Transport and economic development - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 16

road and air travel) as well as by the continued preference of higher income groups for
homes in outer suburban and dormitory rural areas.
For local travel to or within urban areas there have been improvements in rail
networks and services serving the main centres in the provincial conurbations. The
Tyne and Wear Metro was the most significant example of its kind when it opened in
the early 1980s but has nevertheless struggled since to retain patronage in the face
of radical physical and economic restructuring within the conurbation (Gillespie et
al. 1998). This includes the effects of new motorways threaded between the former
separate towns which have transformed the opportunities for car travel between
suburban locations. Similar transformations on an even larger scale have occurred in
the other conurbations. In a league of its own is the enormous 118 mile long 'beltway'
created by the M25 which encircles the continuously built-up area of London and now
functions as a sort of 'inner ring road' to the expanding megalopolis across much of
southern England.
In urban areas as a whole the traditional mainstay of public transport - the bus
- has been unable to offer anything in the way of improvements to rival the private
car. Except where the availability or cost of non-residential parking has acted as an
impediment the attributes of car travel are superior on almost every count. (The
typical urban bus journey involves time and monetary costs three times greater than
those borne by motorists.)
Across urban regions the increasingly dispersed pattern of trip origins and
destinations has meant that the logical response of road-based public transport
to lengthening journeys - the development of coach services - has generally not
transpired. Services to airports - because of their scale and concentration of trips - are
an important exception.
Bus services have not usually been able to take advantage of major road
developments. In fact the design of these and of new residential areas have often
had an adverse effect on bus services by forcing them to adopt slow and/or tortuous
routes in order to continue to access developed areas. The introduction of one-person
operation on buses in the 1970s and 80s (i.e. doing away with conductors) lengthened
journey times because of the delay involved in cash transactions with the driver. The
effects of this have since been lessened by the development of pre-payment systems,
most impressively in London.
Most serious of all, urban bus services have suffered from worsening traffic
congestion. This has not only lengthened journey times still further but caused service
irregularity and bunching, sometimes to a catastrophic degree. Significantly there is no
national monitoring of bus punctuality (only 'reliability' which refers to the percentage
of scheduled mileage actually operated). Congestion presents bus operators with the
unwelcome choice of accepting service deterioration or of assigning additional buses
into operating cycles in order to maintain reliability - adding to their costs simply to
forestall patronage losses.
The introduction of congestion charging (as in Central London) or comprehensive
bus priority measures elsewhere is helping to reverse this spiral. The latter have the
unusual benefit of giving the bus a visible advantage over the car (i.e. a higher speed
along the route concerned), but can only be introduced where the highway layout
permits. However the very notion of giving buses 'priority' over cars is politically
controversial and this has acted to limit the introduction of such schemes and even
provoke their abandonment in some places.