses and trains and would also boost passenger confidence to get more people out of cars, said Harrison.
She went on: “We want it to be easier to be used across all different modes and for all the modes to be planned and co-ordinated so that they work together.
“The way that you do that is by planning the timetables to co-ordinate and planning the routes to connect seamlessly, with integrated ticketing.”
A London-style system, where passengers were able to tap on and off buses and trains with just a bank card with a daily price cap would mean passengers “know that there’s a public authority who’s responsible for delivering the ticketing scheme to make sure you get the best value”, according to Harrison.
A lack of regulation had also led to inflated fares in Scotland’s largest city, Harrison added.
She said: “There’s no regulation over bus fares at the moment and that’s why they’re so expensive. It is actually already cheaper in Glasgow to get the train from most places, if you’re lucky enough to live near a train station or a subway station than it is to get the bus.”
More people would use public transport if “it’s cheaper, more reliable, and if it takes them where they need to go”, said Harrison, who pointed to Glasgow’s “underutilised” suburban rail network which was not integrated with the local bus service.
She said: “Not everyone’s got a train station next to them, whereas we could live in a world where everybody had a bus route within however many metres from their front door, that is possible, it’s within our grasp, it happens in other countries but it takes the regulation of the bus network so that it’s actually planned around people’s needs rather than at the whim of private bus companies as it is at the moment.”
Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop (above) announced the end of the rail fares discount scheme, saying it had failed in efforts to get enough extra passengers on trains.
Peak fares will be brought back on September 27 after passenger numbers were boosted by 6.8% by the scheme. They would have had to have increased by 10% for the changes to be self-financing.
Hyslop pointed to budgetary pressures which meant “this level of subsidy cannot continue in the current financial climate”.
The Scottish Greens said that “behavioural change doesn’t happen overnight” and said the change should have been made permanent to boost passenger numbers further.
Get Glasgow Moving last week launched a petition calling on Transport Scotland to allow bodies like the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport to use powers they could have under existing legislation to improve bus services.
