Much of the debate on bus reregulation has focused on whether operators or councils should decide who can operate buses in a particular location, to what standard and for what price. But why is it that we hear repeated calls for reregulation of “vital” bus services and not for (even more vital) food retailers like Tesco? What is different about buses that means they are subject to a perpetual tug of war between pro- and anti-regulators?

I wrote an article in Transit Magazine published in June. It suggests that buses are a monopoly and so the solution applied to network monopolies are appropriate (i.e. “unbundling”). Smart cards available over the whole network are one way that this could be achieved.