The routes nobody in the transport office used were the ones that mattered most.
Two winters ago, the city’s transport office drew up a list of bus routes to cut. The criteria looked sensible on paper: low passenger numbers, high cost per journey, and – this was the line that gave the game away – “limited stakeholder feedback”. Near the top of the list were the three night services that run from the old town out to the hospital, the distribution depots along the canal and the estates on the far side of the valley.
The routes survived, narrowly, after a campaign that the office did not see coming. I think the reason it did not see it coming is the most useful lesson City Hall could learn this decade, and it has very little to do with buses.
The people who were never in the room
Limited stakeholder feedback. Consider who uses the N4 at a quarter past two in the morning. Cleaners finishing at office blocks. Care workers between visits. Nurses and porters at the end of a late shift. Bakers on their way in. People who, almost by definition, are asleep or at work when the transport office holds its consultation evenings at six o’clock in the community hall, and who do not have the time to fill in a forty-question online survey.
The office counted the feedback it received and concluded that the routes did not matter much. What it was actually measuring was whose evenings were free. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a great deal of bad public policy is made.
“Nobody asked us because nobody was awake when we were,” said Bernadette Achebe, a cleaner who has taken the N4 home five nights a week for eleven years and helped collect more than 3,000 signatures in the hospital canteen and on the buses themselves.
That petition, gathered by passengers on the routes in question, did what the formal process could not. It turned out that the night buses carried fewer people than the daytime routes, but almost none of those people had another way to get home. Take away a daytime bus and passengers wait for the next one. Take away the N4 and a hospital porter walks four miles along an unlit road or pays for a taxi that costs a sixth of their shift’s pay.
The objection, taken seriously
There is a fair counter-argument, and the transport office has made it. Money is finite. Every pound spent on a nearly empty bus at three in the morning is a pound not spent on a crowded route at eight. Listening to everyone equally, the argument goes, is not a practical standard: someone has to decide, and passenger counts are at least objective.
I accept the first half of that. Choices have to be made, and some of them will hurt. But passenger counts are not as objective as they appear. A bus that comes once an hour will always look less used than one that comes every ten minutes, partly because people give up on it. And measuring use without measuring need treats a student going to a party and a nurse going home from a twelve-hour shift as identical journeys. They are not, and a city that pretends otherwise has simply decided which question it would rather not ask.
What listening would actually look like
The fix is not complicated. Consult people where they are, when they are there. Put a researcher on the night buses for a fortnight. Hold a session in the hospital staff room at the shift change. Ask the depot managers along the canal how their workers get home. Count journeys that have no alternative separately from those that do. None of this is expensive. All of it requires admitting that the people who show up to consultations are not the whole city.
Since the campaign, the transport office has done some of these things. Officials rode the N4 last spring and, to their credit, published what they found: that two in three passengers on the route worked in health, care or cleaning, and that most had no car. The route now runs every forty minutes instead of every hour.
The same lesson applies well beyond the buses. Libraries that close in the evening, benefit offices that only answer the phone during the working day, planning hearings scheduled at two in the afternoon – each of these quietly filters out the people whose lives are hardest to fit around a nine-to-five timetable. The voices City Hall hears most are not necessarily the ones that matter most. They are the ones with the most convenient hours.
The night buses taught the city that the quietest routes can be the most important. It would be a shame if the only thing it learned was to keep running them.
