Bus Stops (Hansard, 12 May 2004)

§ Mr. McNulty

In April 2002, DfT awarded £20 million supplementary credit approval (SCA) to support 19 local authorities (LA) and passenger transport executives (PTE) in providing real time information (RTI) on their local bus services. The SCA programme ended at the end of March 2004. It has been used to support the provision of:

over 2,600 buses equipped to provide RTI
nearly 1,300 at-stop signs now providing RTI
12 new or extended websites
seven new or extended SMS services.

The transport direct team (TDT) is currently working on a national database of bus stops and public transport interchange points. Bus stops are recorded by LA, rather than by rural and urban areas. The information provided below is therefore broken down into PTEs and shire counties. PTEs are amalgamations of adjacent urban LAs, and as such have been used as an indication of urban areas. Shire counties have been taken to represent rural areas. The TDT database holds a total of 277,363 bus stops in England, of these 65,954 are in the PTEs outside London and 191,760 in the shire counties.

In late 2003, a survey of bus real time information capability in English local authorities, recorded 361 at stop RTI signs in the PTEs outside London, and 2,067 at stop RTI signs in the shire counties. In addition to signs, there are "virtual stops", which provide bus real time information through short messaging service (SMS). The total number of stops equipped with this capability is: 22,639 in the PTEs and 3,933 in the shire counties.

	PTEs (excl. London)	Shire counties
No bus stops	65,055	194,632
RTI signs	361	2,067
SMS capability	22,639	3,933
Total RTI	23,000	6,000
Total percentage	35.4	3.1
Note:
Table 1: RTI enabled bus stops for shire counties and PTEs.

For PTEs outside London, the percentage of bus stops capable of providing RTI to passengers is 35.4 per cent. For the shire counties the percentage is 3.1 per cent. This figure is skewed towards the PTEs due to the large number of stops that have SMS capability. For at stop signage only, the figures are 0.5 per cent. for PTEs and 1.1 per cent. for shire counties.