When the Yorkshire Pennine town of Hebden Bridge is on to a good thing, it doesn't like to keep it to itself. Weaving high-quality moleskin is one example and the export of craggy local son Sir Bernard Ingham is another.
Its latest bright idea is an even more striking addition to the national landscape: the bright yellow American school bus, whose trial run in Hebden is starting to go nationwide.
This week, one of the iconic imported vehicles was attracting sightseers in front of Leeds town hall, and next to it were two omens of change: a lemony-yellow West Yorkshire Metro single-decker, the first "British imitation" of the US bus; and, inspecting it, a bevy of local council delegates from Leicestershire, Devon, Ipswich and dozens of other points of the UK compass.
They were up north for the first National Yellow Bus conference, and were met with the opening words: "You're welcome to take over a very good idea." The speaker was Peter Fryer of the government office in Yorkshire and Humber (part of the nascent regional movement which is getting a lot of practical things moving outside London). With long experience in road-building, he is now a busy proselytiser for public transport - from an arm of government rather than an environmental pressure group.
Fryer's bible is Whitehall's 10-year transport plan; and as he addressed the conference, news was spreading of Lon don mayor Ken Livingstone's attack on the hordes of private cars used on the daily school run. "One of the significant problems we have to combat is the influence of cars," Fryer said, "especially car-makers using emotive TV advertising to sell - through children - the concept of being seen in the 'right car' on the school run. Only this week, I was given a copy of a brochure for a new car which goes on sale shortly. The second page of this very glossy publication concentrates on the school run and how ideal the vehicle is."
Delegates murmured approval at the notion of such stuff carrying a compulsory, cigarette-style health warning about the dangers which the school run now involves, ranging from pollution to parking chaos. But they had not been called to a gathering of grumblers; the point was to admire a glossy initiative of a different kind.
The point about Yellow Bus, shown in equally smart brochures scattered round the hall, is that it has street cred, at least in Hebden Bridge. Children like the bright colour and distinctive branding. They like having the same, familiar driver who runs a register and the absence of an upper deck where bullying can go unobserved. They haven't, needless to say, been converted en masse from Shakespeare's boy who goes like a snail, unwillingly to school; but the Yellow Bus is proving as cool as the latest hatchback or estate car.
And the movement is spreading. The finely-named Magna Carta school at Runnymede in Surrey, with its neighbour Fulbrook high, has used a Yellow Bus service for the past year, dispensing with some 120,000 car journeys to school. Interestingly, the experimental funding from the Countryside Agency, which the scheme shares with Hebden Bridge, is boosted by direct contributions from parents, who also like the distinctive service.
In addition, Runnymede has been able to add a network of related cycle routes, including new shelters for 500 bikes at the new schools. The island where King John signed Magna Carta accommodates pedal-power much more easily than the almost vertical slopes of Hebden Bridge, which are so steep that its back-to-back terraced houses are built on top of one another rather than side by side.
A third Yellow Bus experiment is proving popular in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where the lemon-yellow Metro scheme operates. Here, too, the buses have appealed, this time to a generally prospering community where two-car ownership is common and many mums have time to ferry their children around.
A survey of the scheme, now five months old, shows that 124 children from four schools are registered to use the service - 75% of the two vehicles' joint capacity. Almost 65% of the pupils previously travelled to school by car. Reasons for the change include its convenience over walking or biking and - from parents - the way it encourages kids to develop independence.
Other Yellow Bus pilot schemes organised by First Bus are working successfully in Aberdeen, Wrexham, Wokingham and Windsor. But no one pretends the system is a "magic bus" solution. North Yorkshire county council is having to work hard to get tenders to renew its seven-month experiment in Harrogate, where passenger use has increased but not by enough to reach targets for keeping the scheme in the education department's £12m annual transport budget.
As the delegates left to get their own buses and trains (and some cars), there was a general recognition that determination and patience will be part of the long battle against glossy car ads, as well as flair. But the Pennines provide a model for that, too.
Just across Emily Brontë's moors from Hebden Bridge, the village of Cowling is a monument to people's bus power. Fed up with expensive farm-cart rides to Keighley market, villagers raised a huge sum of money and then 18 of them, led by one Ezra Laycock, went to London in 1905 and drove triumphantly back north in a Milnes-Daimler single-decker. The journey was the longest yet made by a bus in England, and the vehicle was also the first bus seen in Yorkshire - but it was green.
