h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The modern bus companies (like the rail companies) are out to make profet for their shareholders, and where ex-municiple bus stations were built on prime land, (like at Southampton and Edinburgh), the companies have sold the land and forced buses to park on the streets, blocking up many city streets and arresting traffic movement.


Privitize anything, and people make money and the users suffer.

At least when privatization happened in Manchester, it was made perfectly clear that First and Stagecoach were ONLY geting the bus fleets and the depots - definitely NOT the bus stations, which remain in accessible central locations in our town centres and which are still council-owned.

Although with the good little Blairites who ruin Manchester Council, this should not be taken as 100% absolute...

Bradford has not got many good things going for it, but it does have an excellent bus station on the same site as one of its railway stations.

Being a metropolitan district the old smaller towns also have their bus stations. Keighley has recently had the old one replaced by a nice modern one. As it is next to the main shopping centre it is actually easier to get the bus into town than drive. Less distances to walk. Unfortunately it is not on the same site as the railway station. Mind you just as well as the smoke from the locomotives could be a bit of a problem. Keighley railway station is shared with the Keighley and Worth Railway.

Ilkley bus station is next to the train station. Not as sophisticated as Keighley, but plenty of shelters.

I think these decent bus stations are the work of the West Yorkshire Passenger Traffic Executive rather than the district councils, but they are not contentious areas. Leeds, Huddersfield and Halifax all have decent bus stations. There is also a nice new one on the Keighley pattern at Cleckheaton.

It certainly is not all rough living up north.

Poor old Skipton, which is in North Yorkshire, has a barren windswept bus station which the locals are always complaining about.

...At least Skipton has a nice castle to cheer everyone up.

Newport on the Isle of Wight has had its bus station developed into a very dull shopping centre full of clothes shops. Its the Clothes Event Horizon, I tell you...

<BB<