MORE than 780,000 extra passengers helped make York one of the country's hottest places to catch a bus.

John Spellar, the minister for transport, has praised a 14 per cent increase in bus passenger numbers in York.

The city's figures bucked the national trend of falling bus use - down 1.6 per cent - and put York at the top of the local transport pile.

Across England and Wales, outside London, bus use fell by 1.6 per cent and only a handful of cities, including York, were an exception to the trend.

Mr Spellar said: "I am pleased that bus patronage is continuing to increase overall, following decades of decline. There are some areas seeing considerable success in increasing bus use. Working with local authorities and the industry we need to look at what's worked and roll those lessons out across the country."

York's figures beat other much bigger cities' gains including Leeds and Nottingham - where bus travel increased by 3 per cent overall - and even London where bus use increased by 5.5 per cent.

Coun Tracey Simpson Laing, the council's executive member for transport, said: "We have begun to reap the rewards of investment in a high quality, high frequency bus network, which has come at a time when York has needed relief from congestion.

"The council sees this as the starting point, with investment in better stops, two new Park&Ride stations, electronic time-tabling and a satellite system to give buses uses better journey times, should result in further gains."

Ironically, the surge in passenger numbers may have hurt First, which runs the majority of York services.

The company has been struggling to run services in face of driver shortages and, last week, the Evening Press reported how managing director Brian Asquith and operations manager Paul Bell resigned on the same day.

A First spokesman admitted that passenger benefits which should have been seen following an £11 million investment in its Metro fleet had "not been as visible as they should be".

Peter Edwards, First commercial manager, said: "There has been a surge in passenger growth. Unfortunately because of the difficulty that we have had in attracting and retaining staff, there have been problems with reliability. As a group, we are very pleased about the increase in patronage and we are taking steps to address reliability."

Updated: 11:52 Tuesday, October 29, 2002