The main obligations for the companies are to ensure number grids and timetables are up to date, that buses running through Oxford city centre meet emissions standards and effective marketing and promotion of bus services, a balance that Councillor Arash Fatemian (Con, Deddington) feels is out of kilter.
“I was struck that the requirements to be met by bus operators seemed particularly light and not particularly onerous,” he said.
“There is very little spend involved in any of that. The only real thing is to meet emissions standards.
“It seems to me a very one-sided partnership, 90 per cent of the onus is on the county council… It doesn’t seem like much of a partnership… We could, for example, ask them to invest in cycle parking at bus stops.”
Councillor Charlie Hicks (Lab, Cowley), the vice-chair of the committee, argued that “the governance model is too big, private operator heavy”, adding: “It seems to me they hold too much relative power in the system, they are still going to drive it, and we will only be doing tweaks.”
On ticketing, he said: “I would like to recommend in the firmest language possible to hold the bus operators to integrated ticketing and not woolly stuff… a single card that works across all operators as is best practice in other parts of the country and the world.
“That would be huge and is the sort of ambition we should be holding them to rather than asking them nicely.”
The draft partnership is to be submitted to the Department for Transport by the end of June. Bus operators will then be consulted ahead of the final submission later in the year.
