Giving benefit to buses

In the eight years since bus deregulation there has been a steady fall in the patronage of public transport and a corresponding rise in car ownership. Many local authorities are now actively seeking measures that can limit or reverse this move away from public transport. Various physical measures such as priority bus lanes and turn bans are well established, whilst others require more exploration. This article describes work carried out in the EU funded DRIVE II project PRIMAVERA, the aim of which was to examine ways of giving some measure of priority to public transport vehicles. This article takes one of these strategies and examines how surveys were used to establish whether the strategy would produce a significant benefit.