Back to the buses

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Londoners know better than anyone the truth of the latest damning report on the nation's transport system. But an unexpected minor success story is emerging in the capital. The London bus is on its way back. After 40 years in which the buses got worse and worse and only those of us who had no other choice went on using them, the number of passengers has started to rise by leaps and bounds. It has gone up by 22 per cent in the past seven years, is currently rising by almost six per cent a year, and is plausibly expected to increase by another 40 per cent in the next 10 years.

The use of night buses, hitherto one of the many almost totally neglected parts of the service, leapt by 16 per cent in the past year alone, and is apparently becoming fashionable among the young, though I am far too ancient to know anything about that.

Recently I instead found myself attending the Second Annual Bus Conference, held in the incongruous surroundings of the Royal Aeronautical Society. But though the walls were decorated with pictures of Spitfires and other aircraft, there was no doubting the excitement of the assembled busmen about their earthbound and until now ter minally untrendy form of transport.

They have spent their entire working lives shutting things down. Now, to their delighted surprise, they find they need more drivers, more engineers, more vehicles, more garages. They are recruiting as far away as China, and at last paying better wages to recruit in London, too.

To their pleasure, the vast untapped potential of the bus as a form of urban transport is at last starting to be realised, or re-realised, for between the two world wars London had excellent buses. Services are already back to the highest level seen since 1965, with passenger numbers at the highest since 1975.

But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with me? Many of us have completely lost - if we ever had - the habit of travelling by bus, and have developed an almost invincible prejudice against this form of transport. Buses, we assume, are dirty, slow, unreliable and inconvenient.

Well, sometimes, indeed far too often, they still are. But they also have virtues which no other form of transport can begin to match. The view from the top of a London double-decker is better than the view from even the most bulbous of the four-wheel drives which clog our prosperous residential areas, and someone else takes care of the driving (though, admittedly, quite a few London bus drivers seem, alarmingly, to take Michael Schumacher as their role model). There is really no better way to see London in all its staggering diversity, beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty jumbled together in endless variations, than from the top of a bus.

Consider the alternative which in most cases is to descend into a hole in the ground and allow yourself to be crushed against your fellow Londoners in a narrow metal tube. There is no view, and socially the whole experience is a catastrophe, full of embarrassed people trying to find enough room to hide in timid or angry silence behind their newspapers.

Buses tend to be more companionableplaces. People actually have quite natural conversations there. Perhaps it is something to do with being above ground. Fear and loathing of the Tube may indeed be one reason why buses are starting to revive, while another is the development in the 1990s, with privatisation of bus operation under public regulation, of a system which is more responsive to passenger needs.

There was a time in London when the middle-classes used buses. The horse-drawn omnibus was introduced here in 1829 by George Shillibeer, who, in the words of his own announcement, "induced by the universal admiration the above Vehicles called forth at Paris, has commenced running one upon the Parisian modes, from Paddington to the Bank".

The double-decker grew popular when immense numbers of people wanted to reach the Great Exhibition in 1851 and, by 1902, 50,000 horses were used by public transport in London, moving over two million passengers a day, with no fewer than 600 buses an hour passing the Mansion House in the City at peak times, or one every six seconds. But these horsedrawn buses were still used mainly by the middle-classes, because of their relatively high cost: keeping and feeding horses was not cheap.

The arrival of the first electric tram in London in 1901 revolutionised public transport: the trams were cheap, fast and comfortable, so almost everyone could afford to use them.

In matter of price, almost everyone can afford to use London's buses today. A oneday Travelcard costs only £2, or half the cost of the Tube. If you wish only to make occasional short bus journeys, perhaps in order to establish whether buses are as delightful as here claimed, you can alternatively buy a carnet of six tickets costing a mere 65 pence each. Even if you are rich, do not be put off. Some of the best things in life are cheap.

There remain the great questions of speed and reliability. Some bus journeys are already quicker than you would think, but others are still desperately slow and overcrowded.

Unprecedented efforts have been launched in recent months by the bus industry to keep bus lanes free and to introduce signalling which will enable buses to pass quickly through congested junctions. We shall know within a year or two whether these efforts are bearing fruit. It is vital they do, for in January 2003 congestion charging is due to be introduced for cars in the central area of London. This will be an intolerable imposition unless at the same time we see, not just a rise in the average 10- mile- an- hour speed of road transport in the middle of town, but also improved public transport, which in the short term only buses can provide.