Why is bus funding a much hotter topic than a new set of traffic lights?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2016-02-16 10:37:02 - Graham Ellis
When you look at an annual spend of 5 million pounds spread over a population of 483,000 in Wilsthire, you're looking at 20p per person per week, 14p of which comes from council tax and 6p from central governmnent funding. Problem is that (in the case of being a bus subsidy) it's a revenue cost that goes on year after year, rather than a one off sum, such as the 22 million spend on refurbishing County Hall which cost £46 per head of population (£30 from council tax), or the million pound traffic lights being installed at Farmer's Roundabout, Melksham, which will cost each resident around £1.60 with 70p help from central government.
Problem is that each of those 20p-s, repeated year after year, add up and eventually dwarf the capital costs, and you're left with nothing tangible to show for it, to hold up in the air, to show visitors and say "we paid for this". So, rightly, an annual revenue expenditure of 5 million pounds is looked at much more closely than a capital expenditure of the same amount. Additional expenditure should be looked on with great care, and the exisiting expenditure examimed to say "can we achieve similar or better results at the same or a lower, and decreasing price". We need to be very careful, though, not to reduce expenditure in one area and as a result have expenditure increase in another.
Adult and child social care, learning disabilty support, safeguarding and preventative services and housing have an annual budget of around £160 million between them in Wiltshire. Reducing the availability of public transport used by customers of these care services, or indeed removing people's mobility so that they became customers of such care services, would add to the pressure on that £160 million budget. It's hard to estimate the crossover effect (and no-one at Wiltshire Council has volunteered estimates when I have asked about the effect of each option on the consultation), but general government figures for non-metropolitain areas of England suggest BCRs on bus subsidy of arouns 2.0, suggesting that for each 1 million pounds cut by simply reducing service will cost elsewhere an extra 2 million pounds. Of course, not all of that will fall on Wiltshire Council's other budgets - some will fall on individuals, the NHS, businesses, but I really feel we lack information as to the effect of the proposed options. And that effect's important - it's not just for the year in question, but for the year after, and the year after that ...
The tragedy is that the problem is largely systemic - and the only options we're being offered don't look at the system. In answer to "can you envisage a public transport that meet the needs of today and the future without the need for a 20p donation from everyone each week", I have to answer "yes, I can". A re-arrangement of services, an arrangement under which the connected network is considered as a whole. Some services can be removed with adjustments to others, multiple vehicles heading the same way can serve suburbs as they leave or enter town, town buses can carry on to the next town or connect into other public transport services to encourage better use for the future. And information and shared ticketing can be provided to encourage who are scared off at present - what better way to fill the funding gap than by having new people travel by bus and pay, when most bus services have spare seats available. I've put up three very specific examples - from my own area and knowledge - to illustrate the sort of services that could result from such a change to the system - this isn't just a theory; it shows what could be done in practise
[here] - North and West Wiltshire to Royal United Hospital [here] - Bath - Corsham - Chippenham corridor [here] - Service to from and in Melksham