News – RELBUS

Comments on East Lothian bus changes from April 2025

This paper has been produced as a response to the substantial changes to East Lothian bus services in April 2025. At that time there was much ill-informed and incorrect commentary from a number of passengers and others on a variety of matters which featured in the local press and some hateful posts on Facebook.

RELBUS was not involved in re-shaping the East Lothian network, but is generally supportive of the revised network now in place. However, there are some aspects that, in our opinion, should be looked at again with a view to improving the current services in order to make them more attractive to the travelling public. The object of this paper is to highlight these to East Lothian Council and the operators.

Barriers to bus travel

PUBLICITY

Bus Companies have never been good at publicising their services but today this is considerably worse to the extent it is pitifully inadequate. Bus companies used to produce an all embracing timetable in a standard national UK A5 format which would cover all of that company’s services, plus the majority of those run by other operators in their area. These included all sorts of local details, including town maps, showing where to board the bus, and half days, plus market days, and location of public toilets and buildings of interest. These were priced as loss leaders.

Bus/rail Co-ordination – the Equality Act

Both RELBUS and ELCRP have been involved in attempting, and failing, to introduce bus/rail connectivity principally at North Berwick, the only station in East Lothian that is disability friendly. Under The Equality Act all NEW bus/rail connections must be compliant with the Act. There are many pieces of legislation, no longer relevant in East Lothian, which act against co-ordination, such as The Competition and Markets Authority, but by far the biggest is the Equality Act.

Demand Responsive Travel (DRT) a view from RELBUS

One of the current ‘fads’ within the bus industry is the introduction of Demand Responsive Travel. Those supporting it are often those who stand to benefit financially from its introduction, usually funders, IT suppliers and those who may be funding a ‘fixed route and timetable’ bus service which might be replaced by DRT. With DRT the intending passenger usually has to pre book a journey on an APP or sometimes by telephone the day beforehand, and will often not hear if they have been successful until the morning of the day they intend to travel – because the service has a flexible route and equally flexible timings.