Franchising with confidence

A generational opportunity

Bus franchising is a once-in-a-generation shift. For the first time since deregulation, a combined authority decides where its buses go, how often they run and what a ticket costs.

LCRCA made a public promise that no passenger would be worse off on day one. Every route change and every new connection had to be shown as an improvement – to members, to residents and to the operators bidding for the contracts – with the numbers to back it up.

There are many ways to franchise a network. LCRCA's started with who can get where, and designed outwards from there. Podaris has been the authority's transport planning platform since 2024, and we're proud to have supported the franchising journey from the network sketches through to procurement. It's exactly what franchising should be about.

Four problems and a fixed deadline

Franchising handed LCRCA's network planning team several jobs at once, all of them time-critical and all of them in public:

• Proving the value: franchising was always expected to cost more than the commercial model it replaced, so members and the public needed to see what that money bought. The team's previous tooling only produced static maps, and reading the detail on a whole-network plan meant printing it on A0 – fine for a single design, less so for showing multiple iterations to a non-technical audience
• Measuring who can reach what: LCRCA's design principles included a 400-metre standard so that every resident lives within a short walk of a stop, but proximity to a stop says nothing about where the bus goes. The team also needed to measure access to real destinations, hospitals in particular, and show how the new network changed it
• Iterating without the queue: testing a network change had previously meant packaging up a request for another team and waiting a week or more for the results, which doesn't work when the programme is on the clock
• Bringing operators up to speed: bidders unfamiliar with the region needed clear, consistent information on every route variant, ideally without burying LCRCA's transport information team under clarification questions

Testing the network in-house

Simon's team evaluated several tools during procurement and chose Podaris on what he calls "the key thing – the ease, the simplicity, the speed." The team brought the existing network into Podaris and started changing it directly, merging routes, adjusting frequencies and trying new connections, with each edit visible as soon as it was made. Without a dependency on anyone else's workload, several variants could be evaluated in the time it had previously taken to get results back on one.

Turning edits into evidence

Each version of the network was then run through accessibility analysis, with isochrones layered over census data to show how many residents could reach key destinations and how long it took them. The team could zoom in or out as needed, from whole-network access down to what a single route did for a single neighbourhood.

The result that stuck was Arrowe Park Hospital, where the proposed network brings an additional 40,000 residents within a 60-minute direct journey.

The same approach shaped what launched on day one. The X3 express, a brand-new direct service from St Helens to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, began running on 6 September – the first day of public control – and puts more than 25,000 additional residents within an hour of the airport, rising to over 100,000 within 80 minutes once onward rail and bus connections are counted. It's a direct link that didn't exist before public control, and the sort of connection the network was designed to find.

Sharing it with operators

Rather than issuing bidders a set of static PDFs, LCRCA gave them interactive route maps they could zoom into and cross-reference against stop data for themselves. Clarification questions dropped dramatically, and when an error did surface it was corrected once, immediately, rather than reissued as a fresh document pack.

A franchised network also has to be one that operators of every size can bid for and run. Smaller operators don't necessarily have dedicated scheduling software, so giving them interactive maps and stop data through Podaris:Engage meant they could work from exactly the same information as the larger bidders, without needing a system of their own to read it.

The same evidence base, across the authority

Combined authorities are doing a great deal more of their own strategic planning than they were five years ago, and LCRCA's Transport Development team – several of whom joined from consultancy and brought that way of working with them – now use the same Podaris platform for scheme development well beyond the bus network, including corridor options for the region's new Rapid Transit system.