My travel plans will have me in the UK for much of the month of September this year. This is a great opportunity for British friends to think about events they might want me to do.
First, I can do speaking events related to my book, for free as long as there’s a reasonable marketing value. These events can focus on any mixture of.
- The guide we wrote on considering bus service in town planning, for the National Transport Authority of Ireland. (The town planning habits of the UK, and the resulting public transport issues, are similar.)
- Our Irish network redesigns, and lessons for the many redesigns that will be forthcoming in the UK.
Second, I can also offer sessions of our fun two-day intensive course in public transport network design, for any sponsoring organisation. You can read more about that here. These take some planning so please contact me right away if your organisation is interested. (Our fee to run the two day course is £12,000 plus a suitable venue.)
My larger objective for the trip, apart from some time off in beautiful landscapes and cities, is to see if we can be helpful in the reform of bus services across England, which will give shire and urban area governments the power to define their own bus services for the first time in decades. We have already provided some planning advice in both Cambridge and Birmingham, as well as in Wales. We’re also keen to do more comprehensive network maps to help British communities assess their current services, like the one we did for for the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority.
So please share your ideas for what I should do!
Try to talk with the progress guys
https://worksinprogress.co/
https://www.greaterlondon.co/
https://progressireland.org/
Would love a map that covers all of Norfolk, as an example of a rural county that has a couple of principal cities/towns.
Ideally intermodal including heritage railways as well as county branch lines.
The North Norfolk map (published by Sanders Coaches but including one route with another operator) partially implements some of the standards that your Cambridge example shows, but does not cover city/county routes from other operators.
Shout out also for Roger French’s busandtrainuser blog which renewed the tiger routes in the same week as your Cambridge map post.
I concur with Miles T regarding Roger French’s busandtrainuser blog. Roger has extensive experience in the bus sector and was a senior person in Brighton & Hove Buses, one of the UK’s best bus operators.
Also i would suggest reaching out to the Campaign for Better Transport https://bettertransport.org.uk/ a long standing public transport advocacy group that has the ear of central government.
Other bus sector advocate I would recommend are Route One Magazine https://www.route-one.net/ and Buses Magazine https://www.keybuses.com/
I hope as many as authorities as possible across the UK take up your offer as bus information, especially maps are so lacking and of variable quality across the country, if they exist. Where I live (Hertfordshire) has decent information and maps via Intalink but too many parts of the country, it’s been left up to enthusiasts to properly map the bus networks, even in London as the ‘spider maps’ are awful. Mike Harris’ Greater London bus map puts TFL to shame. Still seriously impressed with your Cambridgeshire map and hope other parts of the country are covered in the future. I tried to find out where buses in various parts of Wales and Scotland went as I was on holiday last year, I gave up and stuck to the trains as information was so sparse.
The councils and government want us all to use public transport more, but that’s not exactly easy when we don’t know where they go, how frequent they are and when fares are not simple to understand. Franchising could easily improve all that.
You should visit Brighton & Hove on the south coast to see a very progressive bus company (Brighton & Hove Buses) working in partnership with a pro public transport local authority. Brighton has the highest bus use in the UK after London. Other cities either good bus networks to visit include Leicester where the main operators working in partnership with local government have created a unified bus branding as Leicester Buses. Nottingham is also a good place to visit with its municipally owned Nottingham City Transport, or another municipal is Warrington’s Own Buses which has replaced its entire fleet with BEVs. If you’d like to sample some delightful coastal scenery then head down to Bournemouth and travel on the Purbeck Breezer open top service to Swanage which includes a short ferry crossing at Sandbanks.