During the past few years all forms of public transport in this country have found themselves in growing financial difficulties; bus operations which dominate the national scene were able to break even up to about four years ago, but by last year most bus operators were unable to recover more than about three-quarters of total cost 'through the fare box'. These problems have become equally severe, though rather different in character, in urban and in rural areas. There is a growing feeling that novel methods for operating and managing bus services may help substantially to alleviate some of the difficulties we face. For these reasons a two-day symposium on Unconventional Bus Services was held at TRRL in October 1976. The main purpose of the symposium was to bring together a wide cross section of those who are directly involved in dealing with bus service problems, and broadly those who are already engaged in, or are seriously contemplating non-conventional bus services. The symposium aimed at providing a national forum for a dispassionate and informed discussion of experience in this country and abroad of several different kinds of bus services. It was attended by about 150 invited delegates representing a very wide range of interests: bus operators, administrators from local authorities and central government, research workers from government and from universities, representatives of the Post Office in Scotland, the Countryside Commission, and the Women's Royal Voluntary Service, as well as participants from five overseas countries. The opening session of the Symposium was a general introduction to the role of unconventional bus systems and the broader social aspects of public transport. This was followed by a review of British experience with Dial-a-Ride and case studies of individual systems in this country and the United States, and the first day concluded by considering the assessment methods appropriate to unconventional services. The sessions on the second day were primarily concerned with public transport in rural areas, and included accounts of the growing network of post bus services in Scotland, of a community bus service, of the use of buses in National Parks, and of the series of official rural transport experiments which are shortly to take place in four study areas in Great Britain. This volume contains summaries of the papers presented to the meeting and of the thoughtful and lively discussions which followed the presentation of the papers. (Author/publisher)
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