Your bus stop may be relegated

Line 9 — Audience minutes below contractual floor, Stop 4417 (Chapel Lane), Q1: shelter roof, removal and disposal — £412.00. The line would appear on a quarterly invoice from one of the larger street-furniture concessionaires to a county council, under a scheme in which every bus stop is ranked by how long it can hold a person still. Stops in the bottom tenth of the table would lose their roof first, then their bench, and then, in most cases, their bus.

Bus shelters in many cities and counties are supplied and maintained by outdoor-advertising companies in exchange for the right to sell the panels, so the shelter is paid for by the advertising rather than by the transport authority. Digital advertising screens at stops increasingly carry sensors or use mobile-location data to estimate footfall and dwell time, which is sold to advertisers as audience measurement. Rural and suburban bus services have been cut steadily in many countries, and stops with low recorded usage are the first to lose services or infrastructure. Leaderboards and rankings have spread from sport into workplaces, schools and public services as a way of allocating attention and resources.

Under the scheme, the concessionaire would supply and clean the county's 3,100 shelters at no cost to the council, in exchange for the advertising panels and whatever the panels can measure. Sensors in the panel frame would count the phones that pass and, more importantly, the phones that stay. The product sold to advertisers is called audience minutes, and every stop's total would be published each Monday in a table with promotion and relegation zones. The top tier would receive heated benches, live arrival screens and a charging socket. The bottom tier would receive a visit from a van.

In one village, the rota would begin at seven. Pauline Crabtree, 71, would take Tuesdays and Thursdays at Stop 4417, a shelter on Chapel Lane served by two buses a day, one of them the same bus coming back. “You don't have to want to go anywhere,” she would explain. “You just have to be there, with your phone on, for the length of time it takes not to be picked up.” The parish council would print laminated cards for the noticeboard listing who stands when. Absences would be recorded. The bus, she would note, has never once been late for her.

Others would find the rota inefficient. A retired surveyor two villages over would leave his handset in the shelter overnight inside a biscuit tin, wrapped in a tea towel against the damp, and would learn from a letter that his stop had been docked forty minutes for non-human dwell. The concessionaire's integrity team would look for phones that do not move, breathe or buy anything. Real loiterers would prove hard to beat. A stop outside a chip shop in the county town would be promoted to the top tier on the strength of six teenagers who have never boarded a bus and do not intend to.

The bus company would read the table too. Its planners would move services towards stops that demonstrably hold people, which is how the leaderboard would begin to reward the one thing a bus stop is meant to prevent. A stop with a bus every six minutes would sit near the bottom, its passengers gone before the sensor could get to know them. A stop where the bus had been cut to hourly would climb steadily, its regulars accumulating minutes like interest. By the second quarter, the best-served stop in the county would be in the relegation zone, and the worst-served would have a heated bench.

Estate agents would adapt first. Listings would describe a semi-detached house as “a four-minute walk from a top-half stop”, and a mid-table shelter would appear on the particulars alongside the boiler. A hardware shop would sponsor its nearest stop and place a bench on the pavement facing the panel, so that customers could wait for nothing in comfort. An appeal process would exist. Relegated communities would have ten working days to submit evidence that the people who were not there had, in fact, been there, and would be encouraged to attach photographs of themselves waiting.

Derek Hallam, the county's head of passenger environments, would defend the table as neutral. “It is not a judgement on communities,” he would say. “It is a record of where communities choose to stand.” The stop outside his own building would enter the relegation zone in the third quarter, after the council moved to a three-day office week, and his department would issue a memo asking staff to take their lunch on the pavement. The memo would specify the pavement.

The van would come to Chapel Lane on a Tuesday. The roof would be removed in the morning and the bench in the afternoon, and by the evening Pauline Crabtree would be standing beside a pole, as scheduled. The sensor would stay, because the sensor sits in the pole, and the pole remains an advertising asset with a small ribbon of screen at head height. Her forty minutes would count. On the following quarter's invoice, beneath the removal charge, one line would read: Line 10 — Pole, Stop 4417, retained. £0.00. It would be the only part of the stop that had ever paid for itself.