It's a common bus operator thing. 'All to town' but no one goes to town then they all sit there scratching their heads about why no one is using the buses. Meanwhile, huge shopping outlets are opening on the edge of town without any buses, with minimal buses or with extremely poor bus access (meaning people walk much further than they should do to get to shops). Bus access can of course being a council issue where the council isn't demanding the right things during planning applications.
There's good and bad on both sides. I bring up Labours failures since you have clearly stated that if Labour were in power in central government, things would be different. I am merely pointing out in other areas, Labour are generally worse than other parties at a local level and I fail to see why that would be significantly different if they were in national goverment (especially when you consider they are in power in Wales and have been for as long as anyone can remember and yet now they are planning franchising but openly admit 'They don't know where they are going to find the money from'. Combine that with removal of tolls on the M4 making it cheaper to drive cars. Consequently leading to the downfall of a bus route as well. Oh, I could go on in Wales.
Have you seen our politics? In some areas, you could go to the zoo, pick up a monkey and put them up for election and they would still be the clear winner. It's extremely difficult to get everyone to unite and oust someone from power. The councillor in charge of Warringtons Own Buses, doesn't even have the buses running through her ward. There was no way of voting in a councillor to be on the board of directors for the bus company. Ben Wakerley was never voted in for MD of the bus company. No one voted to waste taxpayers money competing and then setting up a new route to compete with Arriva (who ran 4 buses per hour). Most of this isn't voted for. People don't vote to get a better set of people in place locally. They vote based off Westminster goings on and colours. You could promise residents the world but if you're not representing a party of the right colour, you won't get a vote.
This is exactly the issue and sadly which a number of municipals, they seem to either be really poor for passengers (The amount of people in Warrington who would rather a private company take over is actually quite interesting) or the council do not support them (not giving them subsidy, poor infrastructure both roadside and bus priority, cheap car parking in the centres etc etc). Either one doesn't do anything good for passengers.
The demographic isn't there and the council area is not big enough for Ipswich Buses to have as much of an impact as Reading, Lothian and Nottingham. Ipswich has even a smaller population than Blackpool with lower population density, more spread out town centre and general retail. A lot of the bus demand is more interurban than local. The sort of network that would suit Ipswich is a mix of interurban and local routes. Interurban routes serving a few estates before heading out of town fast to the next town. Sadly being a local municipal, that doesn't work as it would mean going too far out of the area and competing with First (though even if First didn't exist, it would mean going too far out of the area).
You can see how much Ipswich struggles with the fact they are going for silly contracts and with the coach to do other stuff, they are clearly using it to subsidise the existing network despite the fact that they shouldn't be going for other contracts, especially not coach stuff, because it just takes business away from other areas. Small family owned businesses losing money so the council can make a few bob to prop up a failing bus network because they haven't the will to change the network to make it better.
