MEASURING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF BUSES USED FOR LEISURE TRIPS

Rural bus services are being hit hard by local government spending reductions. Many such services are used partly or primarily for leisure, some are supported by Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, National Parks or other local authorities and make easy prey for budget cuts. Their supporters would point to their value: providing socially inclusive access to natural areas, promoting health and wellbeing, replacing car journeys, bringing spending to local rural economies and claim they offer exceptional value for money. Yet there is no standardised method of evaluating these benefits against the costs of providing the services. This paper reports on an ESRC funded project to measure the benefits of individual services and the results of surveys in seven pilot areas in the season of 2010. The package developed includes a survey template and a programme to help input the data and produce instant reports on performance. The paper also presents the results of an exercise involving practitioners and policy makers (April 2011) to determine the relative value of benefits (converting apples, pears, bananas and raspberries into a common measure of ‘fruit’) and their views about alternative sources of funding for leisure buses such as tourism taxes and business levies. The next step in the project is to develop tools to extrapolate the survey findings to estimate the total benefits of the service for a year or season and compare them to the total costs. Once developed, the tools will have application for most rural transport services and will allow comparative evaluations of the relative benefits and costs of bus, train and taxi services. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using such a framework and whether it can be trusted to give ‘the right answers’, especially in a time of changing values and priorities. Summary With rural buses under threat, how can we decide which ones provide value for money? Our package (survey template, inputting and reporting programme) records the benefits (modal shift, social inclusion, health, local spending) of rural buses used for leisure trips. Thus benefits can be evaluated against costs for public transport and other services. We present the results and dilemmas of an exercise to determine the relative value of benefits and findings from seven pilot areas. Alternative sources of funding (eg tourism taxes, business levies) and the pros and cons of using the evaluation framework in political decisions are discussed

How can you estimate the value of a bus service? Evaluating buses in tourist areas

Bus services are currently threatened with cuts to reduce local government spending. Services provided for leisure activities in rural areas are particularly at risk as leisure travel is seen as less important than utility travel and the people using the buses are often from outside the area. This paper reports the findings of an ESRC funded project monitoring the benefits of such services and how their benefits to the area and passengers can be quantified. Although the goals of reducing car use, increasing social inclusion and access to areas of recreation, generating local spending and improving health and well-being are largely shared by different organisations, the project found very different priorities among stakeholders. Also, value for money was not the only criterion when budgets were allocated

Is devolution good for the Scottish economy? A framework for analysis

This briefing sets out a framework for addressing the question: Is devolution good for the Scottish economy? We are currently implementing the approach and shall report the results in due course. We begin with two observations. Economic issues were clearly not the sole, or even the primary, motivation for Scottish devolution. However, given the current priority given to the decentralised delivery of policies to improve productivity the effect is of considerable interest. Devolution being 'good for the Scottish economy' is not necessarily the same thing as being 'good for the Scottish people'. If, for example, Scotland wanted to become 'greener', this could imply a desire for slower growth than in the rest of the UK. We set out below the aggregate effects and the specific mechanisms through which devolution might be expected to impact on the economy

Measuring the volume and value of the outputs of higher education institutions

One of the key issues facing the Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council is how to assess the contribution made to Scotland's economy by Scotland's higher education sector. Higher Education's contribution to the economy and society at large is viewed as providing one of the most important justifications for government expenditure on higher education. However there is a paucity of robust quantitative evidence against which related resource allocation decisions aimed at encouraging economically valuable activity can be made. Taking higher education activity as a whole there has been no practical, valid, way to analyse the economic value of what universities do, or to compare the value thus created with that generated by other activities in the economy. The overall objective of this paper is to show how the development of a framework with comprehensive and detailed quantitative measures of the outputs of HEIs in both volume and value terms can enable a holistic analysis of higher education institutions' economic value. The present paper draws on initial case study research supported by the Nuffield Foundation which was further elaborated in two substantive reports to the Scottish Funding Council

The Political Mentoring Toolkit

ESRC Impact Report, to be disseminated to all UK local authorities by Local Government Group

National Centre for e-Social Science Nodes –NCeSS Nodes Funding: Notes for Guidance for Applicants

This is a guidance document created to assist applicants to this scheme in the completion of their application

ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science: Call for Research Nodes

In 2001, the Office of Science and Technology1 launched the UK e-Science programme, an initiative involving all the research councils2. John Taylor, then Director General of the Research Councils, explained that: ‘e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it’. This infrastructure, known as ‘the Grid’ or increasingly commonly as ‘e-Infrastructure’, comprises networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate and manipulate digitised data seamlessly across the Internet on a hitherto unrealisable scale, thereby enabling advances in scientific research that would not otherwise have been possible

Understanding Individual Behaviour: Exploratory Networks (UIBEN)

The ESRC, with the support of BBSRC and MRC, invites applications for innovative exploratory networks (ENs) in the area of ‘Understanding Individual Behaviour’ (UIB). Many of the major challenges facing UK society depend on improving understanding on why people behave as they do and how to maximise the effectiveness with which individuals can take control of their own lives. The leading edge is to bring together the different groups of scientists from very different perspectives into a meaningful scientific endeavour which adds value via its interdisciplinary approach. The complexity of analysing human behaviour, as well as the challenges of cross-disciplinary working, both within and between the biological, physical, biomedical and social sciences, means achieving this aim will be especially demanding

Exploring trends and challenges in sociological research

This is the first e-special issue for the journal Sociology and its chosen focus is the article ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’ by Savage and Burrows (2007). This article challenged sociologists with a variety of questions about the role, relevance and methodological opportunities for sociological research in the 21st century. On publication it stoked the already charged debates on a public sociology (Burawoy, 2004), the role of publicly funded research (ESRC, 2009) and relevance of sociological research in an age of burgeoning social media (Brewer and Hunter, 2006). This e-special provides a reprise of these debates and explores relevant papers in Sociology, as well as alerting readers to recurring themes and new directions on the topic of methods and social research