It was the kind of announcement we had all been waiting for.
On February 24, Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram laid out radical plans to bring the region's buses back under public control for the first time since the 1980s. This was the kind of policy so many had hoped to see when the devolved city region first elected a Metro Mayor in 2017.
The move, known as franchising, will aim to create a regulated bus network where private operators will run services, but where locally elected and accountable leaders will have control over fares, timetables and routes. It's a plan that is badly needed.
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Ever since Margaret Thatcher deregulated bus services outside of London, there has been a free-for-all system in place, where private operators can essentially do as they please and decide what services to run and what fares to charge. It is a system that favours the transport corporations and the rest of us have to deal with what they decide.
Franchising will be a big step towards creating a bus network that puts passengers first and a key component in developing a wider London-style public transport network that links up the timetables of buses, trains and boats to help and encourage people across this city region to ditch their cars and use public transport to get around.
Franchising, which is still in its early days, is a big step, but to really make the most of it, government support is badly needed. Herein lies the problem.
The Liverpool City Region like others, was asked to create an 'ambitious plan' for the future of its bus services and leaders certainly felt they had done so with its Bus Services Improvement Plan (BSIP). The bid was submitted to government and asked for nearly £670m to improve affordability and reliability on the bus network. After all, you will only convince more people to use public transport if tickets are cheaper and services more regular.
In response to that ask, the government came back with a rather insulting offer of just £12 million. City Region bosses have said they are now looking to allocate this miserly sum, which shouldn't take long.
The real kicker here is that it really does seem that the city region and its combined authority is, after a slow start, showing that ambition to really transform what most would agree is an outdated, unreliable and overly expensive public transport network. But at this stage the ambition is not being matched by Whitehall.
It was that same local ambition that saw this city region become the first in the north of the country to trial the use of hydrogen buses, with 20 of the futuristic looking vehicles purchased. An application to the Department of Transport and its Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas (ZEBRA) scheme was made, in a bid to expand the fleet, was rejected last month.
While the city region is showing ambition for its bus services, it needs to do similarly when it comes to the trains. We are still of course waiting for the first of the new fleet of Merseyrail vehicles to arrive on the network after a series of lengthy delays.
But when those state-of-the-art trains do finally arrive, they will join a network that continues to operate a ludicrously outmoded ticketing system that still doesn't allow passengers to tap and go as they please and regularly causes long queues for the ticket office at rush hour. It's totally maddening that such an important conurbation as ours still uses these outmoded systems when so many others have moved forward.
It would be easy to blame this particular failure on a lack of government support and its true that more money is needed to develop the smart ticketing options this city region deserves. But local transport operators and leaders must also take responsibility for presiding over a network that has not kept pace with technology and with what passengers expect and not always communicating effectively about when that progress will be made.
Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram pitched a London-style transport network as a key pledge for both his first and second election campaigns and he will know that regardless of the support - or lack thereof - from government, he will be judged on how far he can take these plans.
The next year will be crucial in terms of the region's public transport vision. The progress of bus franchising and the final arrival of the first new Merseyrail trains will be key, symbolic moments, but if people are not persuaded that using buses, trains or boats to get around this city region is cheaper and easier than driving a car, then this will not be enough to power the revolution that is required.
