8 ms·

Buses are a hard problem. In the UK, most of the bus network was in public ownership until the 1980s. The Thatcher government deregulated the bus industry, all

Buses are a hard problem. In the UK, most of the bus network was in public ownership until the 1980s. The Thatcher government deregulated the bus industry, allowing any operator to run bus services and set their own routes and timetables. This greatly increased the level of competition on popular and profitable routes, but it also created the problem of cherry-picking. The new private operators didn't bother with unprofitable but socially-valuable routes, which local governments felt obliged to serve or subsidise. The most profitable routes often became massively oversaturated, with competing operators engaging in "bus wars" in an attempt to dominate that route and force out the other operators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_deregulation_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_deregulation_in_Great_Brit...

Tuna-Fish 8y ago
> The new private operators didn't bother with unprofitable but socially-valuable routes, which local governments felt obliged to serve or subsidise. That's exactly how it should be. A lot of people have the idea that bus operators should be forced to drive the unprofitable routes in order to be allowed to drive the profitable ones. This would work if buses were literally the only way to get around. Since they are not, what it does is drive up the cost of public transport and make it less appealing. In Finland, it eventually caused the prices to rise so high, that it was generally cheaper to drive. This is socially disastrous. If there is a route that is not profitable to run, you should not expect a company to run it. The free market should manage the profitable routes, and drive down the prices as low as they can go. Any socially valuable routes on top of those should be subsidized out of the taxes of the people they provide value to.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  The thing is, private transit has an incentive to go anywhere there's sufficient density of people. If buses don't want to go somewhere, it's probably because there aren't enough people to justify it there, which can be solved with zoning. Sometimes there are other issues too, like too much crime, but even then there's still something for the government to solve that would make it profitable for private transit.
- marksbrown 8y ago
  1. Bus passengers are not rational actors in the free market. They'll get on the first available. In routes with multiple services consumers will prefer to just buy a ticket like 'system one' in Manchester. 2. Frequency and reliability of service on a long term encourages take up. London has Overground trains run every 15 minutes regardless of user take up. Bus companies can't or won't offer service like that. 3. Bus users are poorer. Those of us who can afford to opt out of the market do so. That encourages decline. Externalities like air pollution, community access for the elderly are left to local government despite lack of political will or capital. Essentially I believe public transport should be encouraged as a common good that pays dividends in society as a whole.
  - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
    > 1. Bus passengers are not rational actors in the free market. They'll get on the first available. Strongly disagree. That may be true if there is no good way of getting information, but once there is a website/app that lets you enter your source, destination and departure time, and which clearly lists all the options with their prices, people do effectively shop around and make rational choices about their routes. This has been shown to work pretty well in Finland.
    - amaccuish 8y ago
      Not anywhere else I know, and I've lived in many places. 99% of the time people get on the first bus that arrives. Only if it's their commute bus might they look at times and prices. The free market really doesn't work well with public transport, as shown by the mess that is our train system (UK).
      - ChrisSD 8y ago
        The UK train system isn't exactly a free market. The trains and tracks are all owned by the government. The government also decides who gets the contract to operate trains.
        8y ago
- rayiner 8y ago
  Yes, and it should be this way for everything (bus routes, train lines, water, sewer, electricity, telecom, etc). The government should be the safety net, not the primary provider.
  - willyt 8y ago
    The market does take care of this. No one builds the second sewerage system or railway on the same route, it’s a terrible investment. The first mover gets a monopoly, price gouging happens, public complains and the government steps in. Currently we have private water companies in the U.K. they don’t have their own pipes and they are supplying the same water at nearly the same price, the actual water is provided by another private water company which owns the pipes and has a monopoly which has to be heavily regulated by the government. The result is choice of 10 different companies which charge between say £995-£1005 for the same thing, it’s not an efficient use of my time @ £60/hr to deal with the phone calls and paperwork needed to choose a supplier, it feels like I’m being forced to take part in a stupid game making a purchasing decision for something which is essentially exactly the same regardless of who I buy it from. The trouble is that infrastructure is often a natural monopoly. Countries that provide thier citizens efficient hassle free infrastructure increase thier productivity relative to other countries by reducing the bureaucratic load on citizens. Britain has private trains, electricity, water, phone networks etc. It doesn’t seem to be working very well, for example our rail ticket prices have increased faster than the rest of Europe, our train operating costs per mile are higher than state run systems in other comparable countries. In general our productivity is pretty low compared to other similar countries in Europe despite working some of the longest hours, maybe all the stupid phone calls from utility companies are one of the reasons why.
- hokus 8y ago
  Let me debunk that for you. We want a system optimized for transportation. We do not want a system optimized for wealth extraction. Say someone is buying a house. He will look for the stuff he needs. If they have kids that have to go to school or if they cant drive for some reason they look at the bus and train schedule and kinda expect that service to be there the next month. How you imagine it actually doesn't happen. You don't get a substantial number of people with kids, old and disabled people moving to an area without public transport so that you can move in for the killer profits. Even if there is a bus it would be unreliable if profit rather than transportation is the goal. Its just like we don't wait until the entire region smells like human poop before we put the sewers in. Oh and no more internet and electricity for you! You are just not using enough of it to be relevant compared to urban centers! Meanwhile in the already overly crowded city centers real estate prices will explode and force families to live in tiny single room apartments. From a strict profit driven perspective utopia is now happening!
  - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
    > Let me debunk that for you. Then why not debunk something I said instead of going off on a weird tangent that is orthogonal to it? > We want a system optimized for transportation. We do not want a system optimized for wealth extraction. Agreed. > Say someone is buying a house. He will look for the stuff he needs. If they have kids that have to go to school or if they cant drive for some reason they look at the bus and train schedule and kinda expect that service to be there the next month. Agreed. > How you imagine it actually doesn't happen. You don't get a substantial number of people with kids, old and disabled people moving to an area without public transport so that you can move in for the killer profits. Even if there is a bus it would be unreliable if profit rather than transportation is the goal. Who spoke anything about killer profits? To put it simply, in my proposal any place that could be a competitive market would be one (so profits are driven as low as possible), while any place that could not be would be subsidized. Regardless, this is entirely orthogonal to my point. What I railed against was the idea that public transport in areas with lots of demand should subsidize public transport in areas with low demand. This is an absolutely terrible idea, whether your public transport system is private or government-ran. It's bad, because it drives the cost of public transport up, and unless you ban private cars, it therefore also drives the incentive to use public transport down and the incentive to use a car up. Instead, since we want to optimize for transportation, we should drive the cost of public transport as low as possible. Especially in areas with high demand, simply because as they have more people, they matter more in reducing emissions and traffic. And do note that as low as possible will be lower in areas of high demand than in areas of low demand. For this task, I propose using an open, competitive market. You might like a government-ran system better. I think either approach might work, although I prefer my version because it is less fragile. The important part is that not a penny of the fare prices paid by people in high-demand areas should go to subsidizing service to people living in low-demand areas. Because having public transport in those low-demand areas is also socially good, any areas where a competitive market cannot work should probably have subsidized public transport. However, that subsidy should not come from other public transport, because that makes public transport worse where it matters and makes people drive cars instead, making traffic and pollution worse. If you look at my original post, I proposed subsidizing it from taxation. Have I now repeated my point enough times that you have understood it? I'd have repeated myself less, but I thought it necessary since if you actually had bothered to go read my original post, instead of ad-libbing your favorite strawman on it, this entire post would not have been necessary.
humanrebar 8y ago
> The new private operators didn't bother with unprofitable but socially-valuable routes, which local governments felt obliged to serve or subsidise. For what it's worth, local governments in the U.S. don't feel all that obligated. Just because something is public doesn't mean that it looks out for the little guy all that well.
- dfee 8y ago
  Excellent generalization about the 89,004 local governments in the US. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/governments/cb12-161.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/government... Also, is your comparative perspective based on time living under multiple local UK governments, too?
  - ChristianBundy 8y ago
    Rethink this.
    - dfee 8y ago
      No. I’ve actually lived in both. Also, it appears(?) the parent comment to my initial comment was adjusted.
  - dzhiurgis 8y ago
    Holy cow, it means 89 thousand different bus orders.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Local governments often fail their poorest citizens, but unlike for-profit companies, they in principle exist to serve all of their citizens, not to line the pockets of their owners. Private companies neither have nor pretend any such mission.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    How do you enforce that principle?
varrock 8y ago
How would you define socially valuable routes?
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  Those that serve poor neighborhoods? Those that connect underserved communities? Those that enabled the educational improvement of the population?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    An example from my local area is a bus route connecting deprivedNeighbourhood with largeIndustrialSite, with the timetable arranged around the shift patterns of the employers on that site. It doesn't have enough passengers to be profitable, but most of the passengers would be unemployed if that route didn't exist.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      > It doesn't have enough passengers to be profitable, but most of the passengers would be unemployed if that route didn't exist. I highly doubt that. People carpool. NYC has dollar vans which serve underserved communities at lower cost than the state. Providing subsidized bus routes to work is basically subsidizing employers who employ these people.
      - jdietrich 8y ago
        >I highly doubt that. I can only assume that you've never been poor, because lack of transport is a massive obstacle for people struggling to get or stay on the bottom rung of the employment ladder. The world is a very different place if you're on the breadline - quite minor issues can become crises if you just don't have any spare money to fix them. How do you get to the job interview if you can't afford a taxi? How do you carpool if you've only just started the job and don't know anyone who works there? What do you do if your shift pattern changes and you can't get a ride any more? What do you do if the person giving you a ride quits or gets fired? What do you do if they lose their license for drink-driving or their crappy old car breaks down? If there was a private bus operator ("dollar van") serving that route, the local authority wouldn't have to subsidise it. >Providing subsidized bus routes to work is basically subsidizing employers who employ these people. Yes, but what's so wrong with that? Running a subsidised bus route is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying unemployment benefits and dealing with the social costs of long-term unemployment. It'd be nice if those companies were willing to pay for it, but they clearly aren't. Place A has a lot of unemployed people with low skills. Place B has a lot of low-skilled jobs. There's no public transport between place A and place B, so a lot of those unemployed people can't get to those jobs. Is it really so irrational for the local government to solve that problem?
gkya 8y ago
They deal with that nicely for railways, where if you want to operate some profitable lines, you're obliged to operate some infrequent lines too. Wonder why they did not do the same with the buses too.
- askvictor 8y ago
  I've never understood how railways can be privatised; it's a natural monopoly. I can't decide I want to compete with this rail line and build my own rail line (at least in most circumstances). And a London-Edinburgh line is not in competition with a London-Newcastle line.
  - gkya 8y ago
    I'm not from the UK so maybe I am mistaken but AFAIK the railways belong to the govt but they outsource the operation of them and of trains, stations etc. And if they limit operation times too (so that you get some certain amount of time then everybody bids), I think that is a good model.
    - askvictor 8y ago
      This is how it works in Melbourne (actually, there is now a single company that runs the entire Metropolitan railway). Initially they split it into two companies each running half the city because competition. Because a train line on the east side of the city can compete with a train line on the west side. Now a single company runs both halves. I can't see how this is better than the government just running it.
jlebrech 8y ago
they should redesign the whole lines so that they have to most coverage. so that people on average are around 500m walk from the nearest bus stop, and also making sure stop aren't too close so busses don't make too many stops.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Most US bus systems have a strong bias towards coverage and are learning that utilization gets better if they instead discard coverage in favor of frequency. Having a bus stop nearby isn’t worthwhile if it comes once an hour. Those people will drive anyway. Better to provide an actually compelling alternative to a subset of the city than a worthless alternative to all of it.
  - jlebrech 8y ago
    I think coverage would promote frequency, you don't have to go down every street, just enough blocks away for everyone.
closeparen 8y ago
I’m not sure it’s a feature that public transit agencies allow popular commuter routes to become ridiculously overcrowded by siphoning off the funds for fare subsidies and mostly-empty buses no one wants. My government for a while was clearly trying to shift the incentives to favor bus over car commuting, but half the time the bus was so full that the driver wouldn’t even let me try to get on. The agency was not out of money. Instead, it had spent the money on a new route from nowhere to nowhere that passed my apartment every 10 minutes and was consistently empty, while at the same time downsizing the vehicles used on commuter service.

Tuna-Fish 8y ago

> The new private operators didn't bother with unprofitable but socially-valuable routes, which local governments felt obliged to serve or subsidise. That's exactly how it should be. A lot of people have the idea that bus operators should be forced to drive the unprofitable routes in order to be allowed to drive the profitable ones. This would work if buses were literally the only way to get around. Since they are not, what it does is drive up the cost of public transport and make it less appealing. In Finland, it eventually caused the prices to rise so high, that it was generally cheaper to drive. This is socially disastrous. If there is a route that is not profitable to run, you should not expect a company to run it. The free market should manage the profitable routes, and drive down the prices as low as they can go. Any socially valuable routes on top of those should be subsidized out of the taxes of the people they provide value to.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
The thing is, private transit has an incentive to go anywhere there's sufficient density of people. If buses don't want to go somewhere, it's probably because there aren't enough people to justify it there, which can be solved with zoning. Sometimes there are other issues too, like too much crime, but even then there's still something for the government to solve that would make it profitable for private transit.
marksbrown 8y ago
1. Bus passengers are not rational actors in the free market. They'll get on the first available. In routes with multiple services consumers will prefer to just buy a ticket like 'system one' in Manchester. 2. Frequency and reliability of service on a long term encourages take up. London has Overground trains run every 15 minutes regardless of user take up. Bus companies can't or won't offer service like that. 3. Bus users are poorer. Those of us who can afford to opt out of the market do so. That encourages decline. Externalities like air pollution, community access for the elderly are left to local government despite lack of political will or capital. Essentially I believe public transport should be encouraged as a common good that pays dividends in society as a whole.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  > 1. Bus passengers are not rational actors in the free market. They'll get on the first available. Strongly disagree. That may be true if there is no good way of getting information, but once there is a website/app that lets you enter your source, destination and departure time, and which clearly lists all the options with their prices, people do effectively shop around and make rational choices about their routes. This has been shown to work pretty well in Finland.
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    Not anywhere else I know, and I've lived in many places. 99% of the time people get on the first bus that arrives. Only if it's their commute bus might they look at times and prices. The free market really doesn't work well with public transport, as shown by the mess that is our train system (UK).
    - ChrisSD 8y ago
      The UK train system isn't exactly a free market. The trains and tracks are all owned by the government. The government also decides who gets the contract to operate trains.
      - 8y ago
rayiner 8y ago
Yes, and it should be this way for everything (bus routes, train lines, water, sewer, electricity, telecom, etc). The government should be the safety net, not the primary provider.
- willyt 8y ago
  The market does take care of this. No one builds the second sewerage system or railway on the same route, it’s a terrible investment. The first mover gets a monopoly, price gouging happens, public complains and the government steps in. Currently we have private water companies in the U.K. they don’t have their own pipes and they are supplying the same water at nearly the same price, the actual water is provided by another private water company which owns the pipes and has a monopoly which has to be heavily regulated by the government. The result is choice of 10 different companies which charge between say £995-£1005 for the same thing, it’s not an efficient use of my time @ £60/hr to deal with the phone calls and paperwork needed to choose a supplier, it feels like I’m being forced to take part in a stupid game making a purchasing decision for something which is essentially exactly the same regardless of who I buy it from. The trouble is that infrastructure is often a natural monopoly. Countries that provide thier citizens efficient hassle free infrastructure increase thier productivity relative to other countries by reducing the bureaucratic load on citizens. Britain has private trains, electricity, water, phone networks etc. It doesn’t seem to be working very well, for example our rail ticket prices have increased faster than the rest of Europe, our train operating costs per mile are higher than state run systems in other comparable countries. In general our productivity is pretty low compared to other similar countries in Europe despite working some of the longest hours, maybe all the stupid phone calls from utility companies are one of the reasons why.
hokus 8y ago
Let me debunk that for you. We want a system optimized for transportation. We do not want a system optimized for wealth extraction. Say someone is buying a house. He will look for the stuff he needs. If they have kids that have to go to school or if they cant drive for some reason they look at the bus and train schedule and kinda expect that service to be there the next month. How you imagine it actually doesn't happen. You don't get a substantial number of people with kids, old and disabled people moving to an area without public transport so that you can move in for the killer profits. Even if there is a bus it would be unreliable if profit rather than transportation is the goal. Its just like we don't wait until the entire region smells like human poop before we put the sewers in. Oh and no more internet and electricity for you! You are just not using enough of it to be relevant compared to urban centers! Meanwhile in the already overly crowded city centers real estate prices will explode and force families to live in tiny single room apartments. From a strict profit driven perspective utopia is now happening!
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  > Let me debunk that for you. Then why not debunk something I said instead of going off on a weird tangent that is orthogonal to it? > We want a system optimized for transportation. We do not want a system optimized for wealth extraction. Agreed. > Say someone is buying a house. He will look for the stuff he needs. If they have kids that have to go to school or if they cant drive for some reason they look at the bus and train schedule and kinda expect that service to be there the next month. Agreed. > How you imagine it actually doesn't happen. You don't get a substantial number of people with kids, old and disabled people moving to an area without public transport so that you can move in for the killer profits. Even if there is a bus it would be unreliable if profit rather than transportation is the goal. Who spoke anything about killer profits? To put it simply, in my proposal any place that could be a competitive market would be one (so profits are driven as low as possible), while any place that could not be would be subsidized. Regardless, this is entirely orthogonal to my point. What I railed against was the idea that public transport in areas with lots of demand should subsidize public transport in areas with low demand. This is an absolutely terrible idea, whether your public transport system is private or government-ran. It's bad, because it drives the cost of public transport up, and unless you ban private cars, it therefore also drives the incentive to use public transport down and the incentive to use a car up. Instead, since we want to optimize for transportation, we should drive the cost of public transport as low as possible. Especially in areas with high demand, simply because as they have more people, they matter more in reducing emissions and traffic. And do note that as low as possible will be lower in areas of high demand than in areas of low demand. For this task, I propose using an open, competitive market. You might like a government-ran system better. I think either approach might work, although I prefer my version because it is less fragile. The important part is that not a penny of the fare prices paid by people in high-demand areas should go to subsidizing service to people living in low-demand areas. Because having public transport in those low-demand areas is also socially good, any areas where a competitive market cannot work should probably have subsidized public transport. However, that subsidy should not come from other public transport, because that makes public transport worse where it matters and makes people drive cars instead, making traffic and pollution worse. If you look at my original post, I proposed subsidizing it from taxation. Have I now repeated my point enough times that you have understood it? I'd have repeated myself less, but I thought it necessary since if you actually had bothered to go read my original post, instead of ad-libbing your favorite strawman on it, this entire post would not have been necessary.

humanrebar 8y ago

> The new private operators didn't bother with unprofitable but socially-valuable routes, which local governments felt obliged to serve or subsidise. For what it's worth, local governments in the U.S. don't feel all that obligated. Just because something is public doesn't mean that it looks out for the little guy all that well.

dfee 8y ago
Excellent generalization about the 89,004 local governments in the US. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/governments/cb12-161.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/government... Also, is your comparative perspective based on time living under multiple local UK governments, too?
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  Rethink this.
  - dfee 8y ago
    No. I’ve actually lived in both. Also, it appears(?) the parent comment to my initial comment was adjusted.
- dzhiurgis 8y ago
  Holy cow, it means 89 thousand different bus orders.
emodendroket 8y ago
Local governments often fail their poorest citizens, but unlike for-profit companies, they in principle exist to serve all of their citizens, not to line the pockets of their owners. Private companies neither have nor pretend any such mission.
- dnautics 8y ago
  How do you enforce that principle?

varrock 8y ago

How would you define socially valuable routes?

kasey_junk 8y ago
Those that serve poor neighborhoods? Those that connect underserved communities? Those that enabled the educational improvement of the population?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  An example from my local area is a bus route connecting deprivedNeighbourhood with largeIndustrialSite, with the timetable arranged around the shift patterns of the employers on that site. It doesn't have enough passengers to be profitable, but most of the passengers would be unemployed if that route didn't exist.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    > It doesn't have enough passengers to be profitable, but most of the passengers would be unemployed if that route didn't exist. I highly doubt that. People carpool. NYC has dollar vans which serve underserved communities at lower cost than the state. Providing subsidized bus routes to work is basically subsidizing employers who employ these people.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      >I highly doubt that. I can only assume that you've never been poor, because lack of transport is a massive obstacle for people struggling to get or stay on the bottom rung of the employment ladder. The world is a very different place if you're on the breadline - quite minor issues can become crises if you just don't have any spare money to fix them. How do you get to the job interview if you can't afford a taxi? How do you carpool if you've only just started the job and don't know anyone who works there? What do you do if your shift pattern changes and you can't get a ride any more? What do you do if the person giving you a ride quits or gets fired? What do you do if they lose their license for drink-driving or their crappy old car breaks down? If there was a private bus operator ("dollar van") serving that route, the local authority wouldn't have to subsidise it. >Providing subsidized bus routes to work is basically subsidizing employers who employ these people. Yes, but what's so wrong with that? Running a subsidised bus route is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying unemployment benefits and dealing with the social costs of long-term unemployment. It'd be nice if those companies were willing to pay for it, but they clearly aren't. Place A has a lot of unemployed people with low skills. Place B has a lot of low-skilled jobs. There's no public transport between place A and place B, so a lot of those unemployed people can't get to those jobs. Is it really so irrational for the local government to solve that problem?

gkya 8y ago

They deal with that nicely for railways, where if you want to operate some profitable lines, you're obliged to operate some infrequent lines too. Wonder why they did not do the same with the buses too.

askvictor 8y ago
I've never understood how railways can be privatised; it's a natural monopoly. I can't decide I want to compete with this rail line and build my own rail line (at least in most circumstances). And a London-Edinburgh line is not in competition with a London-Newcastle line.
- gkya 8y ago
  I'm not from the UK so maybe I am mistaken but AFAIK the railways belong to the govt but they outsource the operation of them and of trains, stations etc. And if they limit operation times too (so that you get some certain amount of time then everybody bids), I think that is a good model.
  - askvictor 8y ago
    This is how it works in Melbourne (actually, there is now a single company that runs the entire Metropolitan railway). Initially they split it into two companies each running half the city because competition. Because a train line on the east side of the city can compete with a train line on the west side. Now a single company runs both halves. I can't see how this is better than the government just running it.

jlebrech 8y ago

they should redesign the whole lines so that they have to most coverage. so that people on average are around 500m walk from the nearest bus stop, and also making sure stop aren't too close so busses don't make too many stops.

closeparen 8y ago
Most US bus systems have a strong bias towards coverage and are learning that utilization gets better if they instead discard coverage in favor of frequency. Having a bus stop nearby isn’t worthwhile if it comes once an hour. Those people will drive anyway. Better to provide an actually compelling alternative to a subset of the city than a worthless alternative to all of it.
- jlebrech 8y ago
  I think coverage would promote frequency, you don't have to go down every street, just enough blocks away for everyone.

closeparen 8y ago

I’m not sure it’s a feature that public transit agencies allow popular commuter routes to become ridiculously overcrowded by siphoning off the funds for fare subsidies and mostly-empty buses no one wants. My government for a while was clearly trying to shift the incentives to favor bus over car commuting, but half the time the bus was so full that the driver wouldn’t even let me try to get on. The agency was not out of money. Instead, it had spent the money on a new route from nowhere to nowhere that passed my apartment every 10 minutes and was consistently empty, while at the same time downsizing the vehicles used on commuter service.