The Bus Stop Is Close but Can You Actually Reach It?
Reliable bus services are a vital part of everyday life. They connect people to work, education, healthcare, shopping and social opportunities, while providing an alternative to private car travel. Yet in many rural areas, maintaining viable bus services remains one of the biggest transport challenges facing local authorities and operators.
These issues were a key theme at the Quality Rural Bus Conference that we attended in June. Discussions highlighted the importance of understanding not only where bus services operate, but whether people can realistically access them. Service frequency, the quality of walking routes and the characteristics of local communities all influence whether a bus service is genuinely available to residents.
With this in mind, we recently carried out a detailed accessibility analysis of bus stops across Wales, exploring how different assumptions about walking routes can significantly affect estimates of the population served.
Why measuring accessibility matters
Bus accessibility is often measured using simple straight-line ("as the crow flies") distances between homes and bus stops. While this approach is quick to calculate, it assumes that people can walk directly to a stop regardless of roads, rivers, fences or other barriers.
In reality, walking routes follow streets, paths and rights of way. The quality of those routes also matters. A route that requires walking along an unlit rural road without a pavement presents very different challenges from one using continuous footways and well-lit streets.
Understanding these differences is important when assessing transport accessibility, planning new services or identifying communities that may be at risk of transport isolation.
Our analysis
We assessed accessibility to bus stops across Wales using three different approaches to measuring walking access:
- Straight-line (crow flies) distance.
- Walking distance using the road network and public rights of way.
- Walking distance using only roads with pavements and street lighting, providing a more realistic measure of routes that many people would feel comfortable using.
We carried out the analysis for:
- All bus stops.
- Bus stops served by at least one bus per hour between 7am and 7pm on a typical weekday.
To understand who is affected, we calculated the population within each accessibility threshold, along with:
- Total population.
- Number of households.
- Households without access to a car.
The analysis was also undertaken separately for urban and rural areas to highlight the differing challenges faced across Wales.
What we found
The results demonstrate that the way accessibility is measured has a substantial impact on estimates of bus service coverage.
As expected, straight-line distances consistently produce the highest estimates of accessibility. When realistic walking routes are considered using the road network, accessibility reduces because people cannot walk directly to bus stops.
Applying a further constraint to include only roads with pavements and street lighting reduces accessibility again. This reflects the reality that some theoretically walkable routes may not provide an environment that many people would consider safe or attractive, particularly during darker hours or for more vulnerable users.
Restricting the analysis to bus stops served by at least one bus per hour between 7am and 7pm highlights another important distinction: proximity to a bus stop does not necessarily equate to access to a useful bus service. While many communities may be located near a stop, far fewer have convenient access to services operating at a frequency suitable for commuting, education or regular day-to-day travel.
The urban and rural comparison also reveals clear differences. Urban areas generally retain higher levels of accessibility due to denser street networks and more frequent bus services. Rural communities, however, often experience a triple disadvantage: bus stops are further apart, services operate less frequently and suitable walking routes may be limited.
The analysis of households without access to a car is particularly significant. These households are often the most reliant on public transport, making gaps in accessibility especially important from an equity perspective.
Connectivity to key services
To explore this further, we applied the same accessibility methodology to key everyday destinations in Pembrokeshire, including hospitals, local healthcare facilities, primary schools, secondary schools and supermarkets. Rather than simply measuring access to bus stops, this analysis assessed whether residents could use public transport to reach the services they rely on. We considered only bus stops served by at least one bus per hour between 7am and 7pm on a typical Tuesday, reflecting the level of service needed for regular day-to-day travel. Each location was assigned an accessibility score between 0 and 100, with higher scores representing better access across these essential services.
The results were striking. Using straight-line distances, 24% of residents achieved an accessibility score of at least 75 out of 100. When the road network was taken into account, this fell to just 9%. Restricting the analysis further to accessible walking routes reduced this to only 1% of residents. These findings reinforce an important point, good public transport accessibility depends on far more than simply having a nearby bus stop. People also need safe and accessible routes to reach that stop, a service that operates frequently enough to be practical, and, crucially, a network that connects them to the places they actually need to go. Measuring accessibility in this way provides a much more realistic picture of how effectively public transport supports everyday life and helps identify where improvements to infrastructure or services could have the greatest impact.
Why this matters
Improving bus accessibility is not always about introducing new services. Small infrastructure improvements such as new footways, safer crossing points or improved lighting can make existing bus services accessible to many more people.
Equally, accessibility analysis that reflects real walking conditions provides a stronger evidence base for transport planning than relying solely on straight-line measurements. It allows local authorities, operators and policymakers to identify where investment can have significant impacts and where communities remain underserved.
As governments continue to focus on reducing car dependency and improving access to opportunity, robust accessibility analysis will become increasingly important in supporting evidence-based transport decisions.
Supporting better transport planning
At Basemap, we provide the data and tools to help clients understand how people access services in the real world. By combining detailed network modelling with demographic data, we can identify gaps in accessibility, evaluate policy options and support evidence-based decision making.
If you would like to discuss how accessibility analysis could support your transport, planning or infrastructure projects, we'd be delighted to hear from you.