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My local bus route passes through a mixture of very affluent villages and in complete contrast some quite deprived ex mining areas. There has been quite an increase in the number of passengers from the ex mining villages using the bus. They can afford to travel more regularly into Nottingham at £2 each way but they won’t travel so often if it goes back to the £9.50 day ticket. In this case I think the £2 fare has actually encouraged people to use a bus service which had previously been threatened with withdrawal.
Despite coming in before the national scheme, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority have said they’ve now aligned their scheme to the national scheme, and it will end/change at the same time
It basically sounds like if the national fare hadn’t come in, the local fare would have increased by now, but as it was extended they’ve ended up having to use their own local funding to keep paying for the local fare to stay the same as the national fare
It'd make more sense if the West Yorkshire Combined Authority dropped the local scheme and adopted the national scheme instead, on the ground nothing will have changed but the managerial side will have.
The problem is the £2 fare costs the same whether you use tap on tap off or pay the driver. The £2 fare should only available where you don't buy the ticket from the driver.
Come to think of it, cash fares on buses already have an inherent disadvantage over contactless fares as daily capping can't really be implemented for cash fares. I don't think any other methods to discourage the use of cash is really warranted, otherwise it's going to put certain types of people at a major disadvantage.
Personally, I genuinely hate using my card on buses: firstly, because the way the cash is taken from my account is genuinely confusing; secondly, I can see where my money's going more easily with cash; and thirdly, because I genuinely also dislike having to be thinking about tapping off on longer journeys when I should be relaxing!
The problem is the £2 fare costs the same whether you use tap on tap off or pay the driver. The £2 fare should only available where you don't buy the ticket from the driver.
I was chatting to my pensioner father about the impending loss of the winter fuel payment, and he said that while he'd expected that to go, he'd be really angry if the bus pass went.
The Government should steer well clear of messing with it.
Really? I use my bank card, usually fairly quick , but around here we have the people who use their 'phone and sometimes there's a lot of scrolling up and down, trying it, failing, looking puzzled, back to step 1...
Putting £2 on the cash tray seems the quickest way to me.
I also would be relaxed waiting at the bus stop with £2 in my hand, but I don't hold my bank card like that at a bus stop, I wait until I'm on the bus before I get the card out. So that's a further slight delay card vs cash.
Really? I use my bank card, usually fairly quick , but around here we have the people who use their 'phone and sometimes there's a lot of scrolling up and down, trying it, failing, looking puzzled, back to step 1...
Putting £2 on the cash tray seems the quickest way to me.
I also would be relaxed waiting at the bus stop with £2 in my hand, but I don't hold my bank card like that at a bus stop, I wait until I'm on the bus before I get the card out. So that's a further slight delay card vs cash.
Transferring a physical token (eg a£2 coin) from my trouser pocket to the tray is by far the easiest way.
One problem with phone payment is that most punters probably don't realise that they can change the screen timeout from the factory default. With Samsung this is only 30 seconds which leaves people fiddling with their phones even if everything had been set up less than 2 minutes earlier.
I have ENCTS for the bus but the timeout does catch me out with event tickets. Of course I always forget to reset it when I get home.
Really? I use my bank card, usually fairly quick , but around here we have the people who use their 'phone and sometimes there's a lot of scrolling up and down, trying it, failing, looking puzzled, back to step 1...
Putting £2 on the cash tray seems the quickest way to me.
The absolute quickest way (aside from conductor operation or only doing random checks and thus having lots of fare dodging, as per Uncle Ken's "free buses") is that everyone taps a debit card or a preloaded Oyster style card as they walk past the driver without even breaking stride - even with correct change selling a paper ticket takes longer as you have to make a short pause to take it from the machine. Or a phone if they want. Yes, there's always the odd person who thinks getting a method of payment out is something you do when you get to the place you're paying rather than ready for it, but in reality moving to Oyster has brought slightly faster operation than Routemasters offered with no need to pay any conductors. (Slightly faster because you have the rear exit, whereas on a RM you had to wait for people to alight before you could board as per a UK regional single door bus).
My mind utterly boggles as to why bus companies haven't realised this and moved to a London style system of that being the only allowed option. The savings in making dwells at busy stops reduce from minutes to seconds must be huge - I certainly know of routes (e.g. the Manchester Oxford Road ones) where you could probably take several vehicles out of the peak requirement if you implemented this. And of course a faster bus service is a massively more attractive one in terms of getting people to switch from the car - many UK urban bus routes are slower than cycling, and fare collection is a key reason why.
Cash payment would of course still be available as it is in London - at corner shops and the likes where you pay the cash and have it loaded onto your Oyster-a-like.
My own highly unscientific observation is that the second fastest transaction is someone who plonks down £2 and knows they have to take a ticket. The fastest is showing a combined rail/bus pass printed on CCST - particularly the second or third time to the same driver that week!
If it didn't also involve the passenger digging through their purse to find the coin (or coins) and the bus driver pressing the right right buttons on the ticket machine.
Tap on systems (either with comtactless cards, phone that use apple / Google / Samsung pay or an oyster style card) are much much quicker and easier.
The problem that I've seen first hand with the "TfL way" is that there's far too few Oyster Ticket Stops at the fringes, leading to people begging the driver to travel, particularly at night. An appalling state of affairs in my opinion.
Ultimately it won't work for interurban and rural operators as customers can't top up by inserting an ITSO card and a banknote into a field of cabbages in the middle of nowhere. "But you can buy on your phone with the app," - if there's any phone reception and and and...
The biggest source of severe delays for bus users is temporary roadworks, not punters purchasing tickets from the driver. Purchasing time is built into the timetables.
Nothing wastes more time than passengers faffing around with phones where payment is constantly being declined, it is by far my biggest bugbear on bus travel and has been since such a method of payment was introduced.
The absolute quickest way (aside from conductor operation or only doing random checks and thus having lots of fare dodging, as per Uncle Ken's "free buses") is that everyone taps a debit card or a preloaded Oyster style card as they walk past the driver without even breaking stride - even with correct change selling a paper ticket takes longer as you have to make a short pause to take it from the machine. Or a phone if they want. Yes, there's always the odd person who thinks getting a method of payment out is something you do when you get to the place you're paying rather than ready for it, but in reality moving to Oyster has brought slightly faster operation than Routemasters offered with no need to pay any conductors. (Slightly faster because you have the rear exit, whereas on a RM you had to wait for people to alight before you could board as per a UK regional single door bus).
My mind utterly boggles as to why bus companies haven't realised this and moved to a London style system of that being the only allowed option. The savings in making dwells at busy stops reduce from minutes to seconds must be huge - I certainly know of routes (e.g. the Manchester Oxford Road ones) where you could probably take several vehicles out of the peak requirement if you implemented this. And of course a faster bus service is a massively more attractive one in terms of getting people to switch from the car - many UK urban bus routes are slower than cycling, and fare collection is a key reason why.
Cash payment would of course still be available as it is in London - at corner shops and the likes where you pay the cash and have it loaded onto your Oyster-a-like.
London buses have a flat fare, which until the £2 scheme came in, wasn't the case elsewhere. Plus bus companies outside London have other tickets you can buy like returns, day tickets etc
Tapping on and off speeds things up, but having to tap off does slow things down again, especially at a busy stop.
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Nothing wastes more time than passengers faffing around with phones where payment is constantly being declined, it is by far my biggest bugbear on bus travel and has been since such a method of payment was introduced.
Nothing wastes more time than passengers faffing around with phones where payment is constantly being declined, it is by far my biggest bugbear on bus travel and has been since such a method of payment was introduced.
The problem that I've seen first hand with the "TfL way" is that there's far too few Oyster Ticket Stops at the fringes, leading to people begging the driver to travel, particularly at night. An appalling state of affairs in my opinion.
The fix for this isn't slowing your buses down and risking driver safety by accepting cash, rather it's getting more retailers on board. If you got all of Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys and Asda doing it, there are those (usually 24 hour) across pretty much all of our towns and cities. Add in chains of fuel stations, and maybe even something like McDonalds, and you've covered more or less everywhere pretty comprehensively. If there's a shortage, perhaps TfL haven't sweetened the deal enough for retailers to want it?
Of course if you don't want that risk, use your debit card. Most people have one. You can't even be paid benefits in cash any more.
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The biggest source of severe delays for bus users is temporary roadworks, not punters purchasing tickets from the driver. Purchasing time is built into the timetables.
It's absolutely both (plus parked cars on narrow roads, and traffic in general). It may not make much difference when you have a handful of people joining at a stop. But when you have 10 or more which can be common in urban areas then it really does make a difference.
buying tickets on the bus definitely slows things down hugely
Going back a decade now since I got buses in Leeds so they may have a more sensible approach but the time it took to get passengers on was sometimes ridiculous - especially on a Monday when everyone was buying their weekly ticket, which then had to printed off and put in a plastic wallet. Repeat that at every stop and it’s a lot of time.
Tapping off and exiting the front door of a bus is still much slower than walking straight off the centre door of a London bus. You might be ready to tap off, but if the person in front of you has problems and is slow, you can't exit. And because of this, people can't then get on.
So often when people scan their phones it doesn't work straight away, whereas with cards it hardly ever doesn't work.
The problem that I've seen first hand with the "TfL way" is that there's far too few Oyster Ticket Stops at the fringes, leading to people begging the driver to travel, particularly at night. An appalling state of affairs in my opinion.
A lot (probably most) of these people are just trying it on, trying to blag a free ride. A lot of genuine cases could get a fellow passenger to pay for you using their card. It is your responsibility to carry an Oyster card with you, just like you wouldn't go out without your wallet or house keys. Auto top up is an option and TfL even allow you to go into a negative balance on your Oyster card if you are not organised enough to keep your Oyster card sufficiently charged.
You could possibly argue for tickets to be sold on the bus at a premium (say £3 instead of £1.75), but then drivers will risk being robbed. There would also be the additional cost and security of cash handing in the depot.
The Netherlands scrapped cash payment nationwide a while back, including rural areas. Cash payment hasn't been necessary for many years, because they introduced their national smartcard around 2007. Buying tickets on the bus has always been expensive, so not many people did it anyway. It was pressure from drivers that finally led to the scrapping of cash. Drivers didn't want to be robbed any more.
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Tapping off and exiting the front door of a bus is still much slower than walking straight off the centre door of a London bus. You might be ready to tap off, but if the person in front of you has problems and is slow, you can't exit. And because of this, people can't then get on.
So often when people scan their phones it doesn't work straight away, whereas with cards it hardly ever doesn't work.
They need to allow tapping off after the previous stop like in the Netherlands. They've had tap in tap off on buses there (for smartcards) since around 2007, and this isn't a major issue. A lot of the time people are boarding at the same time anyway.
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buying tickets on the bus definitely slows things down hugely
Going back a decade now since I got buses in Leeds so they may have a more sensible approach but the time it took to get passengers on was sometimes ridiculous - especially on a Monday when everyone was buying their weekly ticket, which then had to printed off and put in a plastic wallet. Repeat that at every stop and it’s a lot of time.
That's interesting. Do they have Ticketer machines there? I thought it was a feature of those machines (to prevent fare dodging) that you have to be approaching a stop before you are allowed to tap out.
Anyone know when Arriva are getting their next batch of EV buses for Leicester? I was told earlier this year it would be "October" - well here we are......
Anyone know when Arriva are getting their next batch of EV buses for Leicester? I was told earlier this year it would be "October" - well here we are......
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