One week to go before launch of The Bee Network

A new Bee Network app that puts real time bus, tram and train travel information at customers’ fingertips for the first time – and allows them to buy combined bus and tram tickets that are 20% cheaper – has gone live today. 

 

It comes ahead of the launch of Greater Manchester’s first locally controlled bus services in nearly 40 years taking to the roads on Sunday. 

 

The move represents the biggest change to public transport in a generation, after services were deregulated across Great Britain in 1986. Since then, the number of bus journeys made in the capital – where bus services remained under local control – has doubled, while in Greater Manchester bus use has fallen from 355m in 1986/87, to just over 182m at the end of the last decade (and before Covid). 

 

Bus franchising signifies the start of the Bee Network – Greater Manchester’s plan for an integrated, ‘London-style’ transport network – and is the first step in reversing decades-long decline in bus use, with the recently published GM Bus Strategy setting out how the city-region aims to deliver 50 million more bus journeys each year by the end of the decade.