THE world may seem wedded to the car, but Dorset’s main bus operator is doing astonishingly good business.

Since the Go Ahead group bought Wilts & Dorset a decade ago, passenger numbers have risen by 24 per cent and the company has become more profitable.

Passengers can use free wi-fi on their bus journeys, buy their tickets with smartphones and give forthright feedback via Facebook.

In line with this new image, the name Wilts and Dorset is gradually disappearing in favour of the branding for Morebus – the name first introduced on its busiest services.

Andrew Wickham, managing director of Go Ahead’s Go South Coast group, said: “We are a lot more commercially focussed than we were.

“We get a lot less public sector money than we did but we carry a lot more passengers.

“The largest manifestations are the M1 and M2. The number using those has doubled.

“It’s a phenomenal level of passenger growth.”

It was in 2005 that the company invested £4m in new single-deckers for the M1 and M2 routes linking Poole, Bournemouth, Castlepoint and Christchurch.

Those vehicles were in turn replaced with 36 new buses in 2011.

The services now run every three minutes at peak times, meaning that looking up the bus times is a thing of the past if you commute on those routes.

The company also introduced night buses, with services from Bournemouth running until 1.45am in the week and all night on Fridays and Saturdays.

That’s all good news if you live on the busy “corridors” – but some people have seen their services decrease or disappear.

Mr Wickham points out that public subsidy for bus travel has reduced dramatically since buses were privatised in the 1980s.

Loss-making routes can only be run if councils will pay for them – and councils face plenty of pressures on their budgets.

“We need to be profitable. Buses are really good at carrying lots of people from one place to another.

“What buses aren’t designed to do is carry lots of individual people from various places to very diverse destinations,” he said.

“We can do it but it’s quite an expensive way of meeting that demand.

“From a social point of view, I think the best thing we can do is provide the best level of service to the maximum number of people.”

The alternative, he says, would have been to let the whole service decline.

“Were we to spread the cuts differently, all we would have is a much poorer level of service on the main corridors.”

Go Ahead has sought to emphasise customer service, with complaints down and compliments up.

“We’re not there yet – it’s an area we can keep improving on.

“It isn’t just about smiling at people; it’s about waiting for older people, and people who look vulnerable, to sit down before the bus pulls away,” said Mr Wickham.

The business’s reputation was not helped by the traumas of September 2011, when school services run by the subsidiary Damory got off to a chaotic start.

There were complaints of children being left stranded or taking lifts with strangers.

Mr Wickham acknowledges the experience was “very difficult”.

“The problems disappeared after about three weeks,” he said.

“We don’t get many complaints now. It runs well. It’s sorted out – it was hard work.

Mr Wickham, 47, is a self-professed bus enthusiast, who worked his way up through a variety of roles in the industry.

He says buses have been transformed since he was young.

“All I remember as a teenager was every year, the network would be cut a bit more. The buses wouldn’t have proper destinations on them so you couldn’t tell where the bus was going.

“It was all pretty shoddy, the level of service decreased and the staff were pretty surly,” he said.

“If you fast forward to where we are now, we’ve cut back in some areas but the number of people we’re carrying has increased significantly since 2003.

“We must be doing something right.”