Quasi un quinto dei servizi di autobus rurali dell’Inghilterra sono svaniti negli ultimi cinque anni
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/07/almost-a-fifth-of-england-rural-bus-services-disappeared-in-last-five-years?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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We have one that travels past our house 3 times a day, empty every time I look
Yep we’ve been dropped to some shitty “community style bus” that only runs 9-3 in the week and you have to pre book a slot.
Useless for anyone who isn’t a pensioner.
Some bus companies schedule their services in such a way to make them unusable with an eye on eventually scrapping the service. Near me there was a bus service that would have been ideal for work (standard 9-5), trouble is the buses were so infrequent that they’d arrive near work either an hour before I started or half an hour late.
Also certain people love to hate on pensioners and their free bus passes, what they don’t realise is that it’s a way of subsidising bus routes.
I’m currently living in a rural village with no shop, no post office, no pub, and the only bus route stopped eight years ago.
The simple reality is that there’s never going to be the footfall needed to make rural buses financially viable, and the only way to get the footfall is to send them on circuitous routes that take forever and leave people thinking about cars instead. Making them financially viable means insane subsidies that nobody wants to pay for.
The simple fact is that most rural bus routes are nowhere near being financially viable, even if you just run a skeleton service (which then means even fewer people will use them). And they’re an easy thing for councils to cut, because they’re generally not a legal requirement unlike a lot of other council spending.
So unless a local business is willing to subsidise a bus route, or the public is willing to pay for them out of general taxation, then we’re going to see more and more of them cancelled.
This is mostly because they never go *where* people want to go *when* people want to go there and so nobody uses them.
They also take bloody ages.
And we wonder why people in villages drive and never use public transport..