DAVID JENKINS examines the Bus Service Improvement Plan process, and the first bids to see success
BSIP has become a very important set of initials in the bus industry in the last year. Standing for Bus Service Improvement Plan, and usually pronounced B-sip, it was the UK government’s instruction that every Local Transport Authority (LTA) in England had to produce one by October 31, 2021. With the announcement to do so being made barely six months earlier, they have been produced at breakneck speed, often with the help of consultants (and hands up, one of those consultants is me).
The BSIP is supposed to lay out the plans and policies that operators and LTAs wish to pursue to improve bus services in their area. While primarily the responsibility of the latter, it was made clear that operators should be heavily involved, and LTAs were required to include letters of support in each BSIP to show that this had been achieved.
There is a general presumption in favour of bus priority,neatly skipping over the local politics involved
Indeed, this was one of many details that have been quite tightly prescribed, and most of the 79 BSIPs have stuck fairly rigidly to the guidelines. This enables the…
