From the over enthusiastic loud honk by the bus driver on a Durham roundabout this evening I can only conclude I had a near death experience. His subsequent over enthusiasm in hitting the breaks in non-life-threatening situations can only suggest I was lucky to survive.Yet I am grateful at this time of year for any bus turning up within a 30 minute window. Once the ice is gone and the evenings get lighter I can walk to and from Durham (aside from the event of the odd torrential downpour). But until them I am hostage to the buses (though always grateful of Iain’s lifts home from work when we leave at the same time).

This is not a case of unfair comparison. Yes I lived in London for three years, but as soon as I made the decision to move out of that mecca of public transport on demand I realised I could no longer complain about having to wait a whole five minutes for a bus. Or indeed a whole fifteen minutes at two o’clock in the morning. I understood I would have to significantly lower my expectations, and allow the word taxi to re-enter my vocabulary after a certain hour of the night.

I grew up in a place where the promised service was not that different from the one here in Durham. A bus every 10 minutes during peak hours. And in Southport that meant on most occasions one would turn up at fairly regular intervals. Except of course on the day of my very first job interview. A rare occasion when no buses turned up for half an hour so I had to call a taxi. That taxi driver was celebrating his birthday. He was meant to be retiring. He had just lost his entire pension. For my second interview I got the train.

County Durham buses are a law unto themselves. Arriva is the worst. But Go North East, although significantly more reliable, still has examples of spectacular failures. Back in December while recovering from a particularly lethal dose of the flu I decided I would still make it to my nieces Panto by hook or by crook. That is because hooks and crooks are probably more reliable than the buses. In fact I left home two and a half hours before needed to arrive at somewhere a mere 16 miles away. A 30 minute drive.

An Arriva bus did, although late, somehow turn up in just enough time to get us to the Go North East bus stop. The stupid mistake I’d made was trusting the Go North East timetable on their website, only to get to the bus stop and be told on that timetable the bus had gone 10 minutes earlier. Confused by a time on the electronic display that didn’t seem to correlate with either of the timetables I called up the Traveline number. I was told that the web timetable nor the bus stop timetable were correct. In fact we had missed the bus we needed by 5 minutes and they were only every half an hour. Had our Arriva bus arrived on time we would have made the Go North East bus, but I would have missed out on the delight of finding out that they have three different timetables for one bus from one bus stop. Obviously painting every bus a different colour is higher up on the list of priorities than making sure your timetables all say the same thing. Eventually I made it to the panto in desperate need of a cup of tea. Returning home five or six hours after I left I finally got that cup of tea.

Checking the timetables is a mistake I make over and over again. Like the leaflets about gritting routes in Durham, bus timetables are just create unrealistic expectations. I have learned that the only bus into Durham that will turn up almost on time every day is the 8.13 am (When I say every day, I only mean five days a week). To give Arriva their dues it seems that the last three buses out of Durham from 9.30 pm onwards do actually turn up on time as well. But should I want to travel to Durham after 8.13 am or home before 9.30 pm then I could be waiting any length of time. If I want to use the buses on Sunday I have to leave myself an hour and a half leeway on a 10 minute journey in to town. Four reliable buses a day. I should consider myself lucky, some places don’t even get four buses a day. However I did choose to live in a city, albeit a small one, under the impression that I could expect my basic public transport needs to be catered for.

This week there’s been a new development for Arriva. Early buses. Or possibly non-existent buses. Though you wouldn’t know either way as the little LED lights promising that a bus is “due” don’t actually seem to have a connection to a bus being at the bus stop at that time. Or any time afterwards. And Arriva will probably shortly claim they’ve reduced the number of late buses significantly. Of course this is by making them disappear into thin air. Or just making sure that now everyone has to get to the bus stop fifteen minutes before a bus that might be early, late or just not turn up at all.

I am sure there are those of you reading this thinking “Surely she exaggerates?” (incidentally a word it seems no matter how hard I try I cannot learn how to spell). But no I do not. My friends who have come to stay can vouch for the unreliable timetables and non-existent buses. Some have waited up to forty minutes for a shiny metal carriage into town, which when coming from London is a shock enough to hospitalize anyone and reconfirm their incorrect prejudices of the North. My Twitter followers must feel like they know far too much about the bad bus services as I tweet while I wait.

Unfortunately as we have come to accept of late for most public service ‘private’ is a code word for crap. I am yet to be convinced that all these wonderful privatised services are cheaper, more efficient and better for the customer than if the Government had kept them as their own. However I will not give in and get a car. Soon the days will be longer and hopefully not to wet and I can resume my walk to work making my rants about public transport a much rarer sighting. For a few months at least.