THE Quality Bus Partnership announced last week is great news for everybody who uses Oxfordshire’s roads – not just for bus riders.

Margaret Thatcher messed up lots of things during her time in office, including the buses. When her government deregulated the buses in 1986, road service licensing ended and competition on services was introduced.

Competition meant that it became illegal for bus companies to enter into dialogues to fix prices and co-ordinate bus timetables. Rural bus services suffered while popular city routes became unbearably clogged.

The new Local Transport Act (2008) allows collaboration between operators to improve services and efficiencies. This partnership means that that the timetables of the two main bus companies serving the city can be worked out jointly with the county council.

Everyone’s a winner. Bus users will get a better, more frequent service rather than the usual three buses arriving at once as they leap-frog each other down the street vying to get to the next stop first.

The bus companies can provide fewer buses and they can run them with more passengers on board, so they make more money.

Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians will all benefit from quieter roads, especially on key routes such as High Street, London Road and Cowley Road.

The most significant thing for cyclists will be the speed with which passengers can board buses.

The plan is to use smart cards, like the London Oyster cards. The cards contain your pre-paid fare. You just slap your wallet on the card-reader and the magnetic strip in the card deducts the fare.

The biggest problem with Cowley Road, where millions of pounds was spent to improve safety, is that the road is constantly paralysed by buses which stop for periods of up to three or four minutes at bus stops. Because the road is so narrow, nothing can pass.

A three-minute cycle along Cowley Road all too often turns into a miserable 10 minute busfest.

When the bus partnership is in place, cycling along Cowley Road, and other busy streets as well, should be a whole lot easier.

Cyclists will be able to ride in the flow of the traffic, rather than wait for ages and then have drivers, impatient with road-rage, zoom past … only to stop at the next bus stop for a few minutes.

The partnership is the country’s first since the Local Transport Act (2008) allowed them. There have been quite a few transport firsts in Oxford.

The first park-and-ride service in the country opened in Oxford in 1973. And the world’s first Advanced Stop Line is outside the King’s Arms pub on the corner of Parks Road and Holywell Street (ASLs are those boxes at traffic lights which allow cyclists to pull away first from a queue of traffic).

How about another national first for Oxfordshire: a Quality Bicycle Partnership? We could start by appointing a cycling officer – after all, there are more than 40 officers working on buses.

There’s zero specific budget for cycling at the moment, though I hope that changes from 2011.

The great news about bikes is that with relatively little cash you can make a world of difference.