Chapter 8: Examples

Many of the ideas and concepts raised and discussed in this book are too new to have been implemented. They have, however, emerged from some years of observing bus systems in practice in a variety of cities around the world. Rather than just being a collection of best practice from these cities, however, I have tried to treat them more as influences on a developing idea of what a city should be trying to do to help the members of its society strive to achieve their aims and improve their quality of life and wellbeing – and how the bus system can help that come to fruition. It might be better to think of this as the influences that combine to influence a live performance: always there, always changing and always new – permanent yet ephemeral, repeating but never repeated. There is, as yet, no extant example of the ideas in action, but there are examples of parts of them in different cases. The ideas continue to develop, of course, and in order to help others come to think about the bus system in different ways, I am now going to describe a number of examples that either have proved influential, or seem to be interesting examples of how people in city authorities, with all their constraints, have sought to enable their bus system to help people achieve their goals.