Transport User Voice April 2025 – Chief Executive’s editorial

01 April 2025

Helping to improve journeys

In this month’s edition of Transport User Voice, you’ll see the second year of results from Your Bus Journey.

We publish a range of surveys across different modes (the Strategic Road User Survey and our Rail Scorecard, which also features this month, are the other main ones) and we want them to stimulate discussion as much as possible and spark a debate about how the experience of transport users can be improved. It’s not the results themselves that matter, it’s the action they generate.

What’s been encouraging with Your Bus Journey is the conversations across England, Scotland and Wales over the past year. There has been real interest in what the results are showing with colleagues from our Engagement Team joining discussions and sharing detailed analysis. Bus operators, transport authorities, civil servants and politicians all with a sense of public service and desire to make things better.

How often though, despite the best of intentions, have stories about public servants doing their best had decline and failure as their punchline? A combination of increasing demands, declining resources and unclear accountabilities have made improvements seem impossible. That’s certainly what the public think. An Ipsos UK survey in July last year found that just 5 per cent of us thought public services had got better in the last five years and 77 per cent that they had got worse.

So, I was delighted when I found the results showed an overall increase in bus passenger satisfaction of three percentage points in England. In places such as Warrington and East Sussex there were even bigger increases (eight percentage points). These improvements didn’t happen by accident, they happened because transport authorities and bus operators worked hard to do what’s right for passengers. After years of decline in bus usage I hope we’re now turning a corner and that these results show what’s possible.

Enjoy the read.

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