UK National Bus Strategy | National Planning Strategies

More than ten years ago, I came across the then iteration of the German National Bicycle Plan (Switzerland has one too, but not in English).  (Similarly, in 2010 I came across the then Provincial bike plan for Quebec and was equally impressed--I came across a summary document at a public museum in Montreal.)

This image from the German plan, conceptualizing bicycling as a system, made a big impression on me.

It made me realize that we don't really have National Transportation Plans in the US for biking, walking, transit (bus, local rail, railroads), ports, etc.

Same with the new Bus Back Better: National Bus Strategy for England document.

Instead, in the US, we say that the various forms of sustainable mobility are important, have funding programs, publish a lot of great material (e.g., the Federal Highway Administration produces scads of great resources on walking and bicycling), but laws and regulations don't require the provision of such infrastructure, mostly they say it's good to do, but provide various outs, and make it comparatively easy to fund roads and much harder to fund sustainable mobility projects.

That's why I say people miss the point about why they do it in the Netherlands and not here (e.g., "why can't we be like Copenhagen?" or even "why can't we be like Portland?").  

It's not because Dutch planners and engineers are more enlightened, it's because it's national policy to prioritize sustainable mobility.  It's not an option for them in planning and design and implementation, it's a requirement.  

And the national government ensures that other laws and policies and regulations are congruent with that requirement.  

For example, gas excise taxes of many dollars per gallon, car purchase taxes equal to 100% of the value of the car, insurance regulations that prioritize bicyclists and pedestrians as more vulnerable, difficult processes for getting driver's licenses, etc.

UK centralized government and transportation planning.  From a planning perspective, I think the system for England is "flawed" (the other f word).  The government is extremely centralized, to the point that many planning approvals are done at the level of the national government.

National government laws pretty much have privatized transit across the UK, with just a couple of exceptions, in London bus and rail and Liverpool's rail , because the systems were difficult to break up.  Although the continued (pre-covid) success of those forms of transit in those places basically prove that privatization on steroids doesn't work very well for transit.  

(In the UK, privatization doesn't just extend to the operation of a local "transit system" but individual services, down to the bus route or service depot. Multiple operators may run different services on the same routes.)

Plus, the failure of privatizing the UK's railroad passenger services ("How the end of the rail franchise system will affect Britain's trains," Guardian).

UK planning policy.  But from a planning policy perspective, since I got involved in this c. 2000, I was really impressed by their various national planning guidance policies, memos, publications, etc.  

Granted the Conservative governments wrecked all that, but I thought it was "a good idea" to have national authoritative guidance on what to do.

US planning policy in an idealized world.  Like we should have National Planning Guidance memos in the US that prioritize sustainable development, sustainable mobility, etc., and in particular National Planning Guidance plans for biking as transportation, walking, local bus systems, local rail programs (heavy rail, light rail, streetcar), railroad services at multiple scales for passenger service, inter-city bus services, and especially freight (railroad versus trucking), shorter versus longer distance trip planning (trains versus planes)/airports, ports--one of the reasons that we are in the midst of a supply chain and logistics problem in the US is because we don't have a national plan for this, etc.

-- "The (Meta) Regional Transit Network," 2008

Basically, such documents would outline the goals and objectives for planning, laws, regulation, and funding.  And state, multi-state, regional, metropolitan, and local plans would have to be congruent with the National Planning guidance.

New UK bus program strategy.  Basically, I'd argue that the Conservative Government and particularly the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, are pretty much pulling the wool over people's eyes when they argue they are concerned about "levelling up" the North compared to London and the South (Levelling Up the United Kingdom policy paper), the new Bus Back Better: National Bus Strategy for England document is interesting in that it says bus transit is important and it would be a good model for a "National Bus Local Transit Strategy for the US."

(cf. "Report from transit advocates calls for improved, coordinated bus service for D.C. region," Washington Post versus my 2019 entry, "Reviving DC area bus service: and a counterpoint to the recent Washington City Paper article.")

While it's probably put out there more because the government would rather promote buses instead of more expensive local rail transit, it does lay out a groundwork for a national strategy.

However, because they won't junk their privatization agenda, calling for reintegration of local transit  into a unitary system instead of the balkanized set of competing services that exists today means that there will be plenty of waste and poor service as a result.