The DfT’s national bus strategy, Bus Back Better, was launched in March 2021, so we prepared a bus service improvement plan bid. We put together quite an ambitious plan, in line with what DfT was looking for, including widespread proposals to cover the whole of our rural county, which added up to about £160m in funding.

We submitted the plan, including a commitment to be ambitious in our urban centres. In Taunton, we wanted to introduce significant bus priority measures, as well as more fare offers. We were one of the few authorities to win some of the DfT money and were awarded about £12m from the £160m that we bid for.

Focus on Taunton

There are a number of initiatives linked to this funding, mainly focused in Taunton. We had to consider what we did with that money to achieve a decent outcome, so there was a tough discussion about how we would use the money. We had a firm view from our operators, which was supported by our cabinet member for transport, to focus it in one place, because if you really concentrate funding, you should get tangible outcomes.

Somerset is quite challenging, because we've got a widely distributed population and there aren't that many chains of towns that you can run a bus along to pick up passengers. That means you have to run a lot of buses between lots of places in order to meet people's needs.

Nonetheless, we've chosen to invest primarily in Taunton, a medium-sized town with a population of 70,000. There’s a mix of capital investment for bus priority lanes and bus priority at junctions, some investment in a mobility hub – bringing back into operation a bus station that was previously out of operation – and wrapping around other facilities there, such as e-bikes, e-scooters and some commercial activity.

Anywhere for a pound

We’ve also introduced a £1 fare (for any single journey) in a zone that covers all of Taunton, including park and ride services. We're also trialling some evening and weekend services on routes from the villages surrounding Taunton, to try and build more of a night-time economy and stimulate a bit of the bus market in the evening. All the fares are up and running and doing well: the £1 fare, and evening and weekend services have been running since November 2022 and have delivered about a 28% growth in bus use in Taunton over that period. The capital projects are taking a bit longer, obviously, but they’ll come online in 2023.

There's another element, which is more about bringing people in from the eastern side of the county in into Taunton. There's a separate bus hub in a village to the east of Taunton with some demand-responsive transport attached to that, which will run around the South Somerset area and bring people into the main service in Taunton.

We submitted the £1 fare scheme for an CIHT award in the southwest and we were asked to present a webinar. At the same time, a Bus Centre of Excellence has also been established in the last few months: a web-enabled repository for sharing good practice, it’s a great idea that should be a useful resource for anyone working with buses. For example, it contains legal agreements that can be stored and reused elsewhere, tools and techniques for doing things and template agreements that everyone can access.

Mike O’Dowd-Jones was in conversation with Craig Thomas