blog: COMBO – Transparent Decisions for Supporting Bus Services
Wednesday 20th November 2024
Yesterday’s announcement by the Department for Transport, confirming how a billion pounds of funding will be allocated to local transport authorities (LTAs) in England to provide bus service improvements in 2025/26, will have been welcome news, particularly for those LTAs whose supported bus budgets are stretched. However, this ongoing pattern of short-term funding awards does little to help authorities make plans for their future bus networks. Increasingly, LTAs are trying to balance spending external funding on new services at the same time as they fight to retain services whose contract prices continue to rise significantly.
How should LTAs decide whether to support new services or retain or enhance existing services in response to new funding awards? Similarly, beyond this pump-priming funding, when the reality of pressurised, discretionary funding pots returns, how do authorities make defensible decisions about which of its supported services are essential and which are less vital?
ITP has worked with LTAs to help tackle these thorny issues. Naturally, bus operators prioritise running profitable services which carry the most passengers. However, for an LTA working out which bus services to support is about much more than ‘bums on seats’. Although authorities want to be able to meet the travel needs of all residents who are not served by a commercial bus service, funding constraints often mean that they are not able to do so. Consequently, a combination of factors needs to be considered to ensure that supported services meet a broad range of travel needs, as well as addressing an authority’s wider objectives.
‘COMBO’ – Consistent, Objective Measurement of Bus Operations – is an analytical tool that allows an authority to assess each of its supported services against a range of measures and indicators, to determine which meet its aims for bus service support. The model applies a range of financial, socio-economic, environmental and connectivity criteria, alongside more traditional value for money measures, which are scored to demonstrate the extent to which each service meets the authority’s objectives.
The tool is flexible, allowing the criteria to be varied and expanded to reflect the relative importance of different elements. Weighting of the criteria allows authorities to focus on those which are of greatest importance, without overlooking other metrics. In addition, applying greater or lesser weightings to the criteria for assessing fully supported, partially supported (de minimis) and demand responsive (DRT) services enables comparisons on a consistent basis.
COMBO ranks each service, so that at any given time the relative performance of each is visible. It offers officers and elected members a clear overview of all services, allowing robust evidence-based responses to questions on funding priorities. It supports wider understanding regarding decisions on whether to retain, review, revise or remove services.
COMBO relies on data that LTAs usually gather and monitor as standard, minimising any additional time and effort required to undergo the analysis. It can also be linked to other existing data-gathering spreadsheets to ensure that the ranking scores remain current.
To find out more and explore how COMBO could be tailored to your local needs, please email Clare Waldron, Associate Director clare.waldron@itp.rhdhv.com