It is roughly two hundred years since horse buses started to operate in England (preceded, according to the ever-truthful Wikipedia, by some services in France.) The innovation, for innovation it certainly was, involved at least three pieces of new technology: multi-passenger vehicles designed to make money at a popular price-point, a timetable and a bus-stop. (It should be noted that the innovation didn’t stop there – bus tickets were an early addition to prevent fraud by the staff, as much as fare-dodging by the passengers.) These technologies solved problems which went back to the beginning of time: without magic powers the only way to rendezvous with your means of transport is to arrange a time (timetable) and place (bus-stop) in advance.
This package of technologies was extremely successful – it democratised horse-drawn transport at a time when the capital cost of a carriages and horses put private use very much in the nineteenth century equivalent of the billionaire class - and enabled cities to grow beyond the geographical limits of a walk to work. Even today, as is well-known, buses are the most used means of shared transport.
Along the way buses were standardised and regulated so that they could become reliable, safe and cheap. But the regulation, necessary to standardise and make safe the service, now stands in the way of the set of innovations that will enable the next major step forward.
It is a bit of an over-simplification, (but perhaps a useful one), to say that apart from walking and cycling or a privately owned car, there are only three types of road transport that regulation allows: buses, taxis and private-hire cabs. The difference between taxis and private-hire cabs is that the former can be hailed on the street: they are more expensive because they are more convenient. Uber demonstrated that this distinction is no longer meaningful in a world where the old constraint - that no-one knows where anything is – has gone away. The geo-locating mobile phone has completely changed the assumptions on which the regulation is based. (There is much more to be said about Uber, of course, but I want to focus on bus here.) The point is that the assumptions that underly the regulations that govern buses have also changed. Could we use new technologies to imagine different, and better ways to provide mass transit (the American term is, for once, more accurate and carries fewer unhelpful associations than the British term “public transport”)? I believe so.
Most people now carry a phone that can locate them, and can communicate the location of a bus in real time. (So a bus stop need not be the only way to organise a service.) There are new vehicle formats that can give economic alternatives to deliver better services. (So the capacity of the vehicle can be better suited to the time of day, or route. In rural areas passenger services could also, perhaps, carry goods or deliver services. Vehicles could be better adapted to carry mobility aids, push-chairs and buggies, bicycles.) Modern IT systems can make services more convenient (with flexible payment, subsidies applied to particular passengers instead of to whole routes), demand-responsive and integrated with other modes. Unfortunately all of these possibilities are more difficult to introduce when the regulation assumes (in fact, sometimes requires) that buses are sixty-seater, diesel-engined, human-driven and operating to a fixed timetable and fixed route that must be published in hardcopy form.
The bus has been a boon to mankind over a couple of centuries and it can (nay, must) be part of a decarbonised, accessible and equitable transport future…but to enable this we have to reimagine what the bus is, what it can do and how it will operate. This is an exciting opportunity and we have to be prepared to rapidly rethink how we manage and control our bus services. To quote Guiseppe di Lampedusa “If we want things to stay the same then things are going to have to change…”
Paul Campion, Chief Executive Officer of TRL