These articles fail to address the point. Instead, they are designed to beat the industry and further create this perception of public ownership making things better. Here is a clue - the decline is primarily due to the lack of capital funded projects, specifically those designed to speed up bus journeys and/or reduce congestion on key routes. Significant investment in bus lanes and things that make tangible differences to journey times will trigger modal shift and will then instigate operator reaction and competition (as operators wont be allowed to continue with a slow stopper, if an express is viable and achievable - otherwise someone else will do it).

Operators don't risk those things currently, there could be a market for a fast bus between X and Y already, but existing operator or commercial competitors are unable to make it work. The express bus still sits in the same traffic as everything else, gains nothing.

NECA, got over £150million in BSIP funding and have done absolutely jack sh1t in respect of capital projects.

Once the mayor takes control and people realise that the buses are still delayed, still unreliable, but might be painted all the same colour (wooooo), then a choice needs to be made to either help speed them up or introduce more resource (and cost) and slow them down. The latter will not be politically acceptable, so I'm sure the money will be found then, to ensure the point is proven.

Whilst operators clearly do need to take responsibility overall (there are shortcomings, there are risk-adverse decisions being made), but they can only "play the hand they are delt" (so to speak), in respect of highways authorities in the region doing absolutely sod all about congestion on core routes.

Its not an operators' responsibility to fix that, but the only solution in most cases is to slow the bus down (funded usually by a reduction in the frequency, as slowing buses down will by the basic law of passenger elasticity, reduce passenger demand, so increasing costs by adding resource in to maintain status quo doesn't make sense from a commercial point of view).

I know this is an emotive subject on here, but that is the reality, whether agreed with or not.