East Kent buses

I live in a town called Deal, on the Kent coast. It is served by 4 Stagecoach East Kent bus services, which go to Canterbury. Most meander slowly through the countryside, which is quite enjoyable, but incredibly slow.
None of these services connect with other bus services, whether provided by East Kent of another operator. I classify connections as services that are scheduled to arrive at a common point at about the same time and wait for each other.
This makes travelling very difficult, for example a trip to Ashford and back, 30 miles away, took 8 hours!
I've commented on this to Stagecoach and they replied that the routes I mentioned weren't their 'most popular routes'. I'm not surprised.
The most irritating thing about their timetables is that buses from Dover to Folkestone usually leave 1 minute before the bus from Deal is timetabled to arrive. It's a moot point, because the service between Deal and Dover is notoriously unpunctual. When I had to use it regularly I would leave an hour earlier than I needed to and even then sometimes I had to call and apologise for being late.
Another example is the trip to Westwood Cross shopping centre in Thanet. It's 13 miles away and takes less than 30 minutes by car, but 90 minutes by bus, if the Dover to Ramsgate bus reaches Sandwich on time.
Is it any wonder that most people use their car in preference to Public Transport?

SouthEastern Trains

South Eastern Railways are con artists. Their first action on being granted the franchise to run rail services in Kent was to increase all journey times by three minutes. That was their solution to the poor punctuality record of their predecessors Connex South East.
Rail services in Kent are probably the worst in the country, the network is congested and antique. It suffers from its location in the most populous area of the UK, which makes it extremely difficult and expensive to expand. The Victorians built the railways in Kent as cheaply as possible. Successive governments starved the railways of investment and we suffer the consequences.
The South Eastern timetable hasn't changed for the better in the 50 years since the lines were electrified. Electrification dramatically reduced journey times for everyday travel, from Deal to Charing Cross, from an average of over 3 hours, before 1959, to less than 2 hours by 1967. The improvement has been whittled away until it now takes 2 hours 9 minutes, or more, unless one pays extra and uses the HS1 service.