In remote areas not well served by buses, or where existing services are under threat, I feel that more could be done to make bus services viable.
Perhaps have the bus company deliver mail, parcels and light freight such as small deliveries to local shops.
I've seen this done in Iceland and Norway (where they have plenty of remote villages). Norway is also rather good at integrating tourist buses with service buses and also with their ferries and trains, so you might have 100 people on a coach/rail/boat trip who are tourists off a cruise trip or doing a "fjord tour", but the tourists keep the ferry links to remote villages viable and the coach will stop a couple of times in the middle of nowhere to pick up a local coming home from college. In Iceland, the tourist bus coming out of Reykjavik each morning stops at local fuel stations to drop off boxes of part backed bread for the shop and Amazon parcels.
Or in small villages, have the bus driver read utility meters. The reading of large numbers of meters would cause undue delay, but to read say one meter a week should be reasonable and the utility company should be willing to pay for this service in remote areas.
Maybe, although I think that will all be being done remotely soon with smart meters
The other approach would be to increase the population of many small villages a bit by building more housing. Few people would support large scale redevelopment, but most villages would NOT be spoiled by the building of say 5 new family homes. That's another 20 or more potential passengers for the bus service, and more trade for the village shop, public house, and post office.
Such additional housing should in my view be of a similar style and price to existing homes in the same village, so as not to unduly alter the character of the village.
Absolutely agree. Too many villages have become outposts of well off retirees. Some new "ordinary" homes would give a better social and age mix. I get the sense that building more houses though would provoke the usual NIMBY reaction.
The main problem with
UK▸ buses since deregulation is lack of stability of service. Would you move to a village on the basis of a decent bus service to your work place? Would you trust that that bus service would still be running in the future? You might if it was a railway service (and Freshford for example thrives in part due to the presence of a station). If you were a logistics company would you use buses to transport your parcels knowing that the service could be stopped with only a few days notice? If you were a package tour operator would you book your customers onto a service bus to, lets say get them to Stonehenge, would you trust your customers with one of the UK's bus companies? or would you lay on your own coach?
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