Re: If you can fix train ridership, you can fix bus ridership
This is not an exaggeration but I live in rural Oxfordshire. I moved there last year.
There is precisely one bus that stops in my village.
It goes to a small town, drops off near the "market".
It runs only on market days. Which is a Tuesday or something. I don't know because I've never witnessed the actual market, even though I've driven through that town on countless hundreds of instances for each day. If there is a market, it's not what you and I know as a market. Also, that town only has about 10 roads and 5 shops, so it's not in some side-street or other.
Anyway, this bus runs once every Tuesday. It goes from another big town MANY miles away, into my village, and then onto another town 3 miles away.
That's it. It doesn't COME BACK. It just goes there.
I asked all the neighbours about it - in a village of barely a few dozen people, nobody has even seen it, knew it ran or ever used it. Why would you?
Apparently it was there for the elderly and disabled to get to the village on market days. It just abandons them there. It doesn't even go back to the far larger town further away. So nobody ever uses it. It's only because we're a village that it has to go past to get to the bigger town, it "stops" but we're absolutely not who it's designed for. It's designed for one big town to transport people to a smaller town.
I have seen this mythical bus (I believe) twice. It's a little minibus. I saw it stopped, or got stuck behind it, once or twice in my village. I've never seen anyone get on it. There were about 3 people on it whenever it was heading towards the drop-off in the town.
People don't believe me, and then I show them the schedules.
One bus. One day. One trip. One way. One destination.
Strangely, when planning permission was being sought to add ten new houses to the village, this was raised - because the village has no resources of its own, no public transport, no schools, no doctors, etc. The council refused planning permission and all appeals because there just aren't the facilities to serve the village, including transport.
The other day my car was unusable and I haven't tried to get to my current employer by public transport. The journey is 25 minutes in a car. I used all the tools and found the "best route". This involves a 20 minute DRIVE to the nearest railway station. Catching a train into Central London. Changing onto another train out of Central London. And then a 30 minute walk to my workplace. The total estimated time - including waiting for trains - was 3.5 hours.
The other story I have is when I was challenged why I don't use public transport. At the time I lived in a pretty major London town that you've definitely heard of. I worked just across the same town. My commute was about a 5-10 minute drive.
I researched the public transport. The one, sole, viable option I could find was thus: a 20 minute walk to a particular bus stop. Catch a single bus that only ran at one time that would get me to work on time (earlier, that bus doesn't run, later the other required links don't run or have huge gaps to make me late). Get off bus, walk to another bus stop. Wait 15 minutes. Get on that bus (assume it's perfectly on-time), get off that bus, get on another bus almost immediately (again, I hope everything's running on time!), get off bus, walk for 15 minutes to destination (because no other bus goes that way).
When people ask me why I don't use public transport in the UK, I tell them - it absolutely, categorically sucks unless you've deliberately bought a house and got a job near the right type of public transport. Anything else, and you're absolutely stuffed. And those houses/jobs are costed to factor that kind of access in - the houses are more expensive, and the jobs don't provide any other way to get to them, nowhere to park, you have to buy a season ticket, etc. etc. etc.
Even when it comes to travel for a break or holiday... I can take some ridiculous time and money to get to Cornwall from London (and only certain places in Cornwall), or I can do it in half the time, half the cost just driving myself, whenever I like, however I like, to wherever I like.
I'm not a car fanatic, I have no interest in Jeremy Clarkson's diatribes or fast cars or making loud noises or leaving tyre tracks. I never have. I don't like that the only way I can reasonably get to most places is by car. But that's been a fact of life for almost my entire life, except when I lived in London near a tube station and went to university in London near a tube station on the same line.
My retirement plans include an electric car, because there is no other reasonable alternative whatsoever. And when I start becoming too infirm for that, I'm stuck. Sure, I'll have "the time" to spend 3.5 hours trying to go shopping, but I will not have the inclination at all. And I imagine I'll just live in the same village and order goods in. Goods that will arrive by road.
Public transport is abysmal almost everywhere I've ever lived. In one place it was actually better for me to get on a train for half the journey and then cycle for 15 miles to get to work than it was to get the equivalent buses and trains.
That's before you even get into timings, reliability, frequency, night services, rail replacements, and all the other things that "go wrong" so often that they are more correctly called "the norm".
As far as I'm concerned, outside the centre of major cities, mostly London, we just don't have public transport.