I have wondered at the setup too. Back at the dawn of the MetroBust project, when Tim Kent was the Bristol Councillor in charge and the Lib Dems (remember them?) were in charge of the council, charges to use the infrastructure were an important part of the plan. The idea was for the councils to be able to borrow enough money to pay for their share of the £160 million cost of the three schemes, and recover it in part from payments by grateful bus operators. There would not just be the Long Ashton Park and Ride, oh no! All the buses from Portishead, Clevedon and Weston Super Mare would use the new guided busway too. The Post asked someone from First - might have been James Freeman, I'm not sure - what they thought of this. The short answer was that they didn't see any need for the guided bit, and wouldn't pay to use it. They also said it would be silly to have the out-of-town buses using it because of the considerably lengthened journey time, what with the distance and the wait for the single-track section.
The lack of an operator so long into the process was another puzzlement. The Cambridgeshire
BRT▸ had two operators signed up before construction began, although their expensive new buses had to wait 3 years to use the guided bit. Now whatever some people in Bristol may think, First know how to run buses. So do Stagecoach, RATP, Arriva, Goahead, and others. You would have expected quite a tussle between the big boys if this was ever going to be a jewel in the crown, but there was only silence. Because?
Maybe because the nature of MetroBust is not that of a franchise. Any operator can apply to run services on it so long as they agree to abide by the terms of the Quality Partnership Scheme
(QPS) which covers quality of vehicles, frequency, fares, performance monitoring etc. This rather leaves the councils over a barrel. First only agreed to take on the M2 and M3 routes after the tolls were suspended for an unspecified period. Any other operator could test the water, but none has chosen to do so. If they decide to reinstate the fees, the bus operators can say no, and alter their routes. The
WECA» mayor could take control under the powers he has been urged to use, but that takes the risk largely out of the bus companies' hands,a and they can tell him that if he is effect making them use toll roads, he had better pay the tolls for them.
Of course, we are now looking at how the councils will fund their share of a much bigger bill - around £250 million that has been admitted so far. There is no other guaranteed revenue stream - much depends on Community Infrastructure Levy payments from developers for houses not yet at the planning stage, and they are not normally used to pay off debt incurred previously. Another source of income was going to be voluntary donations by local companies eager to help a scheme that will profit them greatly. So far, the Airport has chipped in a million, and that's it. You could say there is something of a black hole in the finances.
So why BCT? Were MetroBust reluctant, having told us what a magnificent change in the way we do transport MetroBust would be, to hand the whole lot over to the dominant player in the city on a plate? Or are First boxing clever, and offloading at least some of the risk of running potentially the most awkward of the three routes? The grants martyjon mentions for buses and refuelling kit were not,
IIRC▸ , awarded to specific companies - I don't know what deal was struck behind closed doors to allocate the cash. First are the operators of the route,
AIUI▸ , and have contracted the actual work to BCT. Has a similar setup ever happened somewhere else?
I'm puzzled.
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