(Yesterday, 11:07 am)Kimlfixit wrote 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.

I'm not sure anyone said that buses should be the answer to every car journey. 
But what I will say, is that the vast majority of car journeys can (or should) be quite easily done by bus.

As we have seen with certain operators, they've not adapted routes to changing customer demands or alternative destinations. 
If they did do that, I think we both know that there would be a proportion of car users who would make the modal switch. 
If they make the modal switch, then there's fewer cars on the road etc etc. 

We've got major employers in out of town business parks. Where do the buses come to and from to get to the likes of Quorum or Cobalt? 
Bus lanes will not be the answer or solution to cars going to/from those places and fighting out for parking spaces.