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I disagree strongly - thanks to the cap, I have used the X46/X47 to York more often then the train as its more affordable. Also, and again an EYMS service, its a good way to get the kids out to the countryside on summer special buses like the M1/M3 for example which are part of the scheme
The X46/X47 are also more frequent than the train.
Moorsbus (and DalesBus for that matter) had relatively cheap fares prior to the cap. It was always £1 for kids on buses in North Yorkshire (excluding City of York Council area) on weekends and school holidays as well as school days after 5pm prior to the cap. Moorsbus and DalesBus extended that for destinations outside of North Yorkshire on their network. DalesBus has a Wensleydale & Swaledale £10 rover for adults that included a child travelling with them, granted its now £10 for the entire network rover.
I also make use of Moorsbus and DalesBus a lot because of the cap, but to their credit they always did their best to make it affordable. The cap has really encourage people to make use of these services and hopefully reduce car usage in the Dales and Moors.
This is a recent decision of mine, for context; I'd argue strongly that once it reaches several years of being in effect, it's no longer 'temporary' and it is unrealistic to catapult fares right back to commercial rates set by private operators.
To be fair even if they did, a Cambridgeshire Plus 28 day Megarider is £140, which is £7 per day based on 20 days travel (i.e. 5 days a week), which is a single equivalent of £3.50. That is pretty good value for the long journeys that can be made with it. (The Cambridge city equivalent is £90, which is £4.50 a day on the same basis or £2.25 single).
Single fares have been expensive on buses for a long time, partly because they traditionally just were (because most people would buy returns or day tickets which are far better value even for one off trips) and partly because of how ENCTS reimbursement works in many places.
I don't understand this example? Fares for very short journeys always used to be way under the fare cap. These journeys now cost more because most operators now treat the fare cap as a fixed fare. So they're not being subsidised- if anything, they're paying for people travelling further.
Without the price cap they would have cost more anyway due to the rise of fuel costs, inflation, staff wages etc.
Now this is something that's come up on these forums before, and from a previous conversation on this very topic some poster pointed out that there's shadow fares. These are the fares that are used for reimbursement. The fares that would be charged if the price cap didn't exist. And in many cases you can see them on bustimes.org.
The picture varies between operator obviously, but I chose a quick look at High Peak's 199 from Buxton to Manchester Airport. About half way down the page you'll find a section called 'High Peak 199 Inbound - SHADOW Ad Sgl fares (adult single). A look at the fare table shows the cheapest single fare between two fare stages on that route is £2. But that's rare. Mostly it's £3 or £3.40.
Looking at another High Peak service, i picked the 61 Buxton to Glossop. Here the minimum shadow fare is £2.80. By the way, the most expensive is £5.50. The cheapest actual fare by the way is £2 for a section of the route served also by the Bee Network 358.
I've picked two High Peak routes purely because I know the company and I know their data is on bustimes so it's easy. But those two examples give an indication of what's going on behind the scenes. Bus operator costs have gone up so much over the last few years that their minimum fares are getting to the stage that they're close - or even exceeding - the fare cap. Maybe one or two operators are profiteering, but I doubt it's the majority.
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This is a recent decision of mine, for context; I'd argue strongly that once it reaches several years of being in effect, it's no longer 'temporary' and it is unrealistic to catapult fares right back to commercial rates set by private operators.
Very much this. I don't see quite how they can get back to commercial rates in many areas. How do you go from paying £2 with price cap to a fare that's £5 or £6 and not lose your passengers. It's now going to take a very brave government who will stand on the policy of getting rid of it. And it would have to be a government that didn't care one bit about public transport and was very much pro car. I could name a potential party who I think would go down that route, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
As long as it doesn't make journeys I use unviable then that's fine, but not if it does. I'd rather pay a lot more and keep the bus services I use than pay less to find them withdrawn after a while, £3 is already reasonable even for a short journey to be honest.
Even given that, it is without any doubt healthier to walk one mile in any UK urban area than travel it in motorised transport. That's why active travel is at the top of the hierarchy. If you consider noise an issue, consider noise cancelling headphones. If you find it stressful then you're not good at managing stress, frankly, or have a disability, and I'm all for special accommodations for those with disabilities.
20mph limits and ULEZs help anyway. The air in central London is without doubt cleaner than it is in MK with its 60/70mph roads and no pollution restrictions.
If you are able bodied and it is not raining heavily, only one mode of transport should be under consideration for a journey under one mile - foot. (Even getting a bike out of the shed is faff for a journey that short). Bus fare policy should in no way consider encouraging such journeys to be made by motorised transport; that too many of them are is a major contributor to obesity.
All true points - active travel is certainly the best option for short journeys and this should be encouraged a lot more. This is one of the (few) negative effects of a good transportation system in London - lots of people, primarily under 25s, often take the bus/tube only for 1-2 stops to save the time and effort of walking.
I don't think it's the job of the bus operator/council to disincentivise short-distance public transport journeys though - where these are common, it's an urban design failure, as the parallel walking route to a bus route must be pretty unpleasant for people to be regularly avoiding it. You don't see that many people taking the tram/bus/metro for only a stop or two in Amsterdam or Freiburg for example - and even the few that do are unlikely to be living that unhealthily. It's worth looking at transport usage holistically, including looking at which routes have lots of short-distance travellers to see where walking/cycling options could do with being improved.
I don't think it's the job of the bus operator/council to disincentivise short-distance public transport journeys though - where these are common, it's an urban design failure, as the parallel walking route to a bus route must be pretty unpleasant for people to be regularly avoiding it. You don't see that many people taking the tram/bus/metro for only a stop or two in Amsterdam or Freiburg for example - and even the few that do are unlikely to be living that unhealthily. It's worth looking at transport usage holistically, including looking at which routes have lots of short-distance travellers to see where walking/cycling options could do with being improved.
I don't think I'd deliberately disincentivise them, but a flat fare in an urban system at £3 (say) does do that by making them very poor value. £2 a bit less so, and free doesn't at all. And I think £3 is high enough that it could be a flat fare for any single-conurbation urban journey by any mode or combination thereof, too.
Stagecoach already do TOTO in Leicester with Vix. I'd surmise their general reluctance to roll it out further is more to do with waiting on the West Midlands Coral broker to open the doors (further) to multi-operator capping.
As I said above, you will get the odd few people who benefit from a rather long journey for a cheap price, but I doubt there's many (normal) people thinking "oooh, I can now travel on a bus for 3 hours for £2."
It was on foot on the way to the supermarket. But on the way back I had my groceries to carry, so the bus it was. My wife had the car, I thought I’d give it a go. I didn’t think it would almost be three quid to go a mile.
I learned my lesson, and simply waited until the car was home and then drove both ways after that.
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This is one of the (few) negative effects of a good transportation system in London - lots of people, primarily under 25s, often take the bus/tube only for 1-2 stops to save the time and effort of walking.
People taking very short journeys in London is a consequence of people having always paid for their travel. If you have a Travelcard or you will hit the cap then you may as well take the bus, it’s free.
The opportunity cost for a short journey is £2 if you pay as you go. But if high single fares have pushed you into buying a bus pass then the opportunity cost for that short journey is nil. So you may as well.
I don't think we can use the 1970s as the best example.
There is a cost to running a bus service. Either that cost is paid for through the farebox, through taxpayer subsidy, or through a combination of the two. In most cases now it is a combination of the two- adult working-age passengers paying normal fares together with pensioners and disabled people having their fares paid for by the taxpayer.
I don't see how you can say that lower fares are "unaffordable." The cost of running a bus service is being met- where it isn't met, the service doesn't run. The question is whether the cost comes out of a public purse or a private purse.
Lower fares reduce traffic congestion and lower fares attract people into town and city centres for shopping or for leisure. Higher fares do the opposite. We saw that with the low fares policies in the Democratic People's Republic of South Yorkshire in the early 1980s, with the GLC's Fares Fare policy in the mid 1980s, and again under Ken Livingstone as Mayor in the early 2000s. The low fares schemes in London and South Yorkshire in the 1980s were sunk for political reasons, the Thatcherite Conservatives considering something like low-priced public transport as a bit too communist for their liking. Anyone aged over 30 seen on a bus has failed at life, after all.
Given how moribund high street shopping now is, and given how badly the hospitality sector is struggling, my view is that lowering public transport fares is a way of tempting people out of their cars and back into city centres. Has to be better than what we have now, charging people a fortune for public transport and then wondering why everyone stays at home.
Again, depends how holistically you look at it.
Lower fares drag people out of their cars. All those people sat on a Coastliner bus paying £2 to go to Scarborough are people not sitting in a car in the A64 car park.
Lower fares give people more money to spend in their destination. All those people paying £2 instead of £12 have an extra tenner to spend when they get to Scarborough. It's a tenner they're giving to the fish and chip shop or the cafe owner or whoever. Multiply that effect for a family. Lower fares probably achieves more than the recent VAT cut for that.
Rural services are inevitably longer distance and rural poverty is a massive issue. These services are already heavily subsidised so, really, the net additional cost of the reduced fare isn't that much. Five people paying £2 or one person paying £10, it's all the same in the end.
But these rural services are also sometimes the ones that are popular with tourists and how do you distinguish? Take the X18 which winds its way up the Northumberland coast from Newcastle to Alnwick and then on to Berwick. Yes, in summer it is full of tourists, but it is also the only bus service and the only lifeline for villages like Craster or Bamburgh.
I'd say the £2 cap is more justifiable than ENCTS...
The situation is virtually the same then and now. Huge demands on the public purse, which exceed the incoming revenue. In the 1970s, we ended up at the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. Given the current level of government borrowing, a repeat performance is quite possibly on the cards (and oh look, the Chancellor was called Healey then and now!).
And unless reimbursement is on a more generous basis than that to date, there will ultimately be fewer services, as marginal routes are no longer able to cover their (ever increasing) costs.
They're allowed? That will be a relief to them as they were worried you might call them lazy.
Agree, the cap for the full route of say the X17 or the X5 is an outlier... but actually how many people travel the full length of that route - as someone who has I can attest very few do. Therefore I doubt there's many people 'making money' off the cap in that way. Most will be using it to jump between large towns on the route. But to avoid over complicating the scheme I think it just makes sense to say that any journey is £2, rather than saying all journeys are £2, unless your journey goes over 20 miles at which point it could be anything more.
As I said above, you will get the odd few people who benefit from a rather long journey for a cheap price, but I doubt there's many (normal) people thinking "oooh, I can now travel on a bus for 3 hours for £2."
They would be better off having a tiered fare structure of say £1.50/2 miles then £2 upto 5 £3 over 10 as they risk abstraction from rail in some areas when time isn't at a premia.
To be fair even if they did, a Cambridgeshire Plus 28 day Megarider is £140, which is £7 per day based on 20 days travel (i.e. 5 days a week), which is a single equivalent of £3.50. That is pretty good value for the long journeys that can be made with it. (The Cambridge city equivalent is £90, which is £4.50 a day on the same basis or £2.25 single).
Single fares have been expensive on buses for a long time, partly because they traditionally just were (because most people would buy returns or day tickets which are far better value even for one off trips) and partly because of how ENCTS reimbursement works in many places.
Yes - but those generally fell in price from their pre-cap commercial rates. No promises we'd be at anywhere near that price-point if the daily cap disappeared again.
How is it unfair to those who use rail? The bus is already cheaper, it's only going to be £1 cheaper than it currently is and I doubt the rail journey is also costing £3. In fact, rail has ALWAYS been more expensive than the bus so I don't think anyone is choosing the train over the bus based on price, it's based on convenience/time/comfort.
The only place I can see this argument working is the few places that have a local rail service but no equivalent local bus service, where passengers are already having to pay the higher rail fares (and without free travel for older or disabled people). But that is a pretty unusual situation, in the grand scheme of things.
It will help if it turns the service from unusable to usable, meaning some people are able to ditch their cars or at least use them less. Again, though, this is a pretty niche case and in most cases when people talk about increasing frequency they are looking at moving a service from "usable but not convenient" to "more convenient".
I can't understand why a £2 fare cap is so controversial. Where I am, with our government-owned bus company, a single from my house into Douglas three miles away is £1.40. If I buy a carnet of 12 tickets, loaded on to a smartcard (one for the cash-free fanatics), it comes down to £1.13.
With Bus Vannin being government-owned, and looking at the fares you've quoted, I assume that the fares are subsidised. It's a fair question as to how much we should subsidise public transport.
But your fares also relate to distance travelled. A short hop might be only £1.40, but longer journeys to places like Ramsey, Peel and Port Erin are more than £3 each way, and those are only journeys of about 15 miles. In England there are journeys of 3 or 4 times that distance, and even longer than that in Scotland and Wales. Keeping those fares down to £2 is quite expensive, but can also have knock-on consequences where it leads to overcrowding on some of those long routes where it isn't economically viable to increase capacity to meet the bulges in demand.
I disagree strongly - thanks to the cap, I have used the X46/X47 to York more often then the train as its more affordable. Also, and again an EYMS service, its a good way to get the kids out to the countryside on summer special buses like the M1/M3 for example which are part of the scheme
York to Hull is ~40 miles each way, and costs ~£26 off-peak (single or return!) on the train. I agree that the fare should be capped rather than rising to the commercial rate – 10 years ago, it was £7 single and £11 return, so I don't know how much more than that it would be now but I would guess at least £10 single and probably more. So a fare capped at maybe £4 each way still gives big savings against the commercial bus fare, comparable train fare or cost of driving (especially if you have to pay for parking), it doesn't have to be quite as cheap as £2 to still be very good value but also reduce the cost of the scheme a bit and give people a sense that it is fairer.
As soon as you introduce different fares for longer journeys the whole thing becomes more complicated and costly to administer. It's far easier to manage and market as one simple flat fare. Clearly people making longer journeys will have greater savings, but it's never going to be perfect. For those of us in areas where there are multiple bus companies but no multi-operator ticket, this is ideal when making connecting journeys.
As for abstracting revenue from trains, I expect very few people are using the bus for a town/city centre to town/city centre journey where there is a competing train available. The beauty of long distance buses is that they offer many point to point options not available by train. To use the example of Hull to York, it takes me an hour to get into central Hull to pick up a train. Alternatively I can take a 20 minute bus ride to Beverley and be half way to York on the X46 in that time. I wouldn't even consider the train if it was also £2! I confess to being a big bus fan but these cheap fares make me travel much more often than I otherwise would; surely that's a good thing?
I fundamentally disagree. Public spending should be targetted at need, not at the majority. The majority, generally, will be able to live their lives without much subsidy.
Whilst I agree with you, this isn't going to happen [see also the electricity VAT cut which is designed to give the most benefit to those who don't "need" it]. The political idea is to try and reduce headline inflation, at least in the next 12 months or so, and thus using public expenditure to reduce prices across the board is the policy. A policy of targeting expenditure on those who need it doesn't reduce prices.
Some operators in Norfolk are already opting out the free children's bus fare in the summer and are likely to opt out of this.
The reimbursement processes for smaller operators and the length of time that it takes them to get paid for the travel are said to be very poor with the kids scheme and it leads to a significant revenue risk and also a delay in getting paid. The terms that they are being paid on works for large companies but really doesn't for smaller ones.
I see Coach Services have also stated tonight they will not be part of the scheme for the same reasons.
Do we know what the terms of payment to operators? Is it something silly like they need to evidence a certain number of passengers have travelled and then they are paid months later in arrears or they have to hit a certain amount of reimbursement due before they are paid? If so, then you can see why it wouldn't work for independents as it would take them far longer to hit that cap than a big group that would hit it every week and get paid every week.
They would be better off having a tiered fare structure of say £1.50/2 miles then £2 upto 5 £3 over 10 as they risk abstraction from rail in some areas when time isn't at a premia.
A tiered fare structure would increase complication and suddenly you make bus travel just as confusing as it once was, you also increase the dwell time at stops as people have to say where they're going and then argue with the driver that they're sure x to y is under 10 miles and not over. This way, whilst not perfect, is much simpler and simple encourages people to use.
Same here, I based my YouTube channel around being able to travel across the country for £2/£3 a go, but one of the things I've noted and commented on through my travels is that very few people are actually taking the bus for the full length, therefore these arguments that it's mainly subsidising people doing mammoth journeys is likely very much overblown. It's only us bus weirdos that are doing that, because let's be honest who in their right mind is spending 3 hours on a bus out of choice?
The only place I can see this argument working is the few places that have a local rail service but no equivalent local bus service, where passengers are already having to pay the higher rail fares (and without free travel for older or disabled people). But that is a pretty unusual situation, in the grand scheme of things.
Absolutely, there's only a few niche examples of where there's a train but no bus and in those circumstances it's not like this scheme is stopping them having a bus, nor is it likely that not having this scheme would suddenly give them a bus.
It will help if it turns the service from unusable to usable, meaning some people are able to ditch their cars or at least use them less. Again, though, this is a pretty niche case and in most cases when people talk about increasing frequency they are looking at moving a service from "usable but not convenient" to "more convenient".
In my experience of living in multiple towns and living below the breadline in a number of cases. The frequency of buses tends to be the best in areas where there is a high rate of poverty - because they know that they'll be used. The areas where I've lived that tend to have a poor bus service are usually the more affluent rural locations - for the opposite reason. There is usually a reason why buses are infrequent and it'll be down to demand, if a bus operator thinks it can make a tidy profit running a bus between two locations it will do.
Without the price cap they would have cost more anyway due to the rise of fuel costs, inflation, staff wages etc.
Now this is something that's come up on these forums before, and from a previous conversation on this very topic some poster pointed out that there's shadow fares. These are the fares that are used for reimbursement. The fares that would be charged if the price cap didn't exist. And in many cases you can see them on bustimes.org.
The picture varies between operator obviously, but I chose a quick look at High Peak's 199 from Buxton to Manchester Airport. About half way down the page you'll find a section called 'High Peak 199 Inbound - SHADOW Ad Sgl fares (adult single). A look at the fare table shows the cheapest single fare between two fare stages on that route is £2. But that's rare. Mostly it's £3 or £3.40.
Looking at another High Peak service, i picked the 61 Buxton to Glossop. Here the minimum shadow fare is £2.80. By the way, the most expensive is £5.50. The cheapest actual fare by the way is £2 for a section of the route served also by the Bee Network 358.
I've picked two High Peak routes purely because I know the company and I know their data is on bustimes so it's easy. But those two examples give an indication of what's going on behind the scenes. Bus operator costs have gone up so much over the last few years that their minimum fares are getting to the stage that they're close - or even exceeding - the fare cap. Maybe one or two operators are profiteering, but I doubt it's the majority.
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Very much this. I don't see quite how they can get back to commercial rates in many areas. How do you go from paying £2 with price cap to a fare that's £5 or £6 and not lose your passengers. It's now going to take a very brave government who will stand on the policy of getting rid of it. And it would have to be a government that didn't care one bit about public transport and was very much pro car. I could name a potential party who I think would go down that route, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
For some operators, you can add /fares onto the URL for a timetable and it will give you a page showing the fares.
This doesn't work for all operators, and it doesn't work for any timetable where the destinations in the URL are truncated.
The only place I can see this argument working is the few places that have a local rail service but no equivalent local bus service, where passengers are already having to pay the higher rail fares (and without free travel for older or disabled people). But that is a pretty unusual situation, in the grand scheme of things.
This is not just the case in rural Wales by the way - an example I find interesting is that the current Cambridgeshire bus network review, related to the franchising plans, will see Meldreth (Cambs) have its regular bus service almost fully removed in favour of DRT and rail. The logic presumably being that since Cambridge South is now open, the two main places that village bus users will want to go (city centre and hospital) will be accessible by train. The only issue with that is ENCTS passes aren't valid on the train - it's about £6.50 for a day return which adds up over time compared to a £2-3 bus fare or free ride.
Such niche cases are difficult to properly resolve, as there's little reason to create specific subsidies for rail passengers from Meldreth to Cambridge because the local bus was removed, while at the same time the train is genuinely a much faster and more convenient option in most cases so running a local village bus isn't the best use of public funds. Plus, as we know, DRT is notoriously poor at serving its main userbase (elderly people and young people) as you need to either download an app on a mobile phone, or to phone 48h in advance for a ride.
So although as you say there's unlikely to be that many places where the train is a much better option than a bus from low-population rural areas, in those cases, it's clear that bus fares strategy does need co-ordination with rail fares strategy if you don't want to hugely inconvenience a small (but potentially vocal) subset of people.
For some operators, you can add /fares onto the URL for a timetable and it will give you a page showing the fares.
This doesn't work for all operators, and it doesn't work for any timetable where the destinations in the URL are truncated.
And I'm sorry but I lack sympathy for people complaining of the cost of going under a mile by bus/taxi unless disabled or elderly (for whom it's free anyway). Walk! It's twenty minutes. If you want convenience/laziness be willing to pay, not be subsidised.
What about steep hills? Narrow roads (rat runs) without pavements? Muddy footpaths? Parents with kids, buggies, shopping? That's a horrible generalisation.
Except on the 23 route where it's £2 single to Bamber Bridge, £4.20 for a hospital return from the city centre, but £3.50 for a single to the hospital from ASDA.
In short Preston Bus fares are lower where they directly compete with Stagecoach.
There's also exceptions for contracted services operated by Preston Bus. That meant until recently £3.50 for commercial singles during the day, and £1 subsided singles in the evening - for the same journey!
Exactly, that's why firms that don't opt into the cap like Preston Bus are putting themselves out of business.
Even with it being £3, Preston Bus left that scheme and charge £3.50 for their predominantly urban short distance routes passing through areas of quite high population density.
That is too much to swallow for most fare paying passengers, and will kill the operation eventually.
I personally don’t see Preston Bus going back into the cap, just saw in small writing on Andy Burnhams bus it’s only if operators opt in. So it looks like us Lancashire living people could be paying a lot more than the average…
Personally it's debatable whether they have long left - Stagecoach might take over, or franchising might cap fares at a lower rate anyway (and force Preston Bus to join the multimodal scheme they've been dodging for years).
I hope they rejoin both the daytime and evenings/Sundays cap though, at £2 it's reasonable to make discretionary journeys during the day and it induces a lot of demand to fill their buses to the brim, especially on off-peak journeys with low ridership at current fare levels.
Why would having tiered fares make things so complicated? Operators already have multiple fare brackets and passengers are used to paying different fares depending on how far they are going.
As for abstracting revenue from trains, I expect very few people are using the bus for a town/city centre to town/city centre journey where there is a competing train available. The beauty of long distance buses is that they offer many point to point options not available by train. To use the example of Hull to York, it takes me an hour to get into central Hull to pick up a train. Alternatively I can take a 20 minute bus ride to Beverley and be half way to York on the X46 in that time. I wouldn't even consider the train if it was also £2! I confess to being a big bus fan but these cheap fares make me travel much more often than I otherwise would; surely that's a good thing?
I see a lot of people who travel Leeds-York (yes, city centre to city centre) or York-Malton on Coastliner and there is a rail alternative. With York-Leeds, the frequency of the train is much better than the bus but for York-Malton the bus is more frequent than the train. Some people also use Coastliner if living in Seacroft and commuting to the outskirts of York, as its much easier than the train.
I don't know what a return fare on Coastliner was prior to the cap between York & Leeds or York & Malton, but a single on CityZap between Leeds & York was £8 for an adult at the time that Transdev ended the service (November 2022, the £2 fare cap started in early 2023) and the journey times were competitive with the train.
What about steep hills? Narrow roads (rat runs) without pavements? Muddy footpaths? Parents with kids, buggies, shopping? That's a horrible generalisation.
But to pick up on one of those, kids. They should absolutely walk a mile. We are in the throes of a serious child health crisis caused in part by children no longer walking these short journeys.
The bus is an option here but there is no reason the fare system should encourage such journeys.
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Why would having tiered fares make things so complicated? Operators already have multiple fare brackets and passengers are used to paying different fares depending on how far they are going.
I have to get 2 separate tickets if i get to work on the bus as handily there is a border between where Durham ends and Darlington starts so this will save me money.
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