Maria Brabiner lives about five miles from where she works, as the crow flies.

If she drove - from near Mocha Parade in Salford, to Trafford Park - her commute would take 15 minutes.

But, like the vast majority of people who use public transport here, she gets the bus.

From Lower Broughton, she catches the 98 into the city centre, in theory, before getting the 250 back out to Trafford Park.

In theory.

“I work Tuesday to Saturday and start at 7am, but on a Saturday there are no early buses from Salford to Manchester,” she says, adding that there’s none on a Sunday either.

“I’ve tried going another route, getting the 52 and walking up, but the 52 doesn’t run early enough and even then it only goes as far as Salford precinct anyway.”

The choice she faces as a result will be familiar to many bus users.

“Either I leave my job, which I don’t want to do because it pays my bills, or I get a taxi every Saturday. Or I walk into Manchester.

“Walking into Manchester has been what I tend to do. I’m on minimum wage, so I only use taxis when the weather is absolutely awful.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

The upshot is that Maria, 53, has often found herself walking through Lower Broughton in the dark early hours of Saturday morning, complete with all the risks that brings, in order to get to her cleaning job.

“Four bus stops doesn’t sound too bad, but you’ve got to be wary all the time,” she points out.

“I’m going to work on a Saturday, leaving at 5.30am, and Friday night is revelling night, so you tend to meet all kinds of people. I’ve seen people doing drugs, I’ve seen drunks. You carry on walking by with your hood up.”

She adds: “Last summer I was approached on that walk into Manchester by a lad walking into Salford. He just said to me ‘how much do you charge - £20 for oral sex?’

“I went: ‘What? I’m going to work!’ I quickened up and held onto my bag tight, but he came after me and asked ‘are you really going to work?’

“My heart was in my mouth.”

Fortunately, the man stopped following her. A friend has since given her a rape alarm.

Maria’s experience may be particularly disturbing, but it’s also instructive. The choice between walking a long or risky route in the dark, getting a taxi, being late or not going out at all will ring true for thousands of Greater Manchester bus passengers.

Our region’s bus network has been patchy, expensive and nonsensical for decades.

Yet bus users themselves have also been relatively voiceless: despite comprising 80pc of the people using our transport network, those affected by rail strikes or Metrolink points failures tend to shout far louder.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

In the next 12 months, however, buses are set to be one of mayor Andy Burnham’s biggest political headaches. Two years after an election campaign in which he called for - and arguably promised - a sleek London-style system, the pressure to fix things is bubbling.

Ask for the experiences of Greater Manchester’s passengers and you quickly find out why: long waits, long journeys, rocketing fares, cut routes, lost night buses.

Office administrator Joe Guy, 28, is one of those to have lost a service.

Stagecoach’s 294 bus used to stop near his house in Salford, taking him directly to his work in Trafford Park.

But last year the firm suddenly axed it, arguing it couldn’t afford to run the route. Now Joe - who has a disability, meaning he struggles to walk - gets two buses there and two buses back, turning a 15-minute commute into an hour and 20 minutes each way, via Eccles, standing around in the wind and rain.

It’s ‘exhausting’, he says, because ‘the bulk of my day is completely taken up’.

On top of that, there’s the fare.

“I’ve been working where I work nearly four years and the price has gone up four times,” he says, pointing to the 27pc increase his weekly pass has seen in that time, from £15 to £19.

“You think: what’s that funding for, particularly given the service hasn’t got better?

“Stagecoach have made loads of profit and that bus was full every day. You can’t tell me they couldn’t afford to run it. It’s just nonsense.

“I’m all for business making money, but I think the current situation is ridiculous.”

Joe’s point is echoed by politicians across the region, many of whom have been itching to get their hands on the buses ever since Margaret Thatcher deregulated all networks outside of London in 1986.

From that day on, companies ran routes on a competitive basis, with little-to-no input from the politicians who had previously planned out routes and fares. The old GM bus system was split into two, with First largely running the north and Stagecoach running the south; routes decided according to how much money they could generate for the operators.

“Rather than creating active competition it created two - in my view - private sector monopolies,” Oldham MP Jim McMahon told colleagues a few weeks ago during a Parliamentary debate on the state of Greater Manchester’s buses.

An investigation by the monopolies regulator found very little in the way of real head-to-head competition had ever emerged from deregulation, he noted.

It had instead resulted in wildly different approaches to ticketing and fares in the two halves of the conurbation, with local politicians unable to intervene when operators cut services due to lack of profitability.

Yet at the same time ticket prices here have, in the last decade, risen 55pc above inflation - while Stagecoach collected £17.7m in profits last year.

“How can it be right?” he asked, noting that taxpayers are still subsidising some less profitable routes, albeit less than they used to. “People are paying from both sides.

“The experience of many bus users is that bus services are being run for the benefit of the operators, rather than bus users.”

The barrier Greater Manchester’s bus services create for people trying to access its proudest new employment hubs - the airport, MediaCity, Trafford Park - was underlined in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year, which found even in areas such as Harpurhey, just three miles from the city centre, many people would struggle to get them.

North Manchester councillor John Farrell echoed that experience when he told how he had to walk the three miles in from Crumpsall to the city centre when working security shifts at the airport, due to a lack of night buses.

“It’s not that easy to get to, even during the day, but if you’re starting at 3am and you’ve not got a car, then you’ve got a problem there,” he said during a debate on transport poverty.

“I would leave home at midnight. I would walk from Crumpsall into the city centre. And far be it from me to be knocking anywhere in north Manchester, but you don’t necessarily want to be taking a stroll on your own at that point in the day.

“I was probably quite lucky there.”

None of which will be news to many readers.

Yet it may come as news to many Westminster decision-makers, able to rely on a London bus network that operates in another realm to ours.

For while our bus system has haemorrhaged passengers and shrunk in size since 1986, usage in the capital has soared.

London’s was the only system never to be deregulated, helped further in the early 2000s by a wave of subsidy from the capital’s congestion charge and a general onslaught of cash under the last Labour government.

(Image: M.E.N.)

The resulting divide is stark: a daily bus pass here is £5.80 for our various disjointed routes; £4.50 in London for a service that happily runs smoothly everywhere, all night.

A single hopper is £1.50 in the capital; here, it depends where you are. It could be that cheap if you jump on a Magic Bus from Didsbury into town, along a lucrative route for bus firms; but a single from Gorton to the Trafford Centre will set you back £6.50.

All of which means Greater Manchester’s Labour hierarchy, many of whom - particularly in Manchester itself - only signed up to a devolution deal with George Osborne on the basis that they could tackle the bus problem, are now getting irritable at a perceived lack of progress.

Andy Burnham, in May 2017, had promised to make our bus services ‘more affordable, more reliable, and more accessible’. Seven months later, referring to London’s network, he told the BBC: "We are going to have the same here.”

But by that stage it was ‘two or three years away’, he admitted. “It’s very complicated.”

Eighteen months on, officials would still argue the process is far from straightforward.

Hidebound by various legalities, they have to tick a long list of boxes before deciding how to fix the system. And legally, the mayor has to stay neutral about how he will reform the network, lest he be accused of pre-judging the situation by bus firms.

Ultimately, though, he has two options: either enter into a partnership with the bus operators, a cheaper proposal but one that still wouldn’t give politicians any power over routes or fares; or the full-on franchising Labour wants both locally and nationally - a more expensive model that would provide that control.

Nobody is willing to give an estimate for the cost of franchising, but last year one Labour figure suggested it could be anything between £20m and £60m annually. That’s potentially a lot of extra council tax for a region that has few other ways of raising cash.

Such a move is also highly likely to spark expensive legal action from Stagecoach, a firm not unknown for taking aggressive legal standpoints.

But that hasn’t stopped the pressure growing on the mayor.

Many - if not most - of his Labour colleagues firmly believe the only way he can create that London-style network is by ripping off a 33-year-old plaster to go for full-on franchising, likely council tax rises and all. Yet some suspect a degree of lethargy in the mayor’s office.

One senior Labour council figure describes a ‘huge amount of frustration’ at the pace of change, adding: "There is a worry that a decision was taken very early on that franchising would not be worth the money."

Of the mayor's belief in franchising specifically: "I think Andy has said just about the right amount about it, but I don't buy it."

Another senior Labour source said: "You can tell there's a groundswell at the moment, because people have noticed the network is deteriorating and they are wondering what Andy's doing."

North Manchester Labour councilor Nasrin Ali, who shares a ward with council leader Sir Richard Leese, was among the first to express similar frustrations publicly.

“There seems to be very little progress on this,” she told colleagues in January during the council's debate on transport poverty.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

“And this is causing a lot of frustration.

"It isn’t a straightforward thing and existing bus operators are resistant, but we should be further ahead with this than we actually are.”

Meanwhile bus reform is increasingly high on the agenda for the region’s Labour parliamentarians this year, many of whom also feel things now need to get moving.

“It’s just not good enough that passengers and decision-makers in Greater Manchester seem to be held to ransom by bus operators that take hundreds of millions of pounds from routes, when at the same time routes have been lost and year on year subsidy is passed on,” Oldham’s Jim McMahon concluded in the Westminster debate on the subject, adding pointedly that it requires ‘energy and determination to form a different vision’.

“Fortune favours the brave,” he added.

Such comments were duly followed by a wave of Labour constituency party motions in favour of the union-backed Better Buses campaign, which is pushing - hard - for full-on re-regulation, with a string of MPs publicly backing the move.

In the meantime, it’s not only Labour members who are irritable.

In Salford, Joe Guy says he wrote to both Transport for Greater Manchester and the mayor about the 294 being cut, but received letters telling him to get the 291 instead.

“It goes nowhere near where I need to go,” he says, “and it goes from the city centre, when I live in Salford.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

“Buses are one of the major reasons I voted in the mayoral race.

“I voted for Andy Burnham because of what he promised on bus reform. And I understand there’s legislative issues, but surely he should have checked that out before?

"He should have known that would be a barrier.

“It’s always someone else’s fault and in the meantime, council tax and fares are going up while routes are being cut.”

As Labour figures and campaigners mobilise, the last year of the mayor’s first term is likely to become more and more about buses.

Some uncharitable insiders have long likened his role to that of a ‘glorified bus conductor’, a reference to the fact bus reform is one of the few truly direct powers the mayor actually has.

Yet if he gets it right, shaking up Greater Manchester’s ailing bus system could be Andy Burnham’s legacy.

In Lower Broughton, meanwhile, Maria admits she thought carefully before mentioning her experience walking into Manchester.

Before now, she hadn’t told anyone about the man who approached her, a deeply unnerving experience. But she says it matters in the wider context.

“This is the first time I’ve spoken about that,” she says.

“But if it makes people sit up and think about why the buses need to be sorted out, then it’s worth it.”

(Image: PA)

What Andy Burnham says

Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham said: “I understand people’s frustrations with the current state of the bus market. Buses are an essential way for local people to access education, work and socialise across Greater Manchester. I’m committed to investing in and improving our bus market as part of a London-style integrated transport network that Greater Manchester deserves.

“We are progressing faster than any other city-region to reform our bus system but we are still awaiting some of the powers that we need from the Government. The transport order, promised last spring, is still awaiting affirmative resolution in the House of Lords and without that order we cannot take the final steps towards reform.

“My plan to invest in our bus network this year through an Opportunity Pass for 16 to 18-year-olds, will begin to get young people back on buses and grow the bus market again. This won’t just benefit young people and their families - it will benefit everyone by helping build a better bus system.

“Greater Manchester is leading the way on bus reform nationally and we are the first mayoral combined authority seeking to make use of new powers in the Bus Services Act 2017.

“A substantial amount of detailed, technical work continues to be carried out by TFGM to finalise the assessment of a franchising scheme for Greater Manchester – which includes considering a variety of partnership options – and could lead to the biggest change to the bus market in more than 30 years.

“As Greater Manchester is the first in the country to test out the new legislation, the pace at which we can progress has largely been dictated by this new legislative process, as well as a range of other issues.

“TfGM will bring an update on the process and next steps back to the GMCA in early summer.”

On the withdrawal of Joe Guy's service, the 294: “The situation Mr Guy has found himself in is, unfortunately, far too common and a typical example of how our broken bus system fails so many people.

“I understand that the withdrawal of the 294 has made Mr Guy’s commute to work much more difficult. Both TfGM and I have written to Mr Guy and set out the best alternative services for him but I know that there is often no way to adequately deal with the withdrawal of a service in our current fragmented bus market.

“That is why I am determined to reform our bus market and improve services for people across our city-region. “

(Image: Joel Goodman)

What the bus operators say

Gary Nolan, chief executive of OneBus, the partnership that represents all bus firms in Greater Manchester, said: “Public sector investment in buses has been falling dramatically – down 7% in Greater Manchester between 2016-17 and 2017-18. Buses have also had to pay a significantly higher government fuel tax than other transport modes, such as rail or train operators who pay no such duty.

“These factors, in addition to congestion, which adds over £10m to the annual bill of running Greater Manchester’s bus services, have resulted in cuts to contracted, socially-needed services provided by the public sector in our region and elsewhere.

“It’s important, when looking at bus network shrinkage, to consider other factors like the inextricable link between local high streets and bus networks. Since the rise of ecommerce, bus trip rates for shopping purposes have fallen by almost a third since 2002, which has led to a reduction in passenger levels on certain routes. To suggest this reduction is solely a result of declining bus provision is wilfully ignorant of wider changes in our culture and community.

“We often see London referenced as a utopia for public transport – mostly from those who live outside the city than endure commutes inside it – and it’s important again to put things in perspective. For the £700m shortfall that the public purse pays for buses in London, there are many parts of the capital that are not connected by direct buses, for example Paddington to Knightsbridge, Blackfriars to Oxford Street and Kings Cross to Notting Hill.

“In fact, just this week TfL has admitted that the cost of running London’s franchised bus network is “unsustainable”. The capital’s bus service’s deficit was £638m last year and is headed towards a record bus network loss of £723m by 2021. After four consecutive years of passenger decline, a further haemorrhaging of 58m passenger journeys is forecast, and cuts to 33 central London bus routes are planned. Again, this is not a situation we want Greater Manchester to find itself in, under a franchising model that will only place more burden on taxpayers.

“If the public sector restored the investment it has already chosen to cut from buses, then it would help to maintain fares and the scope of the bus network across our region.”