Bus travel between Aberdeenshire’s two biggest towns, Fraserburgh and Peterhead, has been branded among the worst in Scotland.
According to Our Scottish Future, a think tank set up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, journeying by bus between the two towns ranks as one of the most expensive and protracted trips by bus in the whole country.
The 15-mile journey typically takes half an hour in a car, but limited timings, high prices and a journey time of up to an hour and 20 minutes mean that travelling via bus can be challenging.
Towns suffer from a lack of quick, reliable buses
Our Scottish Future examined bus links across Scotland’s largest towns and cities as part of a report calling for cheaper and greener travel options.
According to Dr Pete Wood, who is a researcher and sustainability expert at Our Scottish Future, it’s towns like the Broch and the Blue Toon which tend to be the most poorly served by buses.
“In cities, there tends to be more buses and they tend to be a bit cheaper,” said Pete.
He explained that the researchers at Our Scottish Future spent weeks manually researching current bus routes across Scotland to put together a thorough picture of where problems lie.
They used the government service Traveline Scotland to plan journeys to and from different locations at different times of day.
“We insisted that the routes had to be real journeys that a decent number of people actually take,” Pete said.
This meant they avoided very remote corners of the Highlands which have no more than a handful of year-round residents.
A long, convoluted journey to travel 15 miles
What the researchers found was that the worst routes were almost always links to commuter towns and suburbs.
“Aberdeenshire contains some of the worst bus routes in Scotland,” said Pete.
“Travelling between the two biggest towns, from Fraserburgh to Peterhead, is a 15 mile, half an hour drive.
“There are no buses that arrive between 8am and 9am.”
“For most of the day, the fastest, lowest price bus leaves once an hour, on the hour, and takes 54 minutes, costing £6 each way.
“Missing the direct bus means piecing together a journey.”
For example, to get there by 12.30pm means a half an hour journey to the Mintlaw roundabout for £4.50, a wait for 27 minutes, then another 20 minutes and £4 to Peterhead.
Coming home is equally as difficult. Pete found that there are no buses leaving between 3pm and 4.30, and only three buses between 7.30pm and midnight.
“The bus is no longer an option for commuters and time-pressed families in much of rural Scotland,” he said.
“People aren’t making these journeys by bus because they are so bad, which means that most people don’t even really know how bad they are, since they never take them.
“By showing how difficult it is to travel by bus, we are demonstrating that change is needed.”
Other particularly difficult routes identified by the research include Cowdenbeath to Burntisland in Fife and Linlithgow to Livingstone in West Lothian.
Campaign to reduce bus fares to £2
The whole reason Pete and the rest of the team at Our Scottish Future were analysing bus services was for a new paper released by the think tank which calls for a radical overhaul of Scotland’s buses.
If fares were reduced to a maximum of £2 per journey, the paper says this would increase the number of people travelling by bus.
We can cap bus fares at £2 – and tackle climate change at the cost of living crisis
We can build a cheaper, greener bus networkhttps://t.co/zn81dZMEH1 pic.twitter.com/oQ0DTxDe6B
— Our Scottish Future (@scottish_future) March 28, 2022
And if more people travelled by bus, services would be forced to improve.
“They did exactly this in Jersey,” said Pete. “Within five years passenger numbers had grown by 40%.”
Our Scottish Future believes that the only way to encourage people to leave their cars at home is to provide a viable alternative.
“A cheap and easy to use bus service is the most direct way to replace car journeys,” Pete said.
“We are not going to get people out of their cars by asking them to make these £10 hour-long journeys.
“We need to make sure that the bus is cheap and easy and that’s the only way people will swap out of their cars.”
A spokesperson for Stagecoach Bluebird, who run the services between Peterhead and Fraserburgh, said: “There is little supporting evidence to label service 69 connecting Peterhead and Fraserburgh as one of the worst bus routes in Scotland.
“The service operates seven days a week with reliability above 90% and more than 92,500 journeys are made on the service each year,”
The spokesperson also pointed out that this service also serves St Combs so “does not travel on the same route as a private car”.
They also stated that the route has a total of 42 bus stops connecting the rural communities which add to the journey time.
They concluded: “While a single journey will cost £6 for one-way travel, we do offer a range of value return and longer term tickets for our customers which can bring the cost of travelling by bus down to as little as £3.21 per day for unlimited travel in Banff & Buchan zone.”
