High Level Summary of Statistics Trend Last update: Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Local Bus Services
Local buses are the most frequently used mode of public transport in Scotland. There were 482 million passengers on local bus services in 2006-07. This was 1.0% more than in the previous year. While the number of local bus passengers has increased in seven of the past eight years, recent years' changes have not been large (the latest four years' figures are 478, 479, 477 and 482 million), and could well be due to sampling variability, so there appears to have been little change in local bus passenger numbers in recent years. However, they have risen from the "all-time low" value of 424 million in 1998/99, following a long period of decline. There were almost 1,700 million passengers on local bus services in 1960. The number had almost halved by 1975 (when it was 891 million), and the falls continued in most of the following years until there was an apparent change in the long-term trend after 1998/99.
Although many more journeys are made by local bus than by rail, the National Travel Survey shows that the overall total distances which (on average) Scots travel by the two modes are broadly similar, at around 400 miles per head per year for each mode. This is because the average journey length is much greater for rail than for local bus.
Relative to the population, more journeys are made on local bus services in Scotland (94 per person per year in 2006-07) than in Great Britain as a whole (84).
The Scottish Household Survey asks adults who have used local bus services in the past month whether they agree or disagree with statements about a range of aspects of the services. In 2006, 75% of people who had used their local bus service in the past month agreed that the buses were on time, 75% agreed that services ran when the person needed them, and 65% agreed that the fares were good value.
The local bus passenger figures represent the numbers of boardings of local buses rather than the numbers of journeys made (as more than one bus may be used in the course of a journey). The breaks in the series are due to revisions made by the Department for Transport.
Source: Scottish Transport Statistics
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