(Yesterday, 9:41 am)Andreos1 wrote Take cars off the road and the bus lanes dont need to exist. 

Making life difficult for car drivers doesn't encourage the modal switch. 

If operators can get the basic, fundamentals right, then passengers will make the switch back to public transport. 

The reason people switched to cars, was because buses didn't work for them. Not because there wasn't a bus lane. 

Ridership has been declining for decades. And it's not because there wasn't a bus lane.

The correlation between increase in car usage and decline in passenger numbers is clear to see. The introduction and growth of bus priority measures hasn't stemmed the decline.

No disrespect, but that is a very idealised way of looking at thing. The bus is not the answer to every car journey - not should it be.

I really don’t want to give a history lesson either, but bus use plummeted between the 50s and 80s as car ownership grew. A period some nostalgically call the halcyon days of British bus! (ha). It’s worth remembering that having a car back then was a status symbol, like owning a colour TV or a washing machine - something we all have today.

For aspirational folk of the 60s and 70s, the implicit message was clear: why share a bus with others when you can drive yourself and your family? And that mindset stuck. Use a bus in some of our less salubrious areas today and I'd agree with that sentiment. if you owned a car, why would you go back to the bus?

As car use increased through the 70s and 80s, buses became slower and less reliable, triggering the vicious cycle of passengers abandoning them. 

Bus priority measures only really emerged outside London from the 90s, but car use had already exploded over the previous four decades. Perhaps our forefathers should have introduced priority earlier, giving buses the reliability they needed instead of letting them sit in traffic for 40+ years without doing anything to help speed bus journeys.