Buses In Portsmouth

The ideal bus service is to transport many people in one vessel, from wherever is a convenient pick-up point, and then drop them to a convenient point, running quickly and effectively. The bus has always been seen as a green way to travel, as it saves people using car so much and provides people with a service that can still be as affordable.

As recently becoming a student at Portsmouth University and living here, I have seen how the buses in the area compare to my home town (Woking). So far I have seen that the buses are more frequent, efficient and more commonly used. Because of this I would like to find out how Portsmouth has made the bus services more environmentally friendly by reducing commuters using cars, such as myself.

The buses were said to have started in 1826, when Stanislas Baudry, who owned a public baths, would transport people in his stagecoach from the town to the baths. He then realised that the passengers were also keen to use the service to travel from one inn to another inn. This was the birth of the first bus route. From this the bus has obviously grown into a large part of life in every country.

Buses, like many other technologies, are always being looked at for different ways to improve them. Different types of fuel are now being used for the buses, some using a biological diesel, natural gas (CNG), the hybrid buses (using a battery and then also having a small diesel engine to charge the battery) and also clean diesel. They can also be improved in other ways by introducing bus lanes, which stop the buses being stuck in traffic, making them more time efficient and also reducing the wasted emissions. Another way of maximising efficiency is to reduce the amount of stops the buses take in rush hours, which some bus companies have done. For example the Big Lemon Buses – the down side to this might be that people, who would normally take the bus at a bus stop that is being skipped in the rush hour, might start taking their car and thus this idea actually would lead to an increased amount of people using cars.

I will be looking into how green the buses are at the moment, what they are planning for the future e.g. buses producing fewer emissions, and what they have already done in terms of progress. I will be looking through many sources such as the Portsmouth City Council to see what changes have been made, and what is still could be improved. I will also be looking at the ECT (Ealing City Transport) as they have won many awards for their public transport and the Big Lemon bus company which is a new green bus company using locally sourced cooking oil to run their buses. I also plan to have a look at previous questionnaires and if needed, conduct my own questionnaire, to see what the public think of the cities buses for such matters such as; affordability, disability usage, frequency and also how safe they perceive the transport to be.

One of the things I will be looking at is to see how efficiently the buses are being used, for example “A bus with as few as seven passengers is more fuel efficient than the average automobile used for commuting. The fuel efficiency of a fully-occupied bus is six times greater than that of the average commuter's automobile” (Corson). However, if the buses that are running have less than seven people on board, then the bus are not running as economically as a car. To have a look at this I will be trying to conduct some first hand research about the uses of buses out of rush hour, and also asking people what they have noticed with regard to the average capacity of the bus. I will also be looking for any statistics that I can find to show how the buses are used.

As there will be times when the buses are used less, I will also look into how smaller buses in these times could reduce emission rates. A double-decker bus would obviously use more fuel than a smaller one and in the late hours when few people are on the buses it would be more economic and better for the environment to use a smaller bus. I will also be looking to see if it would be worthwhile to have larger buses during the rush hours to commute more people, so people who plan to take the bus aren’t left without being able get on, and not left at the bus stop waiting for the next one to come.

Safety in public transport has always been a worrying thing to all commuters. For example “nearly 7,000 crimes were reported on London buses last year, ranging from stabbings, graffiti, stone throwing and other serious incidents of violence” (BBC, 2002) and with this amount of bad press, it’s no wonder people can prefer to use taxis and personal cars instead. If the services want more people to use the buses to commute, then this is one of the things that will need to be addressed before people will fully trust to use the buses.

Bibliography
BBC, N. (2002, August 23). Bus crime crackdown launched. Retrieved from BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2212172.stm
Bus - Wikipedia. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus
Corson, S. (n.d.). Private Transportation vs. Mass Transit:. Retrieved from http://www.cas.usf.edu/philosophy/mass/Stephanie.html
Druitt, T. (n.d.). The Big Lemon . Retrieved from http://www.thebiglemon.com