Owner of London Buses

[O530C2]

Hello everybody,

I saw yesterday on the french website Mobilicites.com that Transdev had sold its subsidiary London Sovereign to french compagny RATP Dev.
I would like to know what should happen to Transdev's buses, and I had a question, who is the owner of London buses and bus garages ? Is it Transport for London or the compagnies which operate the services ? 

Thank you for your help, 
O530C2

[deansullivan]

This is quite a detailed subject but I will try to answer it in a nutshell.

All London Bus Companies are privately owned and have been so since privitisation in the early 1990's. The market is pretty much dominated by the big multi-nationals. Contracts are let on a five or seven year basis by London Buses, who are part of Transport for London (TfL). The latter of which controls most of the roads in London, regulates Londons taxis, bike hire, the London Underground, and of course the Red London bus. This all takes place under the auspices of The Mayors office.

It it perhaps better to liken bus contracts to franchises such as say Burger King. The owner is largely irrelevant as this passes mainly unseen by most bus passengers. TfL set the specification, colour scheme, route, the frequency and so on. Bus operators then tender on the basis of delivering that product for a minimum of five years.

As a result there are eight companies running buses on contract to London Buses. These are Arriva, Abellio, GoAhead, Transdev (T/A London United/Quality Line & now Sovereign), Tower Transit, Metroline, Stagecoach & Sullivan Buses. The largest of which is Arriva & Metroline. The smallest and only independent is Sullivan Buses.

First London left the London market last year, followed around the same time by Quality Line. GoAhead consists of a number of trading names, including London General, London Central, Blue Triangle & Docklands Transit.

As can be seen from time to time businesses will sell and move on or the occasional new entrant may emerge. The most recent addition to the Capital is Tower Transit who bought roughly a third of the former First London. In most cases the business, vehicles, staff & contracts transfer when a company is sold, so little change is seen by the traveling public.

In the case of First London, their business was not sold whole, but was sold piecemeal to two existing London operators (Go-Ahead/Metroline) and one new entrant (Tower Transit).

However London Buses (TfL) does need to ensure that it is satisfied as to the suitability of any new owner, and will need to give their consent before existing TfL contracts are transferred.


So to answer your question. All London Bus companies are owned privately, and they purchase the vehicles (via various means) and employ the staff to operate buses from owned or rented garages.

Hope that helps!

Dean

[O530C2]

Thank you for your answer Dean.
To recap, the opetarors have contracts for five or seven year, and must follow TfL requests.
Each company rent or own its bus garage(s), but, who is the owner of the vehicles ?
An other question, who operates Ibus ? The company for their area or TfL for the whole London ?

Bye
O530C2

[deansullivan]

In terms of bus purchasing, it varies between companies. Some like Arriva prefer to purchase their own vehicles (they have their own leasing arm), others prefer to lease & some prefer a mixture of both. I have opted for the purchase route, as it suits my business. The advantage of leasing, is that if you loose the route at contract renewal you simply hand back the vehicles (in theory anyway!)

Ibus is the vehicle tracking, and messaging system. To my knowledge its actually leased by TfL from a consortia.
Each depot will have at least one ibus workstation which shows all the routes at that garage. Controllers employed by the bus company then use this data to adjust the service to counter any delays. Get it right, and operators earn additional rewards. Get it wrong and we lose money from the contract.
Center Comm based at TfLs head office, also have access to ibus. However their functionality includes all routes in London and can observe traffic hot spots and the impact its having on the services passing through a particular area.
If a driver feels threatened or is in need of urgent assistance Code Red calls are routed through Ibus to Center Comm. This has the advantage of enabling London Buses to locate the bus, and advise whichever emergency service to meet the bus.

Lastly, ownership of bus garages. Like who owns the buses, this is a mixed pot. At privatisation most garages passed to the new owners (with I believe, a ten year claw back facility, to stop companies stripping the assets). So most are owned by the companies themselves. But some are rented from various landlords. In the case of West Ham & Ash Grove garages in East London & Edgware in North London, these are owned by TfL and rented to the operator.

[O530C2]

OK, thank you very much for your help Dean, everything is clear for me now.

[Ben]

There was a suggestion a while back that private ownership of the garages was possibly preventing smaller operators from entering into the market, and stifeling competition as a result. Is this fair at all, would you say? How easy is it to find garage space in within London?

[deansullivan]

Ben, Its fairly difficult to find suitable space inside Central London. This is perhaps why there are few bidders for Central London routes and more for the suburbs where its a bit easier to find accommodation.

However I would say that garage space is just one of the hurdles. There are several others!

[cstock]

London Buses are a subsiduary company of TfL in the same way London Underground is, difference being of course, LU directly operate all services on their network. LB are responsible for Centrecomm as Dean mentioned, also all the infrastructure (ie bus stands, stops, stations, mess facilities for staff) they provide an incident response unit, which consists of a team of controllers who respond to anything that affects the bus network and jump in to get things moving when necessary. TfL also has a team of inspectors which patrol the bus network and carry out regular revenue duties, customer service and incident response when need be.

There was a time (2000-09) when TfL directly assumed control of a small bus company and called it East Thames Buses which was the only state owned bus operation in London (and the UK?) for a time, it was eventually sold back to the private sector in the form of Go-Ahead London.

[Seven Kings Kid]

Garage space/locations is a tough one for any operator trying to enter the London Buses arena, but not all garages are owned by the private companies.
Ash Grove, which was closed at the time of privatisation remained under LT ownership. The new West Ham garage was built by TfL and is 'hired' to Stagecoach.
I seem to recall that Plumstead Garage wasn't sold at privatisation and is leased to Stagecoach (but I'm not totally sure about this one). Something to do with the vast amount of money LT spent in the 80s on the new garage. Anyone clarify/confirm? Walworth garage is another lease arrangement too I think.

So, whilst very difficult to find garage space, deals could be struck with TfL, but I doubt very much if it would be very easy (or cheap) to do so!!

[Seven Kings Kid]

Talking of garage ownership, does anyone know what garages LT retained at privatisation.
Apart from those already mentioned, Streatham remained In LT until sold and recently demolished. Hornchurch remained until demolished.
Any others?

[deansullivan]

Forest Gate was one. It was used by LUL for storage of equipment during the UTS upgrade program. Edgware is another as its jointly let to both Metroline & Sovereign. Walworth might be another, together with Waterloo.
I understand Willesden Junction (previously First now Metroline)was found with assistance from TfL. They might also have some ownership rights - but I am just guessing here.
As it currently stands, there is no plans to increase the number of buses running in London. So garage space although difficult to acquire, is no longer a significant priority.
In fairness to London Buses a few years back with the PVR increasing, they did actively seek out new sites. When they found a suitable site they would write to operators seeking an interest and for proposals as to how prospective operators would use the space.

I also discovered when I worked for LUL, that a fair amount of non LUL property possibly previously owned by London Buses was transferred to the Underground during the privatisation process. We were sent a very extensive list showing us property (including that acquired for future rail projects) which included an office block, and various bus stations. The e-mail attached at that time told us we were to familiarise ourselves with their loctions and notify LT property of an issues arising. Unfortunately I only took a passing interest in those buildings on my patch.

[railtechnician]

May 5, 2014 10:56:05 GMT deansullivan said:

Forest Gate was one. It was used by LUL for storage of equipment during the UTS upgrade program. Edgware is another as its jointly let to both Metroline & Sovereign. Walworth might be another, together with Waterloo.
I understand Willesden Junction (previously First now Metroline)was found with assistance from TfL. They might also have some ownership rights - but I am just guessing here.
As it currently stands, there is no plans to increase the number of buses running in London. So garage space although difficult to acquire, is no longer a significant priority.
In fairness to London Buses a few years back with the PVR increasing, they did actively seek out new sites. When they found a suitable site they would write to operators seeking an interest and for proposals as to how prospective operators would use the space.

I also discovered when I worked for LUL, that a fair amount of non LUL property possibly previously owned by London Buses was transferred to the Underground during the privatisation process. We were sent a very extensive list showing us property (including that acquired for future rail projects) which included an office block, and various bus stations. The e-mail attached at that time told us we were to familiarise ourselves with their loctions and notify LT property of an issues arising. Unfortunately I only took a passing interest in those buildings on my patch.

I'm not sure if there there were one or two LT properties (garage/depot) at Forest Gate. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Forest Gate tram depot was an LU stores from which we used to draw telephone and public address equipment. There was also the old tram depot at Angel where signalling equipment was refurbished and racks were prewired, that became a market which AFAIK is still so, when signals relocated to property at Worship Street near Liverpool Street. Also in the early 1980s LU had Acton tram depot which was offered to the Telephone (later to become Communications) Installation section as a stores but which subsequently was home to First Buses. Walthamstow bus garage was also an LU site and possibly still is, such things as tunnel segments were kept there but I believe one of the ERU emergency stores was also located there.

There is no doubt that LT/LU were prolific when it came to property acquistion, the chapel in Southampton Row at Holborn was bought up for Crossrail and used as offices by LU signals for quite some time before SE&C was centralised from various depots and offices and moved to signal house at Acton Works after devolution of engineering to lines circa 1992-3 and subsequent downsizing of the workforce as engineering contracts were outsourced. Lots of property was bought up over the years for various rail projects. 

[Ben]

What a pity a lot was sold on.

Acton Tram Depot was pulled down a few years ago for flats. Naturally.

[railtechnician]

May 21, 2014 10:04:06 GMT Ben said:

What a pity a lot was sold on.

Acton Tram Depot was pulled down a few years ago for flats. Naturally.

In 2010 apparently.