Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder coming to you today from

well the corner of Chester Street and Grovener Place in London. Very close actually I'm just

looking at the back garden the rear wall of Buckingham Palace.

But it's an extremely busy road.

And that's why I'm here, actually, because I want to talk to you about buses.

And this is a place where you get, I think, more long distance coaches going past than any other road.

Probably in the country.

There will be one along in a minute.

The reason is that we're in a term of great change for the bus industry and yet an awful lot

I talk to take the view.

Well, buses are the last resort and they really wouldn't consider travelling by

megabus or by National Express or by the new challenger Flix bus. Now I hope I'm wrong in

making that assumption because buses provide a really, really important part of the national

transport system, not least, because if the trains are either not working because of engineering

works or it's a Christmas boxing day or whatever, then you know that you will be able to get at least

between the major cities or indeed to and from the airports using, well, generally National

Express, but megabus are doing more and more as well. They are generally extremely

professionally run and as punctual as they can possibly be, given that they are dealing, unlike the railways, where you've got a very closed network.

These are exposed to all sorts of problems and here's a van. Ardena flooring, this is you, stopping a bus

getting into the bus lane and accelerating away. Now, the upside of the bus industry is that

everything is better than it used to be. I genuinely mean that. In the olden days,

you had to sort of go into a dusty bus station office and somebody would write out a ticket for you.

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