On the first day of work, I went to get the bus. I got to the bus stop far earlier than I needed to after severely misjudging how long it would take to walk, and hopped on one of the buses that take me from university to the city centre every 5 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised. The bus is capped at £4 a day, which meant that my 4 short rides to work and back worked out at a quid each. The buses were clean enough, quick enough, and I didn’t have any bad experiences. After using Citymapper the first few times, I can now get on and off buses with no problem.
So, why do I think the public transport network in Birmingham is so bad? I have a bus that leaves every 6 or so minutes to the city centre, a train every 15 or 20 minutes, and we have a tram system. Canals are cycle routes that are separate from traffic, and there’s a cycle lane from the south side of my campus most the way to the city centre. The problem is, we don’t have one reliable public transport system. What we have is a bus route that let me wait half an hour for a bus from a fairly central location to the bus interchange with no updates on when they’re coming, and the weekly cap doesn’t apply to all West Midlands buses – only National Express West Midlands ones, so if the wrong company turns up you’re out of pocket (as happened when I worked in Wolverhampton). We have a separate train system which is affected by any National Rail incidents, which is not uncommon given our ageing infrastructure. Separate to both of these, we have a bike hire system, which costs 5p a minute. Use it for a 10 minute bike ride to work and back, and you’re paying well over £200 a year. If you’re looking at 20 minutes it’s almost £500 a year. The tram system is separate and even I have no idea how to book a ticket for it, nor do I have any idea how much a ticket would cost. This leads to a swiss cheese effect for every form of public transport: in big cities at least, the strengths of one form of public transport tend to make up for the shortcomings of another – each slice of cheese covers the holes in another slice – but each slice of swiss cheese is an entirely individual entity instead of making up one swiss cheese system.
So, we can break this down into a few things. For the sake of this article I’m not going to discuss increasing funding or routes, but just common sense policies that could fix the problems. First of all, there’s information barriers. A big part of this is that buses vary from city to city. I had to get on a bus in my home town earlier this year and went to tap my card on, as I would in Birmingham. The driver looked at me with a confused face and said “You need to tell me where you want to go.” This might be a sign of my age (or lack thereof), but there was simply nothing telling me how to get the bus. I managed to deal with this because saying “town centre” wasn’t too much of a barrier, but not everybody has this privilege. To begin with there’s simply the practical elements – the driver knows where the town centre is. Someone getting the bus to a more obscure location might not know the name of the stop, which is already a knowledge barrier to making use of the public transport system. But knowledge isn’t the only barrier which occurs due to this lack of uniformity – those with anxiety may find it difficult to use public transport as they don’t know how it works and it’s hard to find out. Getting in your own car and driving is easy and you have control. Going on a bus where you’re not sure what’s going on? A little more daunting.
Not only this, but delays are more unexpected and frustrating. This is partly because you’re paying for a service: if you’ve paid National Express a tenner to get somewhere by noon and you arrive at 1pm, you’re not going to be the happiest of people. If you’re driving, nobody has made a promise to you, so delays don’t sting quite as much. But, as frustrating as this is, there’s a far bigger problem.
Transport isn’t unified in this country. If you pay for a train ticket, you’re paying National Rail, not the public transport system. So, when you’re faced with unreliability on just one part of the public transport network, that unreliability affects your entire ticket. Back in July of this year I was about to get on a train for my first day of work at my old job. For context, the train takes about 5 minutes from my stop to where I worked, and there was roughly a train every 20 minutes. My train was cancelled, and the solution offered by National Rail when this happens is to wait for the next train. Alternative forms of public transport are not included in your ticket, and nor is any information on them given. So, when faced with this delay, my ticket required I wait 20 minutes despite being a minute’s walk from my town’s bus stop. No information is given on buses either – it’s a “find your own way at your own cost” situation.
This could pretty easily be rectified on local scales. First and foremost, make tickets valid from location to location via any means of a unified public transport system rather than from stop to stop via a certain means. This means if your train from, say, Birmingham to Coventry is delayed or cancelled? That’s fine – it’s valid on any bus. Renationalise National Express and you’ve got coach options, too. A benefit of this is all the information’s in one place. There’ll be no multiple bus providers for the same route, no checking Trainline and then asking a nice stranger “which bus stand to the town centre?” and no figuring out your options on your own. What could have very easily happened in the situation I faced without buying another bus or train is a system where they say “Sorry, your train is cancelled. Passengers to ____, the fastest way there is the XX bus, departing from stand X. Your tickets will be accepted on this bus.” This doesn’t involve some huge expansion to the public transport network, it’s just common sense.
A more complex issue is ticket acceptance due to safety and fears given the current political climate. My housemate and I got on a bus to the city centre a few weeks ago, when a man decided to take issue with queerness and say to us “don’t make me straighten you out on this bus.” Needless to say we promptly got off – but where did this leave us? We didn’t know when the next would be (which I’ll deal with later in this article), and the next few were full. It left us out of pocket getting a taxi. Granted, the bus company have done everything reasonably possible to make sure we’re okay (which reminds me I need to call them back), but this doesn’t fix our issue – we had to get off a bus, the next two were full, and we ended up forking out for an Uber to the city centre. Unequal access to public transport, and indeed all public spaces, remains a huge barrier for many minority and at risk groups.
Additionally to the information that does exist, it’s not very reliable. You can generally trust Google Maps to get you to your destination within 5 minutes of the time it says on a two hour journey. Despite all the problems with data harvesting and tracking and surveillance this involves, it’s bloody impressive. On the other hand, the bus timetable says 16:30? There’ll probably be a bus at some point between 16:00 and 17:00. Okay, maybe that is a slight exaggeration for myself, but for many people in neglected towns it’s the reality. People can’t be expected to trust public transport with their journeys if they can’t trust the information it offers. The tracking of buses isn’t accurate either; I recall waiting for a bus that Citymapper said was 10 minutes away for about half an hour to get back from work one day. Whilst this is hardly the inconvenience of the century, it does undermine confidence in the system and the information it offers.
The same bus route home is also packed every single week without exception. I work in a school once a week, and I can say with confidence that the bus will be at capacity after the school stop every single week without fail. I wasn’t let on this week despite being at the bus stop (although this might have saved me from catching the Omicron variant, so I shan’t complain too much). Again, people can’t be expected to utilise public transport that fails to plan. Admittedly this is partly down to the lack of school buses, the urban area of the school, and potentially the household income of the average student at the school. Nonetheless, I have no access to historical data, but I know that the bus will be full from the school to the bus interchange every school day, and yet there is no planning to offer an additional bus by either the school (because of the disjointed nature of public services – it’d come out of the education budget, so fair enough) or by the bus provider. Yet again, confidence is undermined. People are told to wait for a bus that the provider knows will probably be full. Nothing is done to solve this.
These are all problems that could be solved immediately. Make buses the same from city to city with the information easier to find. Improve delay compensation on public transport, and make it easier to claim. Unify public transport, but in the meantime at least unify ticket acceptance. Improve punctuality, and improve warnings when it’s off. Plan for peaks, and even what I’ll call micropeaks – where one bus is unusable for 5 stops, as happens on the way home from the school I work in. Use historical data to forecast how busy a bus will be, and warn people of this in advance. Make CCTV obvious, make its data easy to access for authorities, and make the process of reporting incidents easy. These are solutions which don’t need piles of money – they just need smart people with good intentions working in the right industry.
Lewis Compton 