We’ve seen another little bit of nostalgia back on the Island’s roads this summer

The two sparkling hi-tech, low-emission double-deck vehicles which have begun ferrying passengers to and from the Airport are a far cry from the long-serving familiar green and cream JMT ‘deckers’ with their conductors and their open platforms, which, like the Mary Ann adverts they bore, could service the parts of the Island others couldn’t reach.

We may not have train spotters, but judging by the fond tales doing the rounds at the launch, of slippery journeys in the snow, drivers accepting ‘special requests’ and – the pièce de résistance – a child’s delight at being allowed to help push the turntable at the Snow Hill terminus, there are many in this Island with a thriving nostalgia for local bus travel.

Let me mention in passing that the catalyst for rekindling these memories was a display of magnificent photographs from the archives of the Channel Island Bus Society.

However, for the majority of us, a bus is, well, just a bus – big, anonymous, something between a moving traffic obstacle and a mobility lifeline. Attitudes, particularly in this Island, depend on where you live. On the overdeveloped strands east and west, you couldn’t be better served; choose a country hide-away, and your acquaintance with myBus, or anybody’s bus, can be academic.

Yet pass by the Connex garage at La Collete on any weekday and you’ll find it a pretty empty place – a fair indication that all 84 vehicles are deployed, earning their keep and serving the community.

As a frequent bus passenger, it is clear to see that the buses are fuller than they have ever been. At certain times and on particular routes, a reported 3.2 million passengers travelled with myBus in 2010.

Nevertheless, the ‘friends of Connex’ would contend that the company is forced to operate with one hand tied behind its back. It certainly faces a complicated logistical exercise, not least because of the ebb and flow of rush hours and school timetables.

Furthermore, modern buses, like motor cars – and maybe their drivers – have experienced a distinct expansion in girth. You simply can’t buy narrow buses these days, so given the size of our roads, the operator is restricted to using specific vehicles on certain routes. The new double-decks, for example, can only ply the Airport route, the previous batch of new vehicles introduced in March only run on the No 1 or No 15.

Another fly in the ointment is that by 2015, the EU is preparing to insist that all passenger transport vehicles (including school buses) have low access steps, which will certainly have an implication on the existing fleet.

Like most naturally evolving habitations, our Island was not planned with public transport in mind. The piecemeal development around the countryside has for the most part lacked any overall strategic infrastructure consideration. So while the constraints imposed by the existing road network remain, the status quo will inhibit any major public transport improvement, leaving the car as the prime people-mover.

I have been fortunate to have spent most of my working life in cities where public transport is taken for granted as the principle form of transport. In London, I have seen the network recover from the disastrous effects of privatisation of the city’s bus network, expensive cost-cutting – that’s not a contradiction in terms – congestion charging, bus priority lanes, the introduction of the much-maligned bendibuses, and far too many politically inspired experiments at the expense of the travelling public.

Here, since the 1970s when the last of the old ‘deckers’ finally sailed into history, we certainly did witness years of experiment, new colours and new conditions of service. Now, at least, we’ve had ten years of consolidation with Connex, featuring new, well maintained, courteously driven vehicles, with schoolchildren conveyed safely to school and little vandalism.

There is never going to be a ‘one fits all’ solution. The compromise that governs bus travel is a balance between demand, political prescription, financial return and basic technical operation. Isolated customers and car drivers may pour scorn on their inflexibility, but you certainly miss them when they aren’t running – which probably explains why the reappearance of top-deck travel has been so widely anticipated.

But if the new giants of the road are to succeed in wooing more commuters out of their cars with wi-fi toys and comfy seats, they need help. Why, for example, can’t the Airport express operate a limited service, using Victoria Avenue to bypass the St Aubin’s inner road squeeze – particularly when the stops along that section are well served by other routes? I suppose one minister’s transport revenue is another’s parking charge bonanza.

Smooth and passenger-hungry as they may be, we’re not likely to experience again the sort of adrenalin-rush from upstairs front seats that came from being launched to within a hair’s breadth of the rock-face of Mount Bingham as their predecessors swung round the hairpin on route one during the 1960s before the tunnel was opened – much to the excitement of schoolboy easy riders and the trepidation of tourists.

But, along with the revived opportunity to google over garden walls, we’ve seen another little bit of nostalgia back on our roads this summer.

After surviving a vandal attack last year, Paul Talbot’s little green and cream vintage open-top has given the name charabanc a whole new outing on the tourist route – evidence that despite the occasional niggles, we benefit from a dynamic, evolving local bus industry.

Who knows – in two years’ time, when operating contracts are revisited, things could change all over again!