Bus operator transforms after pandemic hit
Booming weekend travel fuelled by tourism and new attractions is spearheading the post-pandemic recovery of Edinburgh’s main transport operator, its managing director has told The Scotsman.
Sarah Boyd said the growth had seen bus firm Lothian reach 90 per cent of its precovid passenger numbers despite many of its travellers now working from home for part of the week. She said notching up 110 million passenger journeys last year – up 17 per cent from 94 million in 2022 – also demonstrated that traffic congestion had not deterred more people from taking the bus.
Ms Boyd said: “We are seeing more and more people out and about at the weekend. Sundays were very quickly our most recovered day and that’s the day of the week where we are now better than we were before, with more travel than there was previously.
“Saturdays are not too far behind and weekend travel continues to grow at a higher rate than during the week. There are a mixture of factors involved. There’s definitely a propensity to travel on Saturdays and Sundays if you are working at home during the week.
“Edinburgh also has a thriving tourist economy, which has come back really strong, and Lothian has played a huge part in that. There’s been a bounce in the staycation market for us and there are new places people are travelling to, such as the St James Quarter [shopping centre], with developments at the Bioquarter [beside the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh] still to come.”
Lothian’s recovery has come after Covid travel restrictions caused an “overnight, off a cliff” 90 per cent reduction in passenger numbers in 2020 from a record 124.2 million in 2019.
Ms Boyd said: “We’re no longer rebuilding from the pandemic – we’re going way beyond where we were then. We talked at the beginning of the pandemic about never getting back past 80 per cent – worrying that at least one fifth of someone’s week would be from home and they wouldn’t need to travel.
“Actually, there’s probably more people doing more than one day a week [at home], so what we’ve got is growth in other areas, like tourism.”
The managing director said the passenger growth showed congestion had not put people off bus travel. Trackers are being fitted to Lothian’s fleet to assess punctuality.
Ms Boyd said: “We are very strong on the need to be reliable. Everything we deliver to our customers falls apart if we’re not. If you’re standing at the bus stop, waiting, wondering, then we have let you down. So we work very hard to make sure that we do everything to not have people in that situation. But I would say our numbers demonstrate that we are not regularly letting people down, otherwise they wouldn’t choose to continue to travel with us.”
Ms Boyd said such passengers included those who could switchtotheircarsinstead.she said part of Lothian’s success had been in creating a “destigmatised” service, which had led to “many people” owning fewer cars than they could otherwise afford because of the quality of the bus operation.
Ms Boyd has been in the industry for more than 20 years since joining Stagecoach as a graduate trainee in Fife and going on to drive buses in Manchester. She moved to city council-owned Lothian in 2013 and was operations director until becoming managing director in 2022.
In addition to handling the dramatic fall in passenger numbers during the pandemic, she also had to deal with a notorious spate of attacks on buses. It included a driver being hit by a stone just below his eye and culminated in the unprecedented suspension Lothian’s network one night in 2021.
Ms Boyd said: “We really did have a serious anti-social behaviour problem. We were big, brightly-lit, moving targets with no human element attached, as far as a young per
There’s been a bounce in the staycation market for us and there are new places people are travelling to Sarah Boyd
son at the side of the road was thinking at that time, because the buses were so empty.
“What is amazing about a lot of our passengers, when any situation develops and there is someone potentially causing a problem, there’s someone else jumping to the driver’s or the other passengers’ defence. That’s the bit that was missing at the time.”
Despite police travelling on buses and decoy vehicles being deployed, things became so bad that all vehicles were taken off the road from 7pm on March 17, 2021 for the only time in Lothian’s 105-year history.
Ms Boyd said: “It was a really difficult decision to make, but absolutely the right one because we got that community interest, and that was the turning point. There was a huge outpouring of support, particularly for drivers because of the horrendous situation of driving a bus at that point. We’ve not had anything on that scale since that day, thank goodness.
“Everybody was experiencing problems, so we were certainly not alone, but ours got more attention. It’s not a problem that is specific or worse in Edinburgh. One of the great things that came from what was a very difficult is a strengthened relationship with the police.”
With that episode behind it, Ms Boyd is focused on making Lothian one of edinburgh’ s top companies.
She said: “We want to be seen as one of the best employers in the city and are doing a lot of work on how we appear to young people as an employer. In the transport world, Lothian is one of the best places that you could end up.”
However, she admitted it had far to go to attract more women, and was “casting the net further”, such as encouraging school visits. Only 9 per cent of drivers are women. Ms Boyd said: “It’s something we’ve committed to work on.”