Transforming travel experiences, enhancing public transport and promoting sustainability
Knowing where to spend a limited infrastructure budget is one of the most persistent challenges facing local transport authorities. Without consistent, countywide evidence, investment tends to follow visibility – flowing towards larger towns and busier stops, while hundreds of others deteriorate unnoticed.
Oxfordshire County Council recognised this problem and commissioned us to do something about it: a full audit of every registered bus stop in the county. The result is a foundational dataset that is already reshaping how the council plans, prioritises and justifies its infrastructure spending.
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The scope was unambiguous: survey every one of Oxfordshire’s registered bus stops, from the interchange at Gloucester Green in Oxford to isolated kerbside stops on rural roads. The county spans a wide geography – from Henley-on-Thames in the south to Banbury in the north, taking in Burford, Shrivenham and the heavily trafficked A40 and A420 corridors.
The survey needed to capture a consistent, comparable picture of every stop: what infrastructure was present, what condition it was in, and whether it met current accessibility standards. That data would then be used to identify priority corridors for improvement and inform the council’s BSIP/LABG investment programme. We designed a bespoke survey methodology for this commission, capturing up to 80 individual data points per stop alongside up to five photographs of each location.
The completed dataset gave Oxfordshire County Council something it had never had before: a consistent, evidence-based picture of its entire bus stop network. For the first time, the council could assess the condition and accessibility of every stop against the same criteria – from the county’s busiest interchange to its most remote rural halt.
Using this evidence base, the council has already identified nine priority corridors for improvement, committing nearly £400,000 of BSIP/LABG funding to upgrade works due to start in the coming months. Crucially, the survey enables that investment to be directed to the stops and routes where it will have the greatest impact – rather than defaulting to the most visible or most frequently requested locations.
