Reading sees more people travelling by bus (11.4% increase)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7k80kjnz4o
by d5tp
Reading sees more people travelling by bus (11.4% increase)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7k80kjnz4o
by d5tp
30 comments
Building bus lanes results in increased bus usage, who could have known?
Modal shift induced by a carrot and stick combination, good to see
who’d have thought investing in services makes people more likely to use them.
Wow, investing in public services means increased quality, reliability and therefore usage? Colour me fucking shocked.
Hopefully this country *finally* wakes up to seeing that investing solely in car infrastructure is a losing battle. More investment in trains, buses, trams, and cycleways please. A proper multi-modal transport network is the way. It’s always been the way.
PS: Fuck you, Ernest Marples.
Doesn’t surprise me. Reading busses are pretty legendary.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2i4C1bG-8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2i4C1bG-8w)
Areas of high bus usage all have council run bus services. Nottingham is the best. Simple things like the same bus number for decades help. Elsewhere bus services are so fractured and expensive.
Ran by Reading Buses, a municipal bus operator owned by the council.
Well yeah, if you want to read on the way to work you need to take Public transport.
Maybe people who read are more likely to be environmentally concerned?
Having an app that gives you realtime location of the bus makes a massive difference to usage. Being able to plan to the minute when to be at the bus stop galvanises me to use a bus more often. I’m in Glasgow but this feature should be a mandatory requirement for any company/council delivery bus services
I usually prefer to read on the bus instead of while driving
Great. The more people that use it, the lowet the costs can be for public transport.
I can’t be the only one who thought that people who read more, are more likely to use a bus!
Will this keep up next year when fares jump 150% to £3?
Reading buses are phenomenal. It was a shock moving away and realising how bad buses are everywhere else.
I come from Reading. The buses have problems but they are the best I have ever been on, in terms of times, routes and amounts.
MOST people grow up using the buses there, because they are so prevalent. My house literally had a busy stop on either side of the road right outside it.
They are great resources, they have great prices compared to other places in the country, and work so hard.
So much of the town centre is busy only.
Hopefully councils see this and realise they need to build more bus lanes and bus gates.
Makes sense. If you can’t Read, how will you know where the bus is going?
Don’t live there, so maybe the service is improved, but what i do know is the M4 past Reading has been fucked for about 3 years. 10 miles of 50 limit while workmen lean against shovels, all to install smart motorways, which have been proven not to work.
That’s weird I thought you got people on buses by making it more and more unpleasant to drive into the city and cutting bus routes. Turns out the secret was just investing in the bus service. Who would have thought.
It’s about 40 minutes to walk/get public transport to work. Takes 10 minutes in the car.
I’d love to be able to take the bus but it’s just not practical.
Lived in Reading for 9 months recently, hands down the best bus system I’ve used in this country
I lived in Reading for 4 years and regularly used the buses, thought their service was excellent any time of day and night.
Public transport is the definition of “build it, and they will come”
Whenever I’m somewhere with decent transport (London or somewhere abroad) I never miss or bemoan not having my car. I love the flexibility of being able to have a drink, it’s usually faster, no faffing with parking etc etc.
But at home…good christ I can’t be without my car. Last time I took the bus, ironically to pick up my car from a garage, I got the bus stop 5 minutes before it was due. And waited 45 minutes for a bus to arrive, which then itself took 40 minutes to do a 20 minute car journey. That shit just isn’t workable.
I had to do the same journey the other week for a work trip and would up paying £20 for a taxi, because I just didn’t have the confidence to get a bus for something even vaguely time critical (was getting a train).
So right now I’m probably the reason our local bus services get no people, which probably encourages them to run less and be even worse. But if they weren’t shit, I’m sure people would more readily use them.
It is an upward spiral.
The income from the buses is reinvested in the bus network, meaning nice and clean buses This encourages people to use them which generates more money for continued investment.
There was an article in the local press a few years ago, at the Bus depot they have this massive interactive board on the wall with every route on it and any road closures/roadworks etc meaning they are ahead of things should something go tits up.
It is one thing that Reading Borough Council has not fucked up in the past 20+ years and probably has a lot to do with it being ran at arms length from the council
702s and 703s are life savers for anyone fortunate enough to be in their route!
For those whose first language isn’t English, Reading is a town to the west of London, pronounced “red-ing”. Simply reading books hasn’t been connected to an increase in the use of public transport.
Merit of public transport improvements, or simply more and more people that cannot afford to buy a car due to car prices (and cost of living) completely out of scale compared to real purchase power?
I’d like to believe it’s the first mainly, but I’m afraid it’s the latter having a large impact on this percentage
That’s because driving in reading by car is hellish
Well presumably the £2 per journey would have meant a significant decrease in the cost of a bus ticket in Reading so that in conjunction with implementing the bus lanes and improving the actual services was bound to see an increase in usage.
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