Tell people about buses so that they can use them

The best bus service in the world won’t do a great deal of good if people don’t know that it exists or can’t find out where the buses actually go, says John Dales

I noticed that there was a certain amount of correspondence in the last episode of LTT about how to make bus travel more attractive to those who presently only use it in extremis, if at all. Some of these thoughts were prompted by a Garrett Emmerson article about the importance of improving the way we market bus services. Recognising a hot topic when I see one, I thought I’d turn my attention to what I regard as a key urban design consideration in the provision of bus services. But before you turn the page, fearing some agonised outpouring over the garish colour of some bus lane surfacing or yet another lament for the design classic that is/was the Routemaster, let me assure you that I’m going to focus on something much more sexy: bus serv­ice information!

Now that I’ve got you drooling, I’ll ratchet up the excitement levels still further by re-introducing a couple of the objec­tives of urban design set out in By Design (DETR, 2000).‘Ease of Movement’ and ‘Legibility’ are their names. The former is all about making places that are easy to get to and move through. Legibility is about making places that are easy to understand and “the provision of recognisable routes… to help people find their way around”.

Speak to most urban designers about legibility and they’ll usually refer to image, urban structure and landmarks: and why not? But speak to me about it, at least while I’m in this mood, and I’ll tell you that bus services in Britain are, on the whole, about as illegible as can be imagined – and I’m not just talking about the graffiti.

My point is that it doesn’t matter how good the ease of movement by bus to and through every town and city in Britain is if no-one knows how to use the services in question because they simply don’t know what goes where, or when. I have to admit that, living and working in London, I’m rather privileged in this regard. The provision by Transport for London of bus service informa­tion at stops and elsewhere may not be perfect but the profusion of easy-to-read timetables, ‘spider maps’, colour-coded routes, destination lists and local area street plans usually provides travellers with about as much information as they need or can handle. But elsewhere the picture is often quite different.

Whenever I go to a town or city that’s new to me, I tend to make a point of trying to catch the bus to where I’m going or to some other place of interest. I do this not just because I’m sad that way but because I think it’s important for me, as a transport professional, to get a better insight as to what it’s like to be a transport punter. And I have to say that my experience as a bus passenger in search of service information is all too often discouraging and confusing.

Bus stops with nothing but a flagpole; flags with nice little boxes for service numbers to be put in but no numbers actually there of course; shelters with no information at all and no sign as to where it would go if there were any; some basic timetable information but nothing that helps if you don’t already know which bus you want; and lovely,shiny,new custom-built shelters with loads of adverts but little else. And it doesn’t get much better when you pop into a travel shop or try to find information online. All too often there’s no such thing as a plan of all the bus routes in a town; and if there is one in theory, the practice seems to be that 'it’s just being reprinted”'. If you can actually lay your hands (or mouse) on a multi-route plan, it almost inevitably only covers the routes run by the operator who published it.

Deregulation may have had some benefits (I’ll leave that broader debate to others) but there’s no denying that the services run by minority operators in any town are often close to invisible as far as published information goes.
I struggle to understand how any local author­ity with responsibility for public transport services in its area regards it as even remotely acceptable that there should be no easily-obtain-able bus route plan for that area. How can you have responsibility for bus services and yet appear simply not to care whether people know how to use them or not?

I was in Haywards Heath the other day and, like many people arriving there by train, wanted to get from the station to the town centre. The walk takes about 15 minutes, isn’t particularly interest­ing and is mostly uphill. Now: I happen to know that any bus that passes the station and heads up the hill will take me to and through the town centre and that, during the daytime, the com­bined frequency of buses gives a reasonable average headway of around 5-7 minutes. So, I didn’t have to worry which of the 57 varieties of bus number, type or operator came calling by, I just hopped on the first one (a number 40, as it happens). Without this insider knowledge, I’d have been stumped, since the bus shelter pro­vided no service information other than a number or two on the flag. A simple 'all buses go to the town centre' would have been enough and I half thought of buying a spray can and using the shelter as a canvas to provide just that message!

But I decided not to. If the professionals can’t be bothered, why should the passengers?

"How can you have responsibility for bus services and yet appear not to care whether people know how to use them?"

In some cities bus service information is lavished upon you...	... but elsewhere a simple timetable can seem like a special privilege
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John Dales is on the Commission for Architecture & Built Environment’s enabling panel and is responsible for helping to deliver CABE’s ‘Streets for People’ programme of urban design training for highways and transportation professionals. He is director of transport and movement at urban design consultant Urban Initiatives. This series of articles was originally commissioned by and published in Local Transport Today magazine.