High Level Summary of Statistics Trend Last update: Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Local Bus Services
Local buses are the most frequently used mode of public transport in Scotland. There were 504 million passengers on local bus services in 2008-09 - 2 per cent less than in the previous year.
Although many more journeys are made by local bus than by rail, the National Travel Survey shows that the overall total distances which (on average) Scots travel by the two modes are broadly similar, at around 400 miles per head per year for each mode. This is because the average journey length is much greater for rail than for local bus.
Relative to the population, more journeys are made on local bus services in Scotland (98 per person per year in 2008-09) than in Great Britain as a whole (88).
In the 2008 SHS, 74 per cent of people who had used their local bus service in the past month agreed that the buses were on time, 75 per cent agreed that services ran when the person needed them, and 65 per cent agreed that the fares were good value.
The local bus passenger figures represent the numbers of boardings of local buses rather than the numbers of journeys made (as more than one bus may be used in the course of a journey). The breaks in the series are due to revisions made by the Department for Transport.
View chart data
Source: Scottish Transport Statistics
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