Transport User Voice – January 2023 – New bus passenger survey

20 December 2022

Improving your bus journey

Bus passengers are set to have their say, when our new satisfaction survey, Your Bus Journey, launches in 2023.

Using our experience of measuring satisfaction with passengers through our own Bus Passenger Survey, we’ve developed a new approach, piloted earlier this year in three areas of England. We’re working with industry partners from the Department for Transport, operators, and local transport authorities to find the best way to look at the experience of bus passengers and their journeys.

As we go to press, there are nearly 35 partnership and operator-only areas committed to our survey for 2023. The survey will represent the experiences of around 35,000 bus passenger journeys across areas of England and Scotland next year.

The new survey will identify where future improvements for bus passengers can be made. We’ll be asking about their experiences to provide robust, comparable, and benchmarked results, which will add value to the work of governments, local authorities, and operators.

Since September, the Transport Focus team have been talking to local transport authorities and bus operators about the benefits. This includes how results will frame the targets that partnerships set for their Bus Service Improvement Plans, Enhanced Partnerships and potentially in the longer term, franchised bus areas.

Transport Focus have highlighted the benefits of the new approach, explaining how local results will stand up against other areas. It will also ‘get under the skin’ of local passenger experience, including what matters to them specifically in their area and how their needs be considered.

We’ll be sharing good practice with partners to identify what’s worked and why, to help drive up passenger satisfaction, and grow the local bus market.

Over time we’ll provide partners with rolling headline results by month using an online data tool highlighting the key issues. Providing weekly verbatim feedback will also mean that passengers will continuously have their voices heard, and results will be reported at six-monthly intervals and annually.

 

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