Well, where I live 2.5 miles out of a City Centre the "normal" fare was £2.70 single. Now £3.10 and maybe another increase in 2025.
Where I live, when the £2 fare came in, the normal fare was £2.70 . Now £3.10, and no doubt there will be an increase in 2025, unless there is a cap.
From where I live, when the £2 fare came in, the normal fare into Mansfield, 7 miles away, was £4.50. I believe the normal single fare is now £5.50.
In my earlier days of 1950's railway travel, I always assumed that I could see telegraph poles. Thank you for correcting my incorrect name for them. I shall now remember them by their correct name of torygraph poles.
I have seen this happen. I wonder if anyone knows why, say a debit card, with ample funds, would decline. Surely it doesn't need a PIN number, you can't enter?
Was the odometer that you mention above named after the warrior cleric, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who fought at the Battle of Hastings?
Well I think there are probably some people who don't have ample funds but try to blag their way onto the bus, but mostly I think its just because the implementation is awful.
They can already track your number plate down. Just use that software for it.
Without a doubt. Simple economics means something has to replace fuel duty once a significant percentage of the cars on the road are electric. An average driver will use 1000l of fuel per year (10k miles at 45mpg), which contributes £529.50 in fuel duty alone to the government, plus the VAT on top. They can't easily add anything on to electricity as it's used so much more widely throughout the home, and anyone with solar might not even pay for charging at all.
I've seen a couple of lads. Card declined on the bus. They went to a ATM, got cash out, and the bus was gone. In one case, the next bus was cancelled. So it worked in a cash machine, not on the bus.
Banks and merchants don't like lots of small transactions (often known as microtransactions) as it can be the sign of something iffy. Given some people may use their card or phone during the week for just bus travel, with larger transactions at weekends, there's too many simultaneous microtransactions. It needs the user to either make a larger transaction, or put their card in a cash machine and input the PIN.
Tap on for buses and the like should be using transit mode which shouldn't trigger the systems you mention specifically because of what you say.
I wonder how much revenue the railways are losing to these longer-distance bus routes (not Oxford - Cambridge obviously, but Leeds - Scarborough or Newcastle - Carlisle for example).
I've not noticed any less passengers on any trains I have been on ..For some, price will be less of a decider , as time may be more of a consideration.
Not specifically tap and cap, but Stagecoach regularly rejects cards or phones pretending to be cards. Or takes an inordinant amount of time to recognise them.
It's an hourly bus vs 2 tph, the bus is 30+ minutes longer and advance tickets for £2-£3 aren't frequently hard to find (although admittedly I'm not normally looking for fares into Newcastle on weekday mornings when they might be rarer), so I'd be surprised if many people taking the bus now would switch to the train because of the £2 cap on that route.
Cash won't let you down...
Certainly won't.
Yes, I found it quite confusing when I looked at my credit card statement after using it on a bus outside London for the first time, and saw that I had only been charged 20p, as the full amount didn't go through until some time later.
Why do you think when London is barely winning its guerilla war with anti ulez activists , that a nationwide road pricing scheme isnt going to be very expensive from the sheer amount of vandalism a bunch of sitting duck cameras in the middle of nowhere will invite?
That depends how it is done. It could be a very simple flat rate per mile, in which case all the government needs to know is how many miles you've driven (which they can get from the MOT records), not where/when you've driven. That would be the cheapest solution as it wouldn't require very much infrastructure, whereas cameras on every street would be prohibitively expensive, and trackers in every car would be hard to implement retrospectively for cars already on the road. Unless they do what the water companies did when they wanted people to switch to meters, and charge a punitively high VED rate for any cars not fitted with trackers.
I've no doubt that the Daily Mail and its ilk will kick up the most almighty fuss, and so must people will be vehemently against it and will give the most ridiculous reasons and pretexts to justify their views. It's very likely that getting on for half of motorists will see their costs fall under road pricing, because for people who drive low mileages (or drive on quiet roads at quiet times, if variable pricing is introduced) the new road pricing costs will be offset by reductions in VED or fuel duty.