Generation Bus: Ensuring The Sector Has The Skills For A Successful Future

Introduction to Vivian

Vivian is a Graduate Transport Planner with Leeds City Council where he has worked since 2019. Like the author of the foreword to the ‘Bus Back Better’ strategy (that pledged a BCoE) his first degree was in the Classics. In Vivian’s current work at Leeds, he enjoys analysing policies and data to develop projects, in support of our Connecting Leeds vision to make Leeds a city where everyone has affordable and zero carbon travel choices.

 Generation Bus: Ensuring the Sector has the Skills for a Successful Future

The current period seems a time of change or at least has a sense of pivotal change for buses and public transport more widely. Potentially a danger exists of getting caught up in the ability to move to different models of governance and ownership of bus services, whereas the transformative opportunities may lie more in bus network redesign. The topic of network redesign is one of those concepts that can both at its best be pleasingly simple but also be possessed of nuances that need unpacking.

As Kamal Panchal has noted in his blog for the BCoE (link), councils have to our frustration tended to lack the levers of control over bus services. And in Leeds we would agree that the recovery of bus services shouldn’t be an attempt to replicate the past – fresh thinking and approaches will be needed to get our bus network delivering for us - socially, economically, and to help us address the climate emergency.

Research I conducted, supported by the Transport Planning Society through their award of a bursary, used a methodology of interviewing key figures across the bus sector; two examples that seem particularly instructive were Dublin (NTA) and London (TfL).

In Dublin, Jarrett Walker Associates have helped the city review and reshape their bus network. Two important aspects of this are consolidating radial services into very high frequency spines and new frequent cross-city orbital services, that collectively if passengers are happy to interchange creates a significantly improved PT offer. A key learning was how hard change is and the need to expect to have deep and robust engagement with communities throughout this process.

In London, where TfL have a public set of bus network planning guidelines, in conversation it was explained that at the inception of franchising TfL did not have these principles as a codified document to refer to, but as time had gone on, having such guidelines was found to be key to helping work thorough the inevitable trade-offs inherent in network planning. And trends of shifting between decentralisation or centralisation of services, for instance within healthcare provision, are examples of how networks need to be adaptable.

In Leeds we are fortunate to have both the Leeds College of Building delivering their unique ‘Transport Planning Apprenticeship’ (of which I’m an alumni) and the Institute of Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. Last semester, I sat in on the fascinating ‘Public Transport Management’ module at ITS, the pièce de résistance was a workshop delivered by Corrine Mulley. This introduced me to concepts, such as that of circular routes (that Corrine referred to as “frying pans”) that are markedly inefficient costing up to 400% more to run than a ‘straight line’ route, or that limited stop bus routes probably should not be the go-to answer for bus-on-bus congestion. The workshop was hands on with a network planning exercise, followed by feedback from Corrine on how well we’d applied using our resources efficiently to maximise the good that public transport can do when well planned.

This mixture of theory and practice is likely exactly what Transport Planners will need, as possibilities unlock from both changed and changing travel patterns and different models of governance that are now available thanks to the Bus Services Act 2017.

In Leeds, as an authority responsible for our road network that serves the country’s second largest population spread over a geographically diverse administrative district, we strive to develop and manage our network, to give our residents attractive alternatives to the private car. And whilst we are not a Transport Authority, I believe the BCoE will offer value to all authorities – in Leeds’s case after all it is our responsibility to ‘keep buses moving’, through our effective deployment of UTMC and Network Management.

I hope this blog has given an insight into my skills journey so far in Leeds that I hope to continue further through the Bus Centre of Excellence.

Vivian Elby, Leeds City Council