Northern Irish Buses Since 1986

We're having another debate about de-regulation/ privatisation of buses in Great Britain on the Forum.

It's made me realise - I don't know how Northern Irish buses have fared over a similar period (to use as a benchmark)

I've been over a couple of times in the past and am aware of some of the high profile events (like the Metro) but never paid enough attention to know how things have ebbed and flowed - how have things like fleet sizes/ evening services/ rural routes changed over the past thirty five years, to compare to England/ Scotland/ Wales? Has Derry (population 85,000) seen its services grown/shrunk more than other places with a population of around 85,000? (e.g. full evening service on all routes or once-frequent routes now a shadow of their former selves)

I appreciate that some people will say that there are some differences (e.g. how much has demand been changed due to retail parks/ shopping "malls"... different amounts of public sector subsidy available to prop up quiet bus routes - there's also the issue that rail privatisation has meant commercially minded TOCs battling more and severely impacting upon some long established bus routes), but it seems a reasonable benchmark (whereas debates about non-privatised bus operators in Great Britain will see some people focussing on flops like Halton and others only looking at successes like Lothian)

Hi,
I can't answer for the whole time period but can give a view of the last 10 years or so.

Remember that in NI the transport is intergrated. Translink run the trains and the buses. This has kept duplication down and has allowed innovations such as interchangabilty of train and bus tickets in the evenings. On the whole the bus services are, as you'd expect, concentrated in the cities and larger towns. But the smaller towns still have a reasonable bus service - from travel around NI and England I'd say that the broad provision is better in NI than in England. That''s my subjective view though - I have no statistics to back that up with.

There is also better integration of train and bus stations than in England. There are many fairly small places where the bus routes do actaully take you to/from the railway station. (It's not all good though - there are still some stunning mis-matches and idiocies in timetables...)

I know that's not really answering your question in detail but I hope it's at least a bit useful.
Cheers,
Mr Toad

I think bus transport in Northern Ireland can be viewed as 'managed decline' over the last 35 years. Strangely, the fleet size for the 2 fleets (Citybus - now Metro/Ulsterbus) has marginally increased (1275 in 1978 to approx 1370 today), mostly accounted for by increased express and schools services. There have been some notable improvements such as Belfast Metro and Goldline, balanced by retrenchment elsewhere. If you look at a route map in Ulster in the 1960s and compare it to today, the vast majority of routes still exist in some form, albeit with much reduced services in most cases - a lot of rural routes now run only at school times. Obviously bus service provision has remained a public service function, and as such gets a substantial injection of funds from the public purse. Certainly this has allowed the companies to maintain a reasonably good quality and up-to-date fleet and has kept route coverage if not actual journey provision. Probably the down side is that, with a virtual monopoly, there is comparatively little pressure for innovation or maintaining a competitive edge - we often see Translink getting awards for such things as 'procurement excellence', but very rarely for the actual service provision which should be their core function.

Obviously buses in Northern Ireland are still publicly owned and there is no franchising, and therefore costs may be higher than they need to be because of the lack of competitive tendering. If tendering was introduced, they could either maintain the same network at lower public cost, or improve the network whilst keeping subsidy at the same level, or something in between.

Belfastmarty said:

I think bus transport in Northern Ireland can be viewed as 'managed decline' over the last 35 years. Strangely, the fleet size for the 2 fleets (Citybus - now Metro/Ulsterbus) has marginally increased (1275 in 1978 to approx 1370 today), mostly accounted for by increased express and schools services. There have been some notable improvements such as Belfast Metro and Goldline, balanced by retrenchment elsewhere. If you look at a route map in Ulster in the 1960s and compare it to today, the vast majority of routes still exist in some form, albeit with much reduced services in most cases - a lot of rural routes now run only at school times. Obviously bus service provision has remained a public service function, and as such gets a substantial injection of funds from the public purse. Certainly this has allowed the companies to maintain a reasonably good quality and up-to-date fleet and has kept route coverage if not actual journey provision. Probably the down side is that, with a virtual monopoly, there is comparatively little pressure for innovation or maintaining a competitive edge - we often see Translink getting awards for such things as 'procurement excellence', but very rarely for the actual service provision which should be their core function.

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In quantitative terms bus passenger numbers have decreased from 80 million in 1995 to 68 million in 2018.

I'd echo what has been written by bangor-toad and Belfastmarty.

I think there's been growth in the Greater Belfast area, and the service provided by Metro to those urban areas outside the old Belfast Corporation (and BCT/Citybus) boundary previously served by Ulsterbus has improved. Evening services in Londonderry (Derry~Londonderry, if you must) and Belfast have certainly improved - I remember when Belfast city centre shut down after the security cordon was closed in the evening and there was an hourly service on such Citybus routes as operated, with all buses departing (on the hour?) from City Hall on the blast of an Inspector's whistle.

The Goldline express services have improved and developed - when they were first introduced there were gaps in the timetable mid-afternoon when vehicles were diverted to school services (indeed this seemed to be a feature of many Ulsterbus routes, but seems less so now).

The availability of printed publicity is excellent, and all bus stations that I've visited in the last five years have a staffed ticket office and supervision.

On the down side, all this comes at a cost and the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Co (NITHCO)/Translink is apparently - as reported by The Befast Telegraph earlier this year, repeatedly actually - close to financial collapse. "Commercial" operations - Ulsterbus Parcels and Ulsterbus Tours - have been withdrawn.

"Liberalisation" of the market has been toyed with over the years. Firstly in the late 1960s when Ulsterbus was formed out of the old Ulster Transport Authority (UTA) and a small number of routes around Portrush were passed over to Coastal Bus Service and around Lurgan/Portadown to Sureline Coaches - neither flourished. Secondly, in more recent years licences have been awarded to McAnulty's Yellow Bus and, the most high-profile, Eamonn Rooney (for a Newry-Belfast commuter service). Haulier Hannon Transport was seeking licences for a network of express-routes, but since the Covid-19 emergency hit things seem to have gone quiet. The problems with deregulation in Northern Ireland are, as Stormont discovered in 1966, there aren't a lot of potential operators to come forwards, and - outside Greater Belfast, Londonderry, and Craigavon-Portadown - most towns are very small serving a rural hinterland offering little traffic potential (other than for express services to the aforementioned bigger centres of population). Privatisation of Ulsterbus and Citybus is also problematic: if privatised as whole you'd end up with approaching monopoly provision in those areas (the Scottish Transport Group were interested in taking on UTA's bus services in the 1960s when the break-up of the latter was being planned, and - I think - Stagecoach expressed interest in taking on Ulsterbus/Citybus in the 1990a; privatisation of Ulsterbus on a depot-by-depot or area-by-area basis would leave some very unattractive units.

As an aside, Swillybus was an interesting project developed by Ulsterbus during the 1980s to take over the operations of Lough Swilly, but was killed-off by the Northern Ireland Office who felt it was inappropriate for a nationalised body to be providing bus services whose mileage was overwhelmingly within the south, even though they were centred on a city within the UK.

Roilshead said:

Privatisation of Ulsterbus and Citybus is also problematic: if privatised as whole you'd end up with approaching monopoly provision in those areas (the Scottish Transport Group were interested in taking on UTA's bus services in the 1960s when the break-up of the latter was being planned, and - I think - Stagecoach expressed interest in taking on Ulsterbus/Citybus in the 1990a; privatisation of Ulsterbus on a depot-by-depot or area-by-area basis would leave some very unattractive units.

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In some countries that have franchising, you have the depots and buses owned by the state, like a rail management contract, or the winning bidder brings their own new buses. That makes it applicable to most situations that aren't suitable for London-style route by route franchising.

Double deckers have certainly made a big comeback in Northern Ireland in the last 20 years, possibly connected with the end of the Troubles I want to say? There was a long period between the withdrawal/destruction of the last Belfast Corporation Fleetlines and the 2001 batch of B7TLs where large single deckers ruled the roost in NI.

How have the Belfast Glider services panned out?

Roilshead said:

The availability of printed publicity is excellent, and all bus stations that I've visited in the last five years have a staffed ticket office and supervision.

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The printed publicity is now withdrawn (due to cost / frequency of changes during the pandemic)

Roilshead said:

On the down side, all this comes at a cost and the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Co (NITHCO)/Translink is apparently - as reported by The Befast Telegraph earlier this year, repeatedly actually - close to financial collapse. "Commercial" operations - Ulsterbus Parcels and Ulsterbus Tours - have been withdrawn.

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The stop / start nature of public funding certainly doesn't help. Neither did the draw down of reserves which the company had prudently built up over a number of years.

90sWereBetter said:

Double deckers have certainly made a big comeback in Northern Ireland in the last 20 years, possibly connected with the end of the Troubles I want to say? There was a long period between the withdrawal/destruction of the last Belfast Corporation Fleetlines and the 2001 batch of B7TLs where large single deckers ruled the roost in NI.

How have the Belfast Glider services panned out?

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Yes, double deckers have certainly made a comeback, driven a lot by schools services where it is no longer acceptable to have standing passengers.

Glider is a mess - the feeder services aren't popular, and replacing 75 seat double decks with 42 seat bendys on the same frequency simply isn't an improvement. Unfortunately both Translink and the politicians think it's the answer to Belfast's chronic traffic issues.

Thanks for everyone who's contributed to the thread - some interesting parallels (focussing more on the "flagship" services whilst backwater routes are cut)

I set up a thread about railway subsidies in Northern Ireland to see how they compared to the increased subsidy required to keep Great British railways going post-privatisation (heck, it was seven years ago - https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/subsidies-in-northern-ireland.103081/ ) - so it's interesting to see the bus comparisons

Belfastmarty said:

In quantitative terms bus passenger numbers have decreased from 80 million in 1995 to 68 million in 2018.

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That seems quite a drop, but then I guess it's nothing like as significant as the equivalent reduction in figures for England or Scotland or Wales! Thanks for confirming

Belfastmarty said:

In quantitative terms bus passenger numbers have decreased from 80 million in 1995 to 68 million in 2018.

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Can you provide a source for these figures please?

Flying Snail said:

Can you provide a source for these figures please?

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https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.u...rn-ireland-transport-statistics-1999-2000.pdf (page 46 of PDF) says Ulsterbus had 55.4 million passengers and Citybus 25.4 million in 1995-96; https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.u...ructure/ni-transport-statistics-2019-2020.pdf (page 18) says there were 38.7 million Ulsterbus, 26.2 million Metro and 3.7 million Glider passengers in 2018-19, which broadly agrees with the figures above.