The last bus is now fighting relegation

A regional transport authority would rank villages by how many people ride the last bus of the evening, and withdraw the service from whichever village finishes bottom. Under the scheme, keeping a bus would become a team sport with no season and no trophy.

Bus services in rural and outer-suburban areas across Europe and North America have been thinning for years, and evening and late services are usually the first to go because they carry the fewest passengers per hour of operation. Transport authorities increasingly decide which routes to keep using automated ridership data from smart cards and contactless payments rather than manual surveys. Some regions publish route performance in league-style tables, and “use it or lose it” campaigns urge residents to ride threatened routes to keep the numbers up. Gamification, with points, streaks and rankings, has spread from fitness apps into public services, including transport loyalty schemes. Community groups regularly organise to save specific services, sometimes by riding them purely to raise the count.

Eleven. That is how many passengers the 22:40 out of the market town would need to carry on an average evening for the village of Amblecote to stay above the line, and for the Pryce household, at number 14, it comes to one single fare a week, £3.60 and an evening, taken by whichever of them has the least reason to go anywhere. Under a scheme being modelled by a regional transport authority, villages would be ranked each month by ridership on their final evening service, and the bottom-placed village would lose it. The table would be published on a Friday, so that people could plan.

The authority would describe the arrangement as “demand-led service protection”. Every tap of a bus pass on the last service would count as a point for the village at which it was tapped, and the forty villages on the network would be sorted into a single league, with the lowest three shaded amber and the lowest one shaded red. A red village could avoid the cut by finishing above another red village the following month, which the authority's draft guidance calls “a fair and transparent opportunity to demonstrate need”. The guidance does not say where the passengers are meant to go.

In Amblecote the response would take the form of a rota on the shop noticeboard. Households would take turns to ride the 22:40 from the town to the terminus, a lay-by beside a reservoir two villages on, where a second member of the household would be waiting in the car, having followed the bus. “I've been to the reservoir nine times,” Derek Pryce, 71, would say. “There is nothing there. I take a flask. The driver and I have stopped saying hello because it feels like an admission.” His wife, Maureen, would ride on Wednesdays, when the table refreshed, because she believed the counting was heavier on Wednesdays.

Rivalries would develop within weeks. A parish council in a neighbouring village would be reported to have chartered a minibus to carry residents to the bus stop, so that they could board the bus. Another would offer a raffle ticket per boarding, with a bench as the prize. Two villages that share a stop would dispute which of them a tap belongs to, and the matter would be referred to a boundary panel that meets quarterly. One village would climb from thirty-eighth to fourth by moving its pub quiz to finish at 22:35.

The authority's data team would notice that the same 340 passes were being used across the region, in a pattern it would describe as “circulating”. A planning officer, speaking on condition that his own village was not named, would say that the scheme was working as intended, because ridership on final services had risen by a third. Asked whether any of those passengers had wanted to be on the bus, he would say that the question sat outside the scope of the metric. The buses, meanwhile, would run full to the reservoir, followed at a distance by a line of cars with their headlights dipped.

The top of the table would carry no reward beyond a line in the authority's newsletter. The bottom would be a village called Sennow, population 190, whose residents would decline to take part. “We had a meeting and decided we'd rather lose the bus than do that,” Iris Kettle, who runs the post office counter, would say. “Somebody has to be last, and it's less work if it's you on purpose.” Sennow's last bus would be withdrawn in February, and its residents would appear on the table the following month anyway, tapping in at Amblecote, where they had been driven.

The authority would already be consulting on extending the table to libraries, on the basis that a service that can be counted can be ranked. The Pryces would keep their rota. Derek would say that the reservoir is quite nice in spring, that a heron has started to expect him, and that he would miss the bus if it went, although not in the way the form means. The 22:40 would carry eleven passengers on a Tuesday in March, exactly eleven, and the driver would write the number down, which is the only thing anyone has asked him to do with it.