Arriva has taken data from a DRT network in Milton Keynes to launch a new orbital bus service that plugs gaps in the commercial local bus network
The Loop launched in early January and has carried over 10,000 passengers in its first four weeks
By Andrew Garnett
Back in the 1960s, Milton Keynes was little more than a small rural village, but now it’s a fast-growing city that is home to over a quarter of a million people. At the centre of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, there are plans to grow the city’s population to over 400,000 by 2050.
The unique characteristics of Milton Keynes also present a unique challenge for public transport. These reflect the difficulties of serving many modern housing developments but on a far larger scale. Designed with the expectation that most residents would rely on cars, public transport was not a primary consideration in the city’s planning, despite hopes in the early days for a monorail system.
Envisaged by the city’s planners in the 1960s as a brave new world where everyone would own or have access to a car, buses were an afterthought. Milton Keynes’s neighbourhoods are located in so-called ‘grid squares’. Most feature a spaghetti of narrow roads, cul-de-sacs and copious mini roundabouts that are joined to one another, the city centre and Milton Keynes’s railway station by a grid pattern of large trunk roads, the overwhelming majority of which are fast dual carriageways. These roads are lined with thick foliage that effectively screen the neighbourhoods from view.
Few of the roads in the neighbourhoods go through from one side of the grid square to the other, so even if the streets were wide enough to accommodate the average midibus or 12-metre single decker, regular bus operation, the like of which would be the norm elsewhere, would be nigh on impossible. However, the grid design does offer some unintended advantages; most homes are within 400 metres of a bus stop on one of the trunk roads, and buses benefit from high running speeds, ensuring swift journeys into the centre of town – such as it is.
However, Toby France, head of commercial at the city’s largest bus operator Arriva, admits there are challenges in sticking to the main roads. With bus stops out of sight of the neighbourhoods on dark main roads covered in dense vegetation and woodland, it’s easy to imagine that some may be deterred from travelling at night. “We do a lot of work with the council and stakeholders to ensure there are safe walking routes to those stops,” he adds.
The city’s strong reliance on cars also presents a significant challenge for modal shift. France acknowledges that switching public perception in favour of bus travel is more difficult in Milton Keynes than in many other cities. Car use is embedded in the local psyche. Meanwhile, this challenge was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted a bus network traditionally focused on commuters.
“Before Covid, Milton Keynes was a commuter city, with many people travelling to the centre or catching trains to London,” says France, who oversees Arriva’s commercial activities across a broad swathe of England that roughly follows the M1 corridor through the Home Counties and into the Midlands. “Remote working has changed that, and we’re now seeing former office buildings in the centre being converted into flats.”
Milton Keynes City Council has also had to navigate these shifting dynamics. While most of the local bus network has been operated commercially by a small band of operators led by Arriva, the council funded a limited number of supported services. These services relied on funding derived from car parking charges, particularly in the Central Milton Keynes business and commercial district. “Covid decimated that revenue stream,” France says. “As a result, the council was forced to make some tough choices, and the difficult decision was taken to withdraw the supported network and fill in the gaps where there wasn’t a commercial alternative with Demand Responsive Transport.”
Before Covid, Milton Keynes was a commuter city, with many people travelling to the centre or catching trains to London
Of course, Milton Keynes was an early pioneer of DRT. In its early years, the embryonic city experimented with Dial-a-Ride minibuses to serve the first neighbourhoods. However, the service was short-lived, as passengers overwhelmingly preferred the more frequent, faster, and reliable buses operating on the main roads. Fast forward almost 50 years, and the new service, MK Connect, aimed to ensure the demise of the supported service left no resident behind by leveraging modern technology to improve efficiency and accessibility.
While the merits (or not) of modern DRT schemes are probably for another time, there has been increasing discussion within the Milton Keynes community over the last three years or so about MK Connect. While some passengers appreciated its flexibility, others preferred the reliability and predictability of a fixed, timetabled bus service.
The presence of gaps in the commercial bus network became clear, leading France and his team to explore potential opportunities. At the same time, the Bus Service Improvement Plan process was strengthening collaboration with Milton Keynes City Council, allowing both parties to share insights on travel patterns across different transport modes, including MK Connect.
“We took data from the old tendered network and gathered feedback from council members and other stakeholders,” explains France. While using data, local knowledge and gut instinct is standard practice for any bus operator commercial manager worth their salt, the key difference, in this case, was access to the extensive data generated by MK Connect. “We began to see a pattern of trips and movements that had never been adequately served by bus before,” he adds.
France and his colleagues at the council decided to investigate further, enlisting consultancy ITP to analyse data from VIA, the DRT technology partner for MK Connect. “They created a heat map of flows, and we began to see a pattern of demand emerging,” he explains. “It formed a loop around the southern arc of Milton Keynes. The data was telling us where to go and who to serve.”
We began to see a pattern of trips and movements that had never been adequately served by bus before
The analysis highlighted key travel flows, including connections to a number of growing business parks and the Open University campus at Walton Hall. It also revealed a need for direct links between outlying areas, such as Woburn Sands, and Bletchley. Additionally, there was also a large and growing retirement village at Shenley Wood, which had never been served by a traditional bus service.
The decision was made to introduce a new service, The Loop, with a distinctive identity designed to set it apart from the wider Milton Keynes bus network. Marking the city’s most significant transport expansion in over five years, The Loop operates every hour, six days a week, from early morning until late at night.
“We wanted to give it its own identity and feel,” explains France. “It’s something new, without a route number that could be linked to the past. The yellow livery, which picks up the ‘Get Around MK’ brand developed through the Milton Keynes Bus Partnership, also harks back to MK Metro [Arriva’s local predecessor].”
Publicity also emphasises the link to the partnership. With an eye to cost control, four fully depreciated vehicles are allocated to the service, with two sporting the distinctive yellow branding.
Launched on January 6, the service has seen strong uptake, with over 10,000 journeys in the first month. “That’s better than we expected, and it’s growing much faster than we anticipated,” reveals France. “At first, some passengers were simply riding it to see where it went – the retirement community organised a group of residents to travel the full route, documenting all the places they can now easily visit by bus.”
With the service now established, the focus is on building momentum. Arriva and its partners are working to raise awareness, including hosting pop-up events along the route. At the retirement community that has included council staff helping residents to apply for their free bus pass. Meanwhile, France and his colleagues have been encouraged by the reception.
“It’s still early days, but it’s great to see such a positive reaction from both the public and politicians,” he adds. “We’ve already had requests from members representing the north of Milton Keynes and places like Newport Pagnell asking when we’re going to ‘do a Loop there’.It’s still very early days, but it’s clear there’s a formula here that we can replicate.”
This article appears in the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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