David Boden, Business Development Director, Stagecoach East

We need to turn this from nice words to actual deliverables… and make sure we don’t forget the most important person of all – the passenger

When the various different lobbies are fighting one another, we’re forgetting the most important person of all – the passenger.

What we need to do is to talk about sustainable travel. We would love to have buses that have clear and easy access when people come out of a station, so it’s not just cycling with a line of sight when you come off a platform, it’s having all sustainable modes. A lot of money is going into cycling and people forget about bus, and it’s actually sustainable transport. What we need to do is to move it from rhetoric to actual deliverables.

Passengers needs whole journeys. Bus operators have asked Network Rail to think about bus when designing stations. Huntingdon in my patch has a terrible bus stop. Cambridge South is a brand new station, but there was no engagement with bus operators whatsoever. So we need to turn this from nice words to actual deliverables.

There are quick wins. The first thing, surely, is to get bus commercial directors to sit in the room with rail commercial directors. Across bus, we’re tired of rail people saying nice words about integrated transport and not delivering anything meaningful.