Couldn't EK and Barrhead go DOO as part of the Strathclyde Manning Agreement anyway?
Yeah there will a lot of t&c's thrown into the pot and I don't think there's a hell of a lot of cash to make it tempting though when these talks were first mentioned there were a lot of guys going round with £ signs in their eyes probably thinking about the Welsh deal.
And that's exactly why I am so worried seeing other drivers going about with pound signs in their eyes,they won't look at the deal or even worse don't care and just think of the money.The headline £ figures in the TfW deal looked good, but once you actually read the 20 odd page deal, it was absolutely not a good deal. Certainly not one that any driver at ScotRail should be aiming for.
I'd much rather they knocked time off the working week or offered another week's holiday.
I think that LoogaBarooga was thinking more along the lines of work life tax bill kind if thing.Money ie pay rise isn't the be all and end for some of us however not everyone thinks the same.Such measures would still increase the cost of providing an already massively-subsidised operation.
I'd much rather they knocked time off the working week or offered another week's holiday.
I'd rather improve my work/life than handing back 42% of any pay increase.
Any big changes in conditions will be dealt with in the talks for sunday as part of working week which we appear to be treating like a DRI 3.Having done this job for a wee while now I look at some of my colleagues who seem to think there premier league footballers nice house nice cars holidays etc but constantly chasing Sundays and rest day working,not for me,I do my fair share of overtime but it's a nice to have not I need.That would further worsen driver availability for work, so I'd think it pretty unlikely to be offered.
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I've heard similar lines from colleagues in the past about pay rises which fall into the scope of higher rate income tax.
But there are ways to mitigate this (e.g. increase your pension contributions - you would receive 40% income tax relief instead of 20% on any earnings over the higher rate limit. Effectively free money from government to spend in retirement).
And I'd say that keeping 58% of extra pay is better than receiving 100% of nothing.
I was dragged in to Dundee to go shopping with Mrs D recently, and the amount of Inter City Buses be it Flix, Ember or Megabus is surprisingly high.If a deal isn’t done to make Sundays part of the working week, then ScotRail risks withering away on the vine.
Stagecoach operate 8 express coach/bus journeys an hour from various parts of Fife to Edinburgh across the car free "old" Forth Road Bridge plus a further 3 per hour to Edinburgh Airport. These services get the bulk of senior citizen traffic as the bus/coach concessionary fare is £0 per single journey within Scotland whereas the rail concessionary fare for Fifers is £1 per single journey as far as Inverkeithing and then the normal Adult range of fares from Inverkeithing to Edinburgh which for a single is (I think) £7. The services do a good trade in particular from the Park & Ride sites at Halbeath and Ferrytoll.I was dragged in to Dundee to go shopping with Mrs D recently, and the amount of Inter City Buses be it Flix, Ember or Megabus is surprisingly high.
With the Under-2Xs having free passes, why would any of them who will become used to going on the buses switch to becoming train users?
No point if the employer doesn't recognise any union.Then they should join a union.
The cuts to services must be music to the ears of the bus companies not only for now, but the long term.Stagecoach operate 8 express coach/bus journeys an hour from various parts of Fife to Edinburgh across the car free "old" Forth Road Bridge plus a further 3 per hour to Edinburgh Airport. These services get the bulk of senior citizen traffic as the bus/coach concessionary fare is £0 per single journey within Scotland whereas the rail concessionary fare for Fifers is £1 per single journey as far as Inverkeithing and then the normal Adult range of fares from Inverkeithing to Edinburgh which for a single is (I think) £7. The services do a good trade in particular from the Park & Ride sites at Halbeath and Ferrytoll.
Absolutely until the unions and the National govts are on the same page about what it will take to run a viable service ie both sides need to play their part id say there is an increasing risk of lines being mothballed in a rerun of what happened in the 1960's and less known when BR ran savage service cutbacks in the 70's to try and balance the books.The cuts to services must be music to the ears of the bus companies not only for now, but the long term.
If new operators can pop-up like Flix and Ember with electric buses, and then make significant market share penetration during these cuts and sustain it beyond, the future funding of electrification and further network improvements will be in question from Transport Scotland.
There's no need for such hysteria. Transport Scotland will table the unions a sweet deal on Thursday and things will go back to normal in two shakes of a lambs tail.Absolutely until the unions and the National govts are on the same page about what it will take to run a viable service ie both sides need to play their part id say there is an increasing risk of lines being mothballed in a rerun of what happened in the 1960's and less known when BR ran savage service cutbacks in the 70's to try and balance the books.
I do admire your optimism.There's no need for such hysteria. Transport Scotland will table the unions a sweet deal on Thursday and things will go back to normal in two shakes of a lambs tail.
Now I'm not Russell Grant but I will say that a 2 year deal with a 4% increase, backdated to April, £600 for drivers working their rest days and an extra lieu day this year and next should be sweet enough.
Other grades will get generous incentives for working rest days too.
A company with more than 21 employess has to recognise a unionNo point if the employer doesn't recognise any union.
There are certainly no plans to end the emergency timetable anytime soon. The bus and coach companies can't believe their luck.There's no need for such hysteria. Transport Scotland will table the unions a sweet deal on Thursday and things will go back to normal in two shakes of a lambs tail.
Now I'm not Russell Grant but I will say that a 2 year deal with a 4% increase, backdated to April, £600 for drivers working their rest days and an extra lieu day this year and next should be sweet enough.
Other grades will get generous incentives for working rest days too.
Hmm, you’ve obviously not been on a train on the HML and A2I recently then. Full and standing with passengers left behind at each station on some services. Many other routes suffering similar from what I’m hearing. Certainly far from coping “very well”!There are certainly no plans to end the emergency timetable anytime soon. The bus and coach companies can't believe their luck.
A certain well known national car hire company is also enjoying the "rail strike bonus"
If I were a cynic I'd say the government are seeing how things cope with a reduced timetable in peak season. And the answer is "very well" at the moment.
Depends on your point of view. You aren't looking at it from a government perspective. If bus, coach and car hire companies ate expanding, that's good news, they don't need subsidy.Hmm, you’ve obviously not been on a train on the HML and A2I recently then. Full and standing with passengers left behind at each station on some services. Many other routes suffering similar from what I’m hearing. Certainly far from coping “very well”!
Not a very pleasant travelling experience at all.
They're expanding because they are so heavily subsidised. Have you been on a bus recently? How people do you see actually paying for a ticket?Depends on your point of view. You aren't looking at it from a government perspective. If bus, coach and car hire companies ate expanding, that's good news, they don't need subsidy.
They're expanding because they are so heavily subsidised. Have you been on a bus recently? How people do you see actually paying for a ticket?
The users with passes are subsidised rather than the operators. The reimbursement which the operators receive is significantly less than the full fare as the argument is that they should not be compensated for additional generated trips encouraged by the existence of the free scheme. Most operators feel they are underpaid but take it on the chin on the basis of half a loaf being better than no bread.They're expanding because they are so heavily subsidised. Have you been on a bus recently? How people do you see actually paying for a ticket?
There could be some tweaks done to make certain trains longer than they are, which is a consequence of a timetable thrown together at relative short notice, however by-in-large the temporary timetable is coping absolutely fine with passenger numbers. The other issue causing overcrowding is ongoing traincrew shortages which disproportionately affect weekends.Hmm, you’ve obviously not been on a train on the HML and A2I recently then. Full and standing with passengers left behind at each station on some services. Many other routes suffering similar from what I’m hearing. Certainly far from coping “very well”!
Not a very pleasant travelling experience at all.
The users with passes are subsidised rather than the operators. The reimbursement which the operators receive is significantly less than the full fare as the argument is that they should not be compensated for additional generated trips encouraged by the existence of the free scheme. Most operators feel they are underpaid but take it on the chin on the basis of half a loaf being better than no bread.
You think? At a time of cuts and belt tightening, it's a fair bit cheaper to subsidise a few Chinese made electric buses than expensive rail infrastructure projects.There's no need for such hysteria.
You think? At a time of cuts and belt tightening, it's a fair bit cheaper to subsidise a few Chinese made electric buses than expensive rail infrastructure projects.
I don't think I ever equated this to line closures, and don't even know why you brought this up.New rail infrastructure projects yes, but closing lines (even temporarily) is a rather bigger issue and likely to be politically untenable.
If you make the fares for full price a level that few pay, but covers what you get paid for concessions, you're quids in. Only need a few plus ones of full payers to travel to add a bit of cream!
22 May 2024 Fare Update
Since launch in 2020, our goal has been to provide the best possible experience for travelling between towns and cities. That included having affordable, fair and easy-to-understand fares.
In particular, we chose to avoid complex yield management systems which vary ticket prices based on how far in advance you book and how busy a service is. These algorithms can boost short-term revenue but reduce trust – it’s hard to expect people to leave their car at home when public transport penalises them for changing their travel plans or travelling on a busy day.
We’ve also stayed away from short-term, too-good-to-be-true promotions and ensured we maintain our ticket prices at a sustainable level – that means making small increases when our underlying costs increase so that we can keep running high-quality, reliable services.
In line with that approach, on Thursday 23 May 2024 we will be increasing our prices. For tickets booked online, the increase will be small – around 4% reflecting underlying inflation since our last update.
Changes to Onboard Fares
We’re also making more fundamental changes to the pricing on our tickets sold onboard, with much larger increases. Bear with us, because the reason for this is a little complicated.
In Scotland, a large proportion of the population – people over 60, under 22 or those with disabilities – are eligible for free bus travel. You get given a card for this which you tap as you get on board a bus. This tap allows the bus operator to claim back money for the journey from the government.
The tricky bit is for the government to decide how much to pay the operator.
One option would be that the government sets the price they are willing to pay based on the route but that doesn’t work too well. It requires the government to monitor the right price for every possible route in the country. If they get it wrong, they may cause an operator to withdraw services because it’s not viable.
To avoid this, the government instead chooses to pay back operators a percentage of their regular adult single fare. This percentage varies between passenger types but for 60+ travellers it’s 55%. The idea of paying less than a full adult fare is that it’s supposed to leave operators no better or worse off due to the scheme, taking account of the fact that the scheme encourages more people to travel by bus and not all adults would otherwise buy the adult single fare.
This system means that two operators who compete on a route may get entirely different reimbursements for an identical journey, depending on their regular adult single fare. There’s a logic behind this. If one operator charges adults more, they’re probably justifying it by offering a better service (otherwise adults wouldn’t travel with them), and hence it’s reasonable for the government to reimburse them based on that higher fare.
But what if most adults don’t actually pay the regular adult single fare? At that point, the operator can just increase their regular adult single fare to get paid more by the government for concession travellers, without putting off their fare-paying passengers.
It turns out this isn’t a hypothetical. This is how the market functions today.
For example:
The more an operator does one of the above, the more they get paid for concessionary travel without having to increase the price that most of their regular travellers pay – a win for the operator but a loss for the taxpayer.
- Many operators offer significant discounts to adults who buy return tickets or daily/weekly passes.
- Some operators, particularly those running long-distance routes, sell a huge proportion of their tickets online at drastically discounted rates compared to the regular adult single fare charged onboard.
We saw these loopholes from the day we launched Ember and flagged them up in the hope they’d get addressed. But we also took a conscious decision not to optimise our pricing to exploit them, instead offering simple pricing where a return is just two one-way tickets and on-board fares only incur a small fixed premium compared to online fares.
The result has been that Ember is currently paid significantly less for each concession traveller compared to direct competitors running on the same route. Consider a single trip from Dundee to Edinburgh. The other operator running a comparable service to Ember is Citylink.
However, with both Citylink and Ember very few people pay the standard onboard fare – instead the vast majority book online (for Ember, about 98% of fare-paying passengers book online).
- Ember: The standard onboard fare is £10.50. Ember receives £5.78 if a 60+ concession pass holder chooses to travel with them.
- Citylink: The standard onboard fare is £22.30. Citylink receives £12.27 if a 60+ concession pass holder chooses to travel with them.
Ember’s online fare is currently £8.30 (prior to tomorrow's small increase). With Citylink, there are lots of ways to book online at completely different prices. For example, it’s easy to book for £7.10 on almost every service tomorrow (as of 22 May).
The trick is that Citylink has set their onboard fare so they are earning far more money from concessions, without having to charge fare-paying adults any more.
We believe this system is fundamentally flawed. It represents poor value for money for the government and means we are not operating on a level playing field with the competition. No matter how much focus we put on optimising our costs to deliver better value for money, Citylink will not feel the competitive pressure because they are being paid so much more for taking each concession card holder. It’s a broken market.
To address this, we’ve also decided to update our pricing from 23 May so we’re no longer operating at such a disadvantage. As such, onboard fares will be increasing much more. The price changes will vary based on the exact journey but take Dundee to Edinburgh as an example:
We know that the onboard fare increase will not affect 99% of passengers and for the remaining 1%, we will support them with their booking through our live chat available from 7 am to 9 pm every day of the week. However, it will remain possible to purchase an onboard fare at every one of our stops including those that are pre-booked only (if you call us we can request the bus stops there).
- Current onboard fare is £10.50
- New onboard fare will be £19.90
We don’t love making this change. We’d be happy to revert it when the system is fixed and a level playing field is restored. And we have a practical suggestion for fixing the system – pay operators based on the average adult fare actually charged, not the theoretical onboard single fare. This resolves all of the issues identified, whilst not requiring the government to set fares on every route across the country.
In the meantime, we will continue to have simple fixed pricing for all of our journeys. It will cost the same to book 10 days ahead or just 10 minutes ahead. We will continue to offer fully flexible tickets, allowing unlimited changes for free. We will still allow passengers to cancel tickets for a full refund, even when they just miss a bus by a few minutes. We will also continue to provide refunds for any journey that is delayed by more than 30 minutes with our zero-click refund process.
At our core, we’re passengers first and strive to make sure that we’re building a service that we want to use ourselves. If you want to get in touch then we read every email that comes to ride@ember.to.
Good explanation from Ember. The elephant in the room is that the local authorities who are pretty much rooked for finance may eventually cry "foul" and seek government support for the imposition of some kind of cap on reimbursement or the provision of a less generous concession.Yes - Ember explained the broken economics of the subsidy scheme well.
Agreed it would be a political hot potato but I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t a group somewhere in Transport Scotland tasked with thinking the unthinkable.New rail infrastructure projects yes, but closing lines (even temporarily) is a rather bigger issue and likely to be politically untenable.