THE BIG PICTURE

• How Transport Use has Changed, Looking Ahead, Interchanges, Park and Ride

Contrary to the picture that the media sometimes likes to portray, nobody, least of all the bus operators, is suggesting that people have got to give up their cars for good. For some journeys the private car is by far and away the most sensible choice, but there are other journeys where the bus provides a safe, practical and value for money alternative, as well as being kinder to our local environment

There never have been buses from everywhere to everywhere and it is doubtful that there ever will be. When bus travel was at its peak in the mid 1950s, there were very few private cars on the road. People had no choice but to live close to bus routes and to work, and shop, in places where the bus went.

The private car changed all this and the so-called Travel To Work Area broadened considerably. People could now live where they liked and travel to wherever they wanted, when they wanted.

Public transport works best when serving high volume, regular demand - from an estate to city centre or between two towns, for example. Unlike taxis, buses have to run to a timetable whether there is any demand or not. There are some activities for which buses are not ideally suited. Out of town shopping centres are a good example. Here the catchment area is widespread. Just about anyone in a 10 or 20 mile radius could be a customer, but might only use the facility a few times a year or even less. So here we have a market which turns over rapidly and everyone comes from a different place, at different times on different days. This is not the sort of profile that fits regular, scheduled bus services.

On the other hand, in September 2000 we launched the highest bus frequency in the history of the Company - a bus every 6 or 7 minutes on our rainbow 5 route between Nottingham and Long Eaton. The service on this intensely-populated and busy corridor had grown by 25% in the previous eighteen months and is still growing exponentially now. In 2008 we will introduce the fifth new fleet of buses to the route since 1992 and the brand now offers customers audible and visual stop announcements,text messaging facilities, air-conditioning and leather seats.

We have already proved that high quality, reliable services make a very attractive alternative to the car, and indeed almost 1 in 3 of our customers could have used a car for their bus journey.

The obvious way forward is a network of very high frequency, high quality services running into towns and cities on the major routes, assisted by heavy-duty bus priority measures in partnership with local authorities. This would mean that instead of putting in so much extra, and very expensive, dead resource into just propping up our services against the effects of congestion, we would be able to use the extra buses to increase frequencies and grow the market. Far more people would be attracted from their cars by reliability, shorter journey times, high profile marketing and guaranteed quality. Other routes would feed into such a network. For example connect in Hucknall has been hailed as a 'model of integration', in that it serves the local estates and town centre on higher frequencies than ever before, whilst linking into both rainbow 3 and the Tram for onward travel to Nottingham - with seamless through ticketing.

The vision is of high quality interchange points around the edges of towns and cities where people can change between services efficiently, safely and comfortably, using easy to buy through tickets which would cover all services.

Park and Ride fits into the picture too. It has the advantage of all of the flexibility at the home end of the route (especially for those who might not live close to a major bus service), without the hassle or environmental impact of taking the car all the way into the city centre. Park and Ride has to be of the right quality -it cannot be done on the cheap. Park and Ride competes for customers who are used to the convenience of their own car. It must be of high quality and high frequency, with a bus in sight at the car park or the city departure point all the time and with high profile site security and other support systems.

There must be a fast track for the buses into town. It is no good expecting a motorist to park out of town, wait for a bus and then join the same queue of traffic that they've just left - only further back!

But the vision cannot be realised by bus operators like trent barton working alone. The Government has made it clear that we need innovative bus operators and bold local authorities working together in partnership to make real progress. The Government has also indicated that it shares the frustration suffered by bus operators over the tardiness of some local authorities in implementing serious bus priority measures.