FORGET road works, chicanes, bollards, diversions and forests of traffic lights. If you think the Big Dig is bad, wait till the Big Shop arrives in a few months’ time.

Grosvenor’s £1bn Paradise Street redevelopment is looming on the horizon. For Europe’s biggest shops and leisure scheme to work, the number of people coming into the heart of Liverpool every day will have to double.

Throw in the thousands of people working in the new shops – all aiming to get to their work stations around 9am – and the spectre of traffic snarl-ups looms large.

It stands to reason that the daily influx will go up, otherwise the doubling in size of the city centre will not stack up economically.

I’m already scanning eBay for a cheap pedal cycle in readiness for the day when the city centre streets become a huge car park.

The trams will not be trundling along Lime Street or anywhere else, at least for a very long time.

To the rescue must come our buses. Thousands of workers, shoppers and visitors will have to be bussed into the heart of Liverpool. You can imagine Arriva and Stagecoach rubbing their hands with glee, and recruiting an army of clippies ready to dispense tickets.

So what does Arriva do? It reduces the services it provides. Arriva runs an express service to Runcorn, where thousands of Scousers live in exile surrounded by flocks of sheep in the Cheshire countryside.

To speed things up, Arriva in its wisdom (or should that be lack of wisdom) decided a faster service was needed, so they axed most of the bus stops along the route. They reduced the evening frequency and then wondered why people were not using their X1.

I’ll tell them why, it’s easy.

How can you board a bus that doesn’t stop? Now they have slashed the evening service.

They say they cut the stops out because that’s what the passengers wanted. Maybe I am missing a wheel nut here, but are those passengers better served by having no service at all?

Then, in what was a stroke of genius, Arriva introduced a service between the airport and Southport – the 48A on a 20-minute frequency.

It skipped the busy Park Road corridor, congested Renshaw Street and instead took the scenic route along Riverside Drive.

They threw in for free the wonderful views of the estuary and the Welsh mountains. It stops at Brunswick Station and the new Paradise bus station (outside the new John Lewis store).

The service was not very well marketed and, as I expected, it has been shifted to a 30-minute service. Maybe, like its fast-track cousin, the X1, it will gradually be shunted back into the transport shed, just like the trams.

It is time bus services were handed back to the control of public transport authorities, such as Merseytravel, so that elected politicians can carry the can.

Meanwhile, I need to dig out my old bike clips.