Philip Kirk has a passion for public transport

It really is quite a journey that Oxford bus boss Philip Kirk begins to describe. It has involved hundreds of drivers and millions of passengers, seen a bus fleet transformed and taken 20 years to complete.

The retiring managing director of the Oxford Bus Company could certainly claim to have seen changes aplenty in the way public transport operates in Oxfordshire, as he prepared for his own departure.

For after driving the company forward for two decades, he has decided it is the end of the road, with the Oxford Bus Company’s other Phil, Phil Southall, succeeding him as managing director, having previously been operations director at the firm.

Not that Mr Kirk can bring himself to leave buses entirely.

His ongoing fascination with buses means he is already planning to train as a public transport archivist, with a view to working at the Kithead Transport Archive in Droitwich, which has been established to store the bus industry's archive material.

No one can say accuse Mr Kirk of being a numbers man, lacking interest in his fleet.

It seems that he had his heart on a career on the buses from an early age. His father had been a bus driver in County Durham.

“I remember at the age of five being put in the cab of a bus. In a way I have been there ever since.

“It was actually the cab of the bus that my father had passed his test in. He was a tremendous story teller.”

Mr Kirk has been managing director of the Oxford Bus Company for 13 of his 20 years with the company, having previously served as operations manager and commercial director.

By the time he arrived in Oxfordshire he already had more than 30 years’ experience in bus and coach operations management, immediately before with Kentish Bus in Northfleet, which was just as well given the challenges lying ahead.

The issue of how best to get people in and out of the city and persuade more people to leave their cars at home then, as now, preoccupied transport planners and councillors who doggedly viewed buses as the best means to combat clogged-up roads.

Ever greater reliance on buses certainly made the need for a strong relationship between local bus operators and local councils essential. And for Mr Kirk it has certainly meant grappling with rapid change.

“I suppose the most obvious change for our company was leaving Cowley Road 10 years ago and moving here,” Mr Kirk told me in his office at Watlington Road.

Moving the depot only came after a planning wrangle over the future of the Cowley Road site, and concerns about whether the Watlington Road site could cope with the extra volumes of traffic.

For Mr Kirk the move was essential.

“By the end, Cowley Road was not fit for purpose. It was an agglomerate of little garages.”

Improvements at Thornhill park-and-ride also show what can be achieved. What was just a brick bus shelter, he said, is today a gleaming terminal building with express coach and local bus services coming in and out of what is now a real interchange.

Some might say, given that the first park-and-ride site opened at Redbridge opened in 1973, such improvements have been a long time coming.

But for Mr Kirk it has been a question of continuing to “build, build and build” on what was in place, with many more park-and- rides around the city now being envisaged by county council leader, Ian Hudspeth and others.

He looks back with particular pleasure to an agreement reached with his company’s main competitor in Oxfordshire, Stagecoach. The two companies in 2011 agreed to co-ordinate their timetables and ticket operations, in what was the first scheme of its kind in the UK.

The smartcard system then introduced meant ‘one ticket, any bus’ for passengers, meaning Oxford became effectively served by one major bus network.

The deal was the first of its kind using powers under the Local Transport Act 2008, designed to allow councils and bus operators to work closely together.

Mr Kirk, at the time, proclaimed it would bring “a better bus network with lower emission vehicles and easier access”, while the then Transport Minister, Norman Baker, hailed Oxford as a city “leading the way in providing better local transport services by using a partnership approach to deliver greater flexibility to reduce congestion”.

At about the same time Mr Kirk announced a £5m fleet of hybrid electro-diesel buses, with his company’s park-and-ride fleet replaced with 17 new 73-seat hybrid double-deckers.

As he prepared to stand down, Mr Kirk points to the fact that the number of drivers employed by the firm has grown from 300 in 1994 to 450 today with more than 50 per cent of people who go into the centre of Oxford now getting there by bus.

“I believe that buses are more than ever part of the lifeblood of the city. In many ways Oxford is a good place to run a bus service, with the local authorities creating the right conditions for a local bus operator to thrive, with bus routes and expensive car parking.”

But at the same time he has always been painfully aware how even the smallest of changes to the road network or minor roadworks can bring the flow of traffic to a grinding halt.

He is equally aware that he leaves with so many long-disputed issues still to be settled.

“I have been here 20 years and in that length of time we have been talking about the Westgate redevelopment,” he said.

Yet issues relating to routes, turning points, space for bus stops and the possible pedestrianisation of Queen Street remain unresolved, along with the central problem facing his successor: how can thousands more people be brought by bus in and out of the city to ensure the city and shoppers benefit from the new Westgate?

But for Mr Kirk, who lives in Thame, the challenge of the public transport archive at Droitwich, with its two miles of shelving, now awaits. The prospect of having the history of the bus industry in one building delights him.

He will tell you he was interested in public transport history long before he became Oxford’s best known bus operator.

In a way, those last 20 years on the buses in Oxford have, in fact, been a very busy and rewarding diversion, as he departs from commercial concerns for a return to buses as a passionate hobby.