, Britain
On the evening of Saturday 25 October 1986 the traffic office of a Sheffield bus operator held a duty roster for a network that had been protected by statute since 1930. On the Monday morning the protection was gone.
Nothing physical had changed. The same drivers signed on for the same duties, and the same buses came off the same depot. What had changed was that anybody holding an operator's licence could now register a service along the same roads, at whatever fare they liked, and nobody had the power to refuse them on the grounds that the road was already served.
By the end of that first week there were liveries at the city's stops that had not existed in August.
The 1930 settlement made a route something close to property
Under the Road Traffic Act 1930 a local bus service needed a road service licence from the traffic commissioners. The application set out the route, the timetable and the fares. Existing operators could object, and so could the railways, and the commissioners decided whether the service was needed at all. Where a licence was granted it was in practice exclusive.
That arrangement lasted fifty-six years and it shaped everything about how a network was run. If the route is secure you can plan a network rather than a collection of journeys. The busy corridor at half past eight pays for the estate route at half past nine and for the last bus on a Sunday. Fares are cross-subsidised deliberately, because the licence is granted on the whole service and not on the profitable half of it.
In the conurbations the operator was usually a public one. The passenger transport executives, set up under the Transport Act 1968, ran the city networks, and district councils ran the municipal undertakings. In South Yorkshire the executive had held bus fares down for years with support from the rates, which made travel in Sheffield conspicuously cheap and the policy conspicuously popular. By 1986 that support had already been pared back and the fares had already risen.
Registration replaced permission, and it came with fifty-six days
The Transport Act 1985 deregulated local bus services outside London on 26 October 1986. To run one after that date you needed a public service vehicle operator's licence, which is a test of your finances, your maintenance arrangements, your operating centre and the repute and competence of the person running the traffic office. Then you registered the service with the traffic commissioner: route, stopping places, times. Whether the road was already served was no longer a question anybody was allowed to ask, and fares were not part of the registration at all. They were yours.
Two consequences followed at once.
The first is that the register is public. Your competitor's intentions are a matter of record before he turns a wheel, and so are yours.
The second is the notice period. A registration, a variation of one, or a withdrawal takes fifty-six days to take effect. That reads like a technicality and it is the most important operational fact of the whole period. You cannot answer a new entrant this week. You cannot cut a journey that is losing money this week either. Every commercial decision about the network is taken two months before it happens, against a competitor who is also deciding two months ahead and can read what you have filed.
It also produced a specific tactic. If the established timetable says the bus leaves at fourteen minutes past, a new registration at eleven minutes past along the same road collects the queue that has gathered for it. The incumbent's answer, moving his own times, was fifty-six days away.
Taking the subsidy out took the cross-subsidy with it
Deregulation was only half of what happened that morning. Support for services changed shape completely too.
An operator registered commercially whatever it was prepared to run for the fare box alone. Anything else, the evening journeys, the Sunday service, the route that only works at school times, could be secured by the local authority through competitive tender and awarded to whoever asked for the least money.
For a city operator that split one network into two businesses overnight. The profitable corridors were now exposed to anybody who fancied them, and the unprofitable journeys those corridors had always carried were now contracts to be bid for against the same people. Losing a tender did not reduce the depot, the engineering shop or the fleet insurance. It reduced the mileage those costs were spread across.
The Act also required the public operators to be reorganised as companies at arm's length from their authorities, which is to say as firms that could go under.
A bus network is a peak, and the peak sets the cost
The cost of running buses is largely settled before the first passenger boards. The peak vehicle requirement, meaning the number of buses you need on the road at half past eight in the morning, determines the fleet you own and the drivers you employ. Both are still there at eleven o'clock whether the bus is full or empty. Fuel and tyres vary with mileage. Very little else does.
That is why free fares were more dangerous than they sounded. Once the bus is out on the road there is no floor under the fare that anybody can point to, and the answer to a rival registering at eleven minutes past was a cheaper ticket, and then a cheaper one than that.
It is also why the off-peak passenger is worth more than the takings suggest. The bus and the driver are already paid for, so that fare is close to pure contribution, and that passenger is the first to stop travelling when the fare goes up.
What followed nationally is well recorded. Bus mileage rose and passenger numbers fell, fares outside London rose, and timetables changed more often than the public could follow. The competitive episodes in the larger cities were fierce and mostly short, and within a decade the industry had consolidated into a small number of large groups. The operators that came through were not the ones that defended every mile of the old network. They were the ones that worked out quickly which corridors actually paid, and let the rest go to tender.
Where this shows up in the game
Deregulation Day starts in Sheffield in October 1986 with a bus operator, Don Valley Buses, and runs for two years. It is scored on profitable months: twelve out of twenty-four. The difficulty is hard, and the reason sits in that objective. A network that holds every route and loses money on half of them will never get there, so the scenario is really asking which parts of the map you are prepared to give up, and how early.
The opening is not a clean one. The anchor store on the high street is closing, which takes the shopping traffic off the corridor that was carrying the rest of the network. Rival operators register against your best routes in the first, second and fourth months and undercut your fare. The county puts its tendered services out in month six and you bid against those same rivals. Fares are yours to set for the first time, so the demand response does real work. Withdrawing or varying a registration takes fifty-six days, which means every answer you give is an answer to the situation two months ago.
The seed is fixed at 600006, so everybody attempting it meets the same Britain and the scores can be set beside each other. It runs under ironman rules: one save, and what happens happens.