Ill-fated 'Yorbus' service was doomed from the start: Yorkshire Post Letters

The Yorbus "Demand-Responsive" bus service (the failure of which you reported on June 5) was doomed from the start.

The problem for rural public transport is not a lack of demand. There are still many people without use of a car who desperately need help to get around. But as car usage has increased, that remaining demand has become too thinly spread for shared-vehicle services to provide an economic solution.

Replacing a timetabled service with a "flexible" service actually makes the economics worse. If I want to get to town for 10am and my neighbour wants to get there for noon, we will probably both use a timetabled bus that gets us there for 11am. That is the only alternative to a taxi. But a fully-flexible bus service will end up collecting me at around 09.30 and then return two hours later to collect my neighbour for a separate trip. If it sounds like a taxi service (go where you want, when you want), then it is going to end up running like a taxi service - taking one person or travel-together group at a time - even if you use a bus and call it a bus service.

I accessed data on Yorbus through a Freedom Of Information request. NYCC said it didn't have (and couldn't afford to procure) the data that would be needed for a straightforward analysis of service efficiency. But from the data they did provide (with a lot of computing), I did eventually manage to work out the patterns of how the buses had operated. The buses only spent a third of their time on the move with passengers aboard, and for 97.5% of their operating hours, you could have replaced the 15-seat minibus with a normal taxi.

I sent the results of my analysis to NYCC in November 2022, but received no response. It is depressing that NYCC hadn't done the analysis for themselves much sooner. It is sadder that even when presented with the data, they have taken another six months to accept the inevitable.

Even more worrying is the question of what had led NYCC to believe that the service could ever have been cost-effective. I have looked high and low for published research that shows how well (or badly) Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) services manage to combine customer requests in rural areas. I have found nothing - despite the fact that there have been dozens of DRT trials around the country over many years. Again and again, the services are (as in North Yorkshire) hailed as a tremendous success, only to be closed when the initial funding runs out. Nobody seems interested in documenting the "valuable lessons learned" that are always quoted in mitigation when the services collapse.

I suspect the success of the salespeople peddling their software and minibuses to run DRT services is because everybody so wants there to be a nice neat answer to the problem of how to provide mobility for those without cars in rural areas. There seems to be no shortage of local authorities who so desperately want to believe in DRT that they are willing to embark on new rural DRT trials without asking to see evidence that the approach has proved a cost-effective solution elsewhere. Or stopping to wonder why so many other DRT trials have failed in the past.