An ideal journey: making bus travel desirable

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which people use their travel-time on local buses, and explains how this knowledge can assist with efforts in many ‘auto-centric’ societies to make bus travel more attractive and encourage a shift away from excessive private car use. Framing the discussion around the concept of an ‘ideal bus journey’, this paper examines whether travel-time activities on-board the bus give subjective value to the journey experience. Particular attention is given to emergent mobile Information and Communications Technologies, which are rapidly reconfiguring the ways in which we can inhabit and use mobile spaces such as the bus. This paper reports a novel mixed-methodology, creating a synthesised analysis of online discussions, focus groups, and a large-scale questionnaire survey of 840 bus users in Bristol, UK. The findings demonstrate that the bus is a very active space, with high levels of travel-time activity. The most popular activities on the bus are those related to relaxation and personal benefit, such as reading, listening to music, and browsing the internet. It is the passengers themselves that are largely in control of their in-vehicle experience, being able to craft a range of different positive journey experiences through travel-time activity. However, negative experiences are very common, and there is a need to challenge unfavourable public perception and media representations of bus travel to create a more positive cultural construction of the bus which would allow for the concept of an ‘ideal journey’ to be more easily realised. Passengers are the main creators of their travel-time experience, however there is much that can be done by bus operators to facilitate different types of activity and encourage a desirable public space. The overarching message is that there is a distinct opportunity to unlock travel-time activity as a ‘Unique Selling Point’ of the bus. Creating a perception of the bus journey as a desirable piece of time will allow local bus services to compete with the car on their own terms, and assist with international efforts to encourage people out of their cars and onto public transport for some trips.

Keywords:

• Travel time use
• journey experience
• bus
• ICT
• passenger

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the UK sponsors of the Ideas in Transit project who have made possible the development of this article, namely the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Department for Transport and Innovate UK (previously the Technology Strategy Board). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors.

Notes

1. Whilst improvements to air quality are a suggested policy outcome from the promotion of bus travel, there is evidence to demonstrate that with specific reference to oxides of nitrogen (NOx), increased bus travel has in many cases led to a worsening of air quality in urban areas due to the dominance of diesel as the fuel type used in the majority of bus fleets (Parkhurst 2004).

2. A p value lower than 0.05 indicates that there is 95% confidence that the variables are related. This is generally taken as the acceptable level of statistical significance in analyses of this type.

3. This was explored through a question which asked passengers to rate on a Likert scale how comfortable they felt with the potential for social interaction with strangers that the bus journey presents.

4. By 5 min or more from scheduled time of departure.

5. Free daily newspaper made available on public transport in a number of cities in the UK.