Bus services will get their biggest overhaul in a generation if Labour gets into power, the party’s transport boss has promised.
In an interview with the Mirror, shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh vowed to boost the UK's "failing" network after nearly 6,000 routes were scrapped and fares rocketed under the Tories.
She accused the Government of overseeing a "spiral of managed decline" and said her team is "chomping at the bit" to fix the mess.
Under Labour, town halls will have greater powers to open new routes and reduce fares, while a ban on setting up publicly-owned bus companies will be lifted, Ms Haigh said.
Back in 2010 there were an estimated 17,600 routes across England, but this has been slashed to just under 11,000., latest figures show. Meanwhile fares have gone up by an average of 51% in the same period.
Speaking on a visit to Stoke-on-Trent, which has been particularly hard-hit, Ms Haigh said: "It's a very common theme that people just can't rely on the bus, they wait at bus stops for potentially hours on end without one turning up.
"These are the kind of things that I hear everywhere. Stoke has been particularly badly served but our bus service across the whole of England has been in steady decline for the last 13 years.
"It's a very common refrain that if people can use any other type of transport to get around then they will, but those who don't have another option are really really stuck and their freedom and their choice are really restrained."
The Labour frontbencher warned that private bus operators have been given too much freedom to close all but the most lucrative routes, leaving many communities left behind.
"As a first step we're saying we want to take back control of our buses and the most important thing is getting the actual system right because clearly it's failing," she said.
"When I talk to people who are having all these problems with buses, they are often really shocked at how unaccountable and how broken the system is.
"We're the only country in the developed world that allows operators to pick whatever services they find most lucrative and charge people what they want."
She announced that Labour will streamline the process to set up municpal bus services and give every transport authority the chance to franchise services across their areas.
Disgruntled bus users said the city's bus services have nosedived in the past decade - a message Ms Haigh said she's heard all too often.
"Too much focus in Westminster is on issues that people aren't experiencing on a day-to-day basis," she said. "This is the bread and butter of people's everyday lives.
"I was talking to one woman who said the bus doesn't start early enough so she has to get a cab. That's more than her first hour's earnings, so it gets to the stage where you're working a much longer day than you should just to get to and from work.
"In places like Stoke and my home in Sheffield we've barely got a bus service that functions. If we have another five years of Tory government there'll be yet more decline, more services cut, more people will not be able to use the bus as a viable option.
"This has a real knock-on impact on the wider economy."
She said there is an appetite among councils to take on management of bus services, and said a specialist Westminster team would assist them in doing so.
But she declined to give a target for the number of additional routes she would hope to see set up in Labour's first term.
"At the moment areas aren't allowed to establish their own municipal services, but you've got areas like Nottingham, Reading, Brighton and Edinburgh that resisted the deregulation in the 1980s, and they're routinely competing for the best operators in the country," she said.
"In Nottingham, where I went to uni, there are 157 bus journeys per head every year which is over three times the national average. It just shows that we've got a reliable decent bus network that will make profit and allowed them to reinvest in the network."
And she added: "We have to accept that public transport has to be a proper public service that serves communities, and there have to be routes that are not necessarily commercially viable but that is service that people deserve and should be delivered to them."
Standing outside the city's bus station, 59-year-old Beverley Lawton told The Mirror: "A lot of the areas around here have lost their services and most of the time after 6.30pm you can't get a bus.
"I've lived in Stoke all my life and in the last 10 years it's just got worse and worse."
Lyn Sharpe, 62, added: "If public transport isn't an option you've got to use taxis and people don't have the money. It has a knock on effect for the economy."
Sarah Jane Colclough, 48, said: "I work with a charity who are spending half their income on taxis because there aren't bus routes."
