Bus Users UK in Scotland: CILT Webinar on 24 February 2025 with Greig Mackay

Bus Users' mission as a charity is to improve access to transport. Buses are a vital part of connecting communities, many of which are rural, that allows access to employment, education, healthcare and so much more. Bus journey-times are crucial to growing patronage levels and ensuring that bus services are more reliable.

Bus Users UK functions in Scotland include campaigning for reliable, affordable and sustainable travel to be accessible for everyone ; resolving passenger complaints ; monitoring bus services on behalf of the Traffic Commissioner and Scottish Government ; and promoting engagement between for the bus industry plus its stakeholders with its passengers.

Bus Users UK is the Alternative Dispute Resolution body for bus passengers, dealing with over 600 complaints annually in Scotland. The top three categories are driver/staff attitude, other ticket matters and service reliability.

The annual Catch the Bus Month UK each September promotes the positives of using the bus, engaging with passengers across the country and involving bus companies, local authorities, Regional Transport Partnerships and Transport Scotland in raising the bus's profile in social as well as traditional media.

On Valentines Day this year Bus Users ran Love the Bus social media messaging. This year marks the 50th of Bus Users UK, which will be promoted along with Catch the Bus Month. Why are We Waiting report was an accessibility campaign in partnership with Motability UK, and Bus Users UK performs Accessibility Audits annually for transport interchanges such as bus stations to ensure compliance.

A team of four Bus Compliance Officers is geographically spread so as to monitor bus services from the passenger perspective. As well as punctuality, they look at infrastructure and vehicle condition and type, monitoring commercial and supported services. Owing to the team being undercover, Bus Users can obtain an accurate snapshot of how a service operates, observing and recording the impact of roadworks on punctuality. Frontline staff conduct is recorded and reported for the operators to investigate.

Who owns a network is less important than the availability of funding for investment. Lengthening of journey times as a result of say roadworks can impact on viability by requiring more vehicles and drivers to maintain a given frequency. The challenge of flat fares offers is about whether the clientele can be retained when they come to an end, compared to investing the money in local transport budgets to maintain and develop supported bus services. Local authority planning officers ought to liaise with their public transport colleagues so as to ensure that new housing developments are bus-friendly from the inception stage, to reduce multi car ownership households.

A more diverse bus workforce can better match the customer-base, where a majority is likely to be female. Innovative routing such as Demand Responsive Transport is not always the panacea for replacing bus services as it can be very costly to maintain as well as increased operating costs if demand for the service grows. Quality of interchange becomes important when not everyone can be provided with a through journey, and connectivity with other modes should also be on offer. To ensure that the attractiveness of bus travel remains by making connections easy as possible, along with them being reliable.

For more informaiton on Bus Users UK, visit their website at

Report by John Yellowlees. Photograph by Greig Mackay, Director for Scotland, Bus Users UK