The last bus goes to the winning village

Under a scheme drafted for next year by one regional transport authority, the final evening bus on rural routes would run only to the village with the highest ridership score that week. Everywhere else, the day would end at 6:15 p.m.

Rural bus services in many countries have been cut over the past decade as public subsidies shrink and operators withdraw from unprofitable routes; evening and weekend services are usually the first to go. Councils and transport authorities increasingly decide which routes survive using ridership data, often collected through contactless tap-in payments and smart ticketing. Some areas have replaced fixed timetables with demand-responsive services that run only when booked. At the same time, public bodies have borrowed gamification techniques such as points, rankings and public dashboards to encourage behaviour like recycling or energy saving. The result is that communities are sometimes told, explicitly, that a service continues only if enough people use it.

Fourteen. That is how many evening tap-ins a village would need per hundred residents each week to hold first place on the proposed last-bus leaderboard, and for the Faircloth household in Heyford Parva it would work out at roughly £58 a month in fares for journeys the family did not otherwise need to make. The 19:42 would keep stopping at the war memorial for as long as the village stayed in the top spot. Drop to second and it would stop at somebody else's war memorial.

The authority's draft would replace the current fixed timetable on eleven rural routes with what its planners call a 'demand-weighted terminal allocation'. Daytime services would continue as normal. The last bus of the evening, however, would be treated as a shared resource, awarded each Monday to the village whose residents had tapped in most often the previous week, adjusted for population. The scores would be published on the authority's website, on a screen in the bus station and, in a concession to older passengers, on a laminated sheet in the shelter. The sheet would be updated by the driver.

Marguerite Ollerton, 71, of Astley Cross, said she had begun taking the 18:10 into town and the 18:50 straight back in order to register two journeys before the leaderboard cut-off. 'I don't get off,' she said. 'There's nothing open. I sit at the back and do the crossword and then I'm home for the news.' Her village currently sits third on the pilot table, behind Heyford Parva and a hamlet of forty people who, she suspects, have been sharing one bus pass. The rules on pass-sharing have not yet been written.

Parish councils would be permitted to organise what the draft calls 'ridership events'. In practice this would mean a rota. Heyford Parva's, circulated on the village noticeboard, would assign each household two evening journeys a week, with pensioners asked to cover Tuesdays and Thursdays because they are cheaper to carry. Households that fail to ride would be listed by surname on the back of the rota. A separate column would record who had offered a lift to the bus stop, which under the scheme would count against the village, since a lift is a journey the bus did not get.

The consequences of losing would be spelled out plainly. A village that drops out of first place would see its evening service end at 18:15, which the draft describes as 'still comfortably within the leisure window'. Tom Faircloth, who works shifts at a distribution centre, said the leisure window did not include him. 'I finish at seven. If we're second, I walk four miles along a road with no pavement, which the council also says is fine.' He has started taking the bus on his days off to keep the village's numbers up. He describes this as commuting to nothing.

A spokesperson for the authority said the scheme would 'reward communities that value their bus', and noted that overall evening ridership in the pilot area had risen by nearly a third. Asked whether the rise reflected genuine demand, the spokesperson said demand was, by definition, the number of people on the bus. The authority's own figures would show that the average evening passenger under the pilot travelled 3.1 miles, stayed on board, and returned to where they started. This would be recorded as two successful journeys.

The 19:42 would, under the draft, carry a small display above the windscreen showing the live table, so that passengers could see in real time whether their journey home was still going home. Mrs Ollerton said she had stopped looking at it. 'I know the score,' she said. 'I am the score.' The driver, who asked not to be named, said the hardest part of the new job was the last stop on a Monday night, when he had to tell a shelter full of people that the bus would be going somewhere else this week. He would then drive there empty.