glowingfish

Topic drift? On the internet? Say it ain't so!

But anyway... the situation over here is complicated. In a few large cities and city-regions, you have a central body which co-ordinates bus services but indeed doesn't actually own them. These bodies (eg Transport for West Midlands, TfWM, which covers the greater Birmingham region) are also responsible for administering concessionary fares. It's not just buses: local rail and (where relevant, including for TfWM) tram services are also co-ordinated by these bodies.

A very small number of councils do own bus operators. This is because they did so before deregulation in 1986 and have grandfather rights* to continue doing so. For example, Nottingham City Transport is owned by the city council. As another example, Merseytravel (Liverpool area) owns and operates the Mersey Ferries.

Outside big cities, and also inside some big cities that don't have the co-ordinating bodies I mentioned -- Bristol is a major example -- it's not far off a free-for-all. Any company that meets the basic standards for safety, trained staff and so on can run a bus route as long as it's not doing so in an anti-competitive way. They can also alter or even withdraw routes at relatively short notice.

The distinction between unionised and non-unionised jobs is less clear-cut in the UK than it is in the US. ("Union shops" would be illegal here, for example.) That said, public transport is quite highly unionised. Very strongly so on the railways, where strikes can come close to shutting down entire parts of the network. Less so on the buses, and although bus strikes do happen they're fairly rare.

Things are different again in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but this comment is long enough already!

* The term doesn't have the potentially uncomfortable connotations in the UK that it can in the US.