Rising car use hits Britain’s bus network

Rising car use and cuts to public funding have seen Britain's bus network shrink to levels last seen in the late 1980s, forcing some communities to start their own services.

BBC analysis has revealed that there has been a loss of 134 million miles of coverage over the past decade alone, with campaign groups fearing that the scale of the miles lost indicates that buses are on course to be cut to the same extent railways were in the 1960s.

Most of Britain's bus network is provided by commercial companies, although local government can subsidise routes which are deemed unprofitable but socially important. English 'metro mayors' have been given new powers to set up Transport for London-style bus franchise systems.

In England, although passenger numbers are now eight per cent higher than they were at the start of the 1990s, the scale of the bus network has fallen to levels last seen in 1991, with the North West losing 23 per cent of miles from its network in a decade.

London now accounts for a quarter of all bus miles travelled in England, the highest proportion since it began being measured in 1982., encouraging the viewpoint that England's public transport system is ‘two-tier’.