Does anyone know where I can access any resources on how Nottingham developed its public transport netowork to what it is now? It is arguably the 3rd best system in the UK (behind Manchester and London) despite being the 9th largest city. With austerity getting worse in this country, I wonder if there’s anything worth learning about how to establish good public transport on a budget. Maybe similar sized cities like Leicester or even bigger like Leeds can adopt some of the strategies that made Nottingham into an easy place to travel around without a car.
Nottingham has had good municipal transport for a very long time. When deregulation came along in 1986 the council chose to keep the service as a wholly owned company where other cities sold their transport departments off. It expanded by buying bus companies in the surrounding county and in 2001 Transdev, who own Trent Barton, the largest private operator in the county, bought a 5% stake in NCT. Transdev are pretty good at branding and brought that to the business. Like Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester the city also decided to invest in converting the local train network into a light rail/tram system. A large part of it is having a progressive outlook, I think. It would be difficult to recover that now for many cities, where infrastructure has been built over, and there just isn’t the money and won’t be while central government doesn’t have a national view of public transport.
I wonder what made only Nottingham have the long term vision to do this unlike other local governments. Do you know what the residents’ reaction to this news was when they did it?
I don’t really know, I’m sure it’s in the local paper archives. I lived in South Yorkshire at the time and the joint councils also decided to do a similar thing, and while fares increased (from 10p for adults and 2p for children for most journeys) it still seemed the right thing to do. In comparison Leeds sold off the transport department on day one and the consequences of that are still being seen. Arguably Nottingham allowing a bit of transport business investment may have fended off Stagecoach and First from forming monopolies like they have in many places.
That’s a good idea, I might investigate those archives if they’re available.
It’s so strange that no one in other local governments could ever envision monopolies forming over something like a bus service (where bus routes are limited anyway).
There were large bus businesses before Stagecoach and First (BET and Tilling for example) but I think deregulation was ideological first and at best the emergence of local and regional monopolies was the invisible hand of the markets.