Focus of work
Travel to and around rural visitor destinations is a significant source of carbon emissions, mainly due to the high number of cars used to reach these destinations.
This project from Low Carbon Destinations, spearheaded by Alistair Kirkbride, explored what makes visitor bus services successful. It explicitly focussed on not only the quantitative and qualitative descriptors of the services themselves, but the social and contextual conditions and stories that led to the development and maintenance of the bus services.
There were three key outputs from the project:
- A main report summarising what works, why and how for rural visitor bus services.
- A compendium of existing services: locations and routes, service levels, scale and volumes, branding.
- Case studies of 11 rural visitor bus services.
Impact
This project aimed contribute to strengthening and extending services so that they become a normal, stable and reliable part of the mobility landscape across the UK’s rural destinations.
The report produced as part of this project describes the scale and variety of services in rural areas across the UK that serve visitor markets, sets out the nature of their benefits, and identifies what might need to happen to maximise these benefits. It establishes nine key factors that help to make a bus service in a rural visitor destination successful:
- Branding and identity
- Targeted marketing
- Being part of a network
- Mixing visitor and resident demand
- Year-on-year stability
- Scaling up services over time
- Appropriate partner involvement and sense of ownership
- Converting recognised visitor car access problems (e.g. parking/narrow roads) into demand for bus services and encouraging bus use
- Winter season operation