Happy 10th Birthday to West Midlands Bus Users!
It all started ten years ago today when I decided to create a page on Facebook:
The last ten years
Sunday 19th August 2012 was the day the West Midlands Bus Users page was born. Why did I do it?
Ten years is a long time, so I don’t exactly remember why I did this. What I can remember is that the page was born out of a desire to allow bus users in the West Midlands to chat about their bus service experiences and offer suggestions.
At the time, I was already active as a member of Tony Hunter’s “West Midlands Buses In Photos” forum for bus enthusiasts, and had also been posting comments on the NX West Midlands Facebook page, and joining in with discussions there.
I remember that for some reason, NX West Mids decided to stop allowing ‘visitor posts’ on their page, which prevented people from asking questions and getting answers from other bus users.
So that was the main reason why I decided to start my own page, so that people could continue to do just that.
I’ve never been a massive ‘enthusiast’ of buses, and have never been any kind of ‘bus spotter’; my interest has always been from the perspective of the bus passenger, having relied on and used buses for much of my adult life to get around the region.
Thanks to the WMBIP forum, I did start to take more of a notice and interest in the various vehicle types, and some of the goings-on at local bus depots.
I was also interested in learning more about service changes, and how changes to bus routes impacted on the passengers who use those services.
The West Midlands Bus Users website was born just over a year later in September 2013.
At the time we were going through a ‘golden era’ of public consulations, where over a period of years, wholesale changes to bus networks were being carried out, preceded by lengthy periods of public consultation exercises, where the public were invited to submit comments, suggestions and feedback on how the bus networks could be better improved to serve passengers’ needs.
Through all this time, I’ve always had a full-time job, which has nothing to do with public transport or the bus industry. This has always just been a ‘hobby’ for me, something I do in my spare time, which is why you’ll often only see me posting on the Facebook page or on the website of an evening or at weekends.
The website itself was a bit of a side-interest to me, I’d already been ‘dabbling’ with creating websites for other people I knew, but this was the first opportunity I’d had to create something for myself, based on a specific interest that I had.
It took a few years to get the website into something that would start to look ‘slick’ and well-presented, and something that would be useful to other people.
Where the last ten years have gone, I just don’t know. The next ten years though, that’s what concerns me!
The next ten years
In the last few years, I’ve seen how things have been changing, the ‘golden era’ of consulting with the public seems to be mostly over, and changes to bus services now seem to be taking place behind closed doors, at the behest of bus operators, in conjunction with Transport for West Midlands (TfWM).
Prior to the Covid pandemic, bus passenger numbers were slowly on the rise, and you could see some kind of effort from the Government and local authorities to encourage more people to ditch their cars and switch to using public transport.
The pandemic delivered a fatal blow to the bus industry, which it has not been able to fully recover from though. Through that period, people were bombarded with messaging telling them that everything was ‘dangerous’, they should avoid close contact with other people (“social distancing”), and the only way to “stay safe” was to avoid using public transport, and to travel privately in your own car, or just stay at home.
The worst of the pandemic now seems to be over, and while passenger numbers are recovering, they are still nowhere near the levels we saw prior to all of this.
As government support funding comes to a close, bus operators and local authorities who fund them, are faced with the prospect of having to make service cuts in order to keep their business sustainable.
Bus operators need paying passengers in order to survive and keep their routes running.
The same governments and local authorities that frightened people for two years that they might die from Covid if they caught a bus, are now expecting bus operators to survive without the support funding that was available to them.
It’s also interesting that despite the recent fuss about rising costs of fuel and the cost of living crisis, bus operators are being urged NOT to increase their ticket prices.
Already this year here in the West Midlands, we’ve seen two local independent bus operators “throw in the towel” and sell their bus operations to another bigger group, namely Claribels and Johnsons, who were acquired by Diamond Bus.
Rotala (parent company of Diamond Bus) have also recently announced the acquisition of Burton-upon-Trent operator Midland Classic.
Elsewhere in the country, I read about how Bournemouth-based operator Yellow Buses went into administration the other week.
As I see things, its going to become increasingly challenging for smaller independent bus operators to stay in business, not unless there is some significant uptake in the number of passengers using their bus services, especially if vital funding is about to be cut off.
The ‘bigger’ bus operators and groups probably won’t have the same issues, they have big financial backing, so can ride out the situation.
You’re going to see more and more smaller operators either become absorbed or acquired into a larger group, such as Stagecoach, National Express, Rotala, GoAhead, First, Arriva etc, or those bigger groups will sit back and let those smaller operators fold, and just scoop up the ‘most profitable bits’ or successfully win contract tenders they might have otherwise been outbid on by the smaller operators who had lower running costs to meet.
Some people might like to see the back of smaller “cowboy operators” running on certain routes, but my concern is that this becomes the end of ‘free market enterprise’, and as long as no one operator has a ‘monopoly’ in any particular area, there is little the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) can do about that.
It doesn’t seem like a good time for any ambitious individual to try and start up a new independent bus company, not unless they have some serious financial backing.
What about us passengers?
As I mentioned earlier, we did have a ‘golden age’ a while back, where network reviews followed extensive public consultation, but that seems to have drawn to a close a few years ago, and now changes are being made mostly to suit the bus operators and their profitability, which to an extent I can understand, as I’m sure no-one wants to run a business that makes a loss.
But it seems to me that when it comes to the travelling public who actually use and rely on these services, our voices are being increasingly ignored, in favour of using ‘datasets’ and ‘computer modelling’ in order to plan and make decisions on where and when bus services should operate instead.
Apart from contacting bus operators privately with concerns and complaints, there has never really been any way of bus passengers engaging with each other to share ideas and suggestions, and provide public feedback to bus operators and local authorities, which is why I added the Community section to this website.
But it would seem that despite my best efforts, people are generally happy to just whine and complain directly to operators on Facebook or Twitter, although it is never known whether any such feedback received will ever actually be acted upon.
What I did here on this website was to set up a ‘platform’; it was never my intention to do everything by myself. Of course, I write up the occasional article to inform passengers about important stuff going on, but the idea was always about having the Community at the forefront, leading the discourse and getting passengers engaging with each other in a constructive manner.
The costs of running this website are covered by myself, I’m not looking for financial donations or remunerations, and I don’t need to run adverts.
What I don’t have though is the time and resources to promote and publicise this website. I maybe naively hoped that by reaching out to the people who follow and ‘like’ the Facebook page, that would be a catalyst for people to sign up, join in, and then ‘spread the word’ in an entirely organic manner.
Yes, I know I had a bit of a ‘hissy fit’ last year when I prematurely closed down the Community, but even so, there were only about the same number of members as there is now, which at the time I write this currently stands at 60, including myself.
Social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are good for some things, but still, they are very much ‘closed spaces’, and unless you are a member of such a social media network, whatever you get up to there is only visible or accessible to other members of that platform.
Yes, you can start a group or page there, but you’ll only ever reach those people who are already on that platform, and of course social networks are also notorious for ‘limiting’ the reach and exposure you get, unless you start paying for adverts to promote your page or group.
Many people are wary or sceptical of joining such social media platforms and to be honest I don’t blame them.
And yes, the WMBU website is also a kind of social media platform, but you can be assured that unlike the others, ours doesn’t pass on your data to any third-parties, we don’t track you elsewhere, and we don’t bombard you with advertising.
As I’ve said already, I’m not interested in making money out of this, I just want somewhere where bus and public transport users can freely exchange ideas and thoughts, as well as getting help and advice from other transport users.
This time round, I’m not going to close this site down. The platform is here, it is ready and capable of doing what it needs to do, it just needs members to participate and spread the word to others.
YOU are the West Midlands Bus Users, you people who regularly travel on buses, you who get inconvenienced when a bus route is changed without warning, you who are upset by anti-social behaviour or vandalism of bus shelters, you who can’t get a bus to where you want to go.
If there is something on your mind about bus services in your local area, chances are it bothers other people too. What can you do? Do you talk to other people waiting at your stop? Do you talk to other passengers on your bus? Or do you fire off an ‘angry tweet’ at the bus operator and then happily accept the response you get ‘fobbed off’ with? Do you ever ask yourself “what mechanism is there in place so I can openly share my thoughts and feedback on my bus travelling experience?”
From birthday cake to humble pie
Just to stop myself as I feel like I’m rambling on here, but I do want to say a big thanks to those regular commenters and posters on the WMBU Facebook page, some of whom have been there from the start. I don’t want to name any names, but there are certainly a few ‘characters’ I have enjoyed engaging with over the last ten years (and some less so!).
Thank you all!
I don’t know how much longer the Facebook page will survive for though, so if you haven’t already, please do consider signing up to our Community and help to make it become the success it deserves to be.
