Bus Services in the British Isles

Abstract

G EOGRAPHERS have paid little attention to the striking interwar development of motorbus services. Yet a study of the growth of a bus-route network, besides being interesting in itself, provides illumination on several problems of social geography. During the course of an investigation in the United Kingdom in which such a study was found most useful, certain features came to light that are worth recording for the benefit of those who may find them germane to their own problems. It is necessary at the outset to recall two important facts of the early development of railway services in the British Isles, for these have had unexpected repercussions a century later. In the first place, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England preceded the beginning of rapid transit by rail, and specialized industrial towns had sprung up away from the old established urban centers whose economy was integrated with that of the surrounding countryside. Rapid transport was developed primarily to link these specialized industrial towns with the older centers and with ports. The second fact of significance is that all the railway lines were built entirely by private enterprise under such a high degree of competition that many of them left a legacy of overcapitalization which seriously affected their financial position decades later. A result of these two historical facts is that the design of the country's railway network has rendered it particularly vulnerable to competition from the much more flexible bus services. On a dense network of public highways these services could be altered in harmony with the public demand with no loss of capital. The bus companies of the United Kingdom, in great contrast with the recently nationalized railway companies, have been operating on an extremely low ratio of capital to turnover. Buses have been able to operate so much more cheaply than railways that for trips to the nearest town they are easily the most representative form of public transport. Moreover, so high a proportion of the population uses them rather than private motorcars or bicycles that the direction of passenger movement by bus may be said to be representative of all passenger movement over distances up to at least IO miles. The following table was compiled in the course of a wartime survey of Getting to Work prepared by the Social Survey (Report No. 31 [N.S.]) for January, I943. Only in East Anglia was