Bus drivers still key, say bus passengers

15 March 2018

Independent watchdog Transport Focus launches its eighth annual Bus Passenger Survey today (Thursday 15 March).

Director David Sidebottom said:
“Despite all the great technical innovation out there, passengers are telling us that it’s still the bus driver that can make or break their journey experience.”

The survey identifies the factors that help deliver that ‘good’ and much sought-after ‘great’ passenger journey. The helpfulness, positive attitude and driving standards of the bus driver had a significant impact on both the ‘good’ and ‘great’ journeys.

Speaking to almost 48,000 bus passengers across Great Britain, the watchdog also found that:
• overall passenger satisfaction was 88 per cent in England, outside of London (89 per cent in Scotland and 90 per cent in Wales)
• as in 2016, 65 per cent of passengers were satisfied that their trip provided value for money
• 73 per cent of passengers were satisfied with the punctuality of their service
• once on the bus, 84 per cent of passengers were satisfied with the journey time.

David continued: “We’re pleased to see that some transport authorities and bus operators have worked together to act on the last few years’ results, which showed declining satisfaction with journey times, to start to turn around performance.”

There were some significant improvements in passenger satisfaction with punctuality and timeliness of trips in cities like Manchester for example. However there were also some significant declines in satisfaction with punctuality and timeliness of journeys in towns such as Reading, as congestion and the ‘growing pains’ of town centre redevelopment slow traffic down.

Transport Focus will now take these results out to governments, transport authorities and operators to make sure they clearly understand and act on what passengers are saying.

– Ends