Is Wilmslow Road really the busiest bus route in Europe?

Wilmslow Road is often claimed to be the busiest bus route in Europe, but is it actually?

The Wilmslow Road bus corridor is the 5.5-mile long stretch we’ve all ventured on for one reason or another, which takes you from Piccadilly Gardens all the way to Parrs Wood.

It’s the bus route you don’t even need to look at the bus timetable for, because you know by the time you’ve taken your hood down as your shelter from the rain under the bus stop, one will be pulling in and leading you on your merry way to a house party in south Manny somewhere.

However, there is, I’m told, a bus on average every minute in each direction during university term time. And the stretch between RNCM and Oxford Road Station has a bus every 30 seconds in each direction.

Currently, two bus companies compete in giving the public the exact same service; Stagecoach Manchester (this includes our friend the wizard, Magic Bus) and First Greater Manchester.

They both quite literally run the exact same route but everyone knows the cheapest is the bright blue buses with a wizard printed on the side, which will get you all the way back for just a quid.

It’s this fact though – the one about the route, not the £1 bargain – that caused the Parliamentary Select Committee on Transport to be told in 2006 that Wilmslow Road corridor was utter ‘chaos’.

So how did things get just so utterly chaotic?

Like a lot of things, we can look to Margaret Thatcher’s government. The deregulation of buses in 1986 meant bus services could run wherever and whenever they wanted.

Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive ran most of the bus services on this route prior to this. In 1986, this became GM Buses.

Shortly after, competitor Finglands Coachways saw a market for cheap public transport to cater for all those pesky students. Word spread quickly and before you knew there were four bus choices; with Wall’s and Bullocks coming into the mix.

By 1996, Stagecoach bought GM Buses and introduced the Ryanair of bus services, the Magic Bus.

The market got competitive and prices just kept on getting lower and lower. In 2001, Finglands were offering a student weekly ticket for just TWO pounds. I don’t even think you can get an ice cream for two quid anymore.

Stagecoach monopolised further, buying Bullocks in 2008 and by 2013, First Greater Manchester purchased Finglands.

Now we’ve had a brief history lesson in the bus market of Manchester let’s get back to the case at hand. Is it really the busiest bus route in Europe?

Well, we don’t know. And unfortunately, there’s no real way of finding out.

First of all, no one has defined the word ‘busy’ so we don’t actually know just how many buses qualifies as the ‘busiest’ bus route.

Secondly, the timetables just aren’t reliable enough meaning we can’t actually compare it to anything else. The buses on Wilmslow Road just fly around the route as fast as they possibly can. I’m assuming when they all get back to the depot at night, compete on how many times they did it that day in a weird little bus route tourney.

And finally, different points in the day, such as rush hour, and year, such as term time, are busier than 1 in the afternoon on a Sunday, for example.

We simply don’t know if it’s the busiest route. One things for sure though, it’s got the best characters and best stories.