It is also macroeconomically poor (discourages people from needing to better themselves, learning, night school, studying, skills courses, setting up own business etc), in blunt terms allows people to be stay on little money, and not improve their pay by ambition and growth.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is not, has never been, and never will be a valid or sustainable socioeconomic strategy.
Although, for what it's worth, high transport costs actually act as a hindrance to people "bettering themselves" anyway. It's not much use getting a job, or getting a better job further away, if the cost of getting to that job is higher than the additional income you receive. For people coming off unemployment benefit this is often a reality: earning an extra £15 a week isn't much use if it costs you £20 a week to get to the job.
You also mention additional learning: not much use if you can't afford the bus fare to get there, is it?
A short term fare cap is more of a political stunt, than a serious way to growth the economy and make people less poor. Appeases those who don't see the whole picture, but just think of themselves.
Reducing the costs to the end user of transportation is a serious way of growing the economy. Lower fares encourage mobility. For work, this is obvious.
But for leisure, too, lower or low fares encourage people out to leisure activities. This stimulates the economy, especially in the hospitality sector which has been struggling more than most for quite some time.
There is a sound economic reason why all public transport in Luxembourg- hardly a country which one would describe as communist or socialist- is free of charge.
What a load of economically illiterate neoliberal garbage!
You're far more polite than I would be.
London going cashless was very controversial but they did it anyway.
What sped things up in London is that they stopped issuing tickets on buses. You had a flat fare and you paid it using a card. No tickets were issued.
The time cost is where, on boarding, you need to tell the driver what ticket you want and where you want to go, and the driver has to print out the ticket. It doesn't matter if you're using a bankcard or cash, the time penalty is the same (in fact, paying the exact amount in cash is probably quicker). Removing this interaction is where you get the time savings.
London did it initially by moving ticketing off-bus to ticket machines on the street, it was only later they made the buses a flat fare and made everyone use some sort of card to pay the fare. Belfast's Glider buses use off-bus ticketing too. Hong Kong's trams used to do it by having an exact fare and a turnstile on exit- you put a coin in the hopper as you got off.
In London, they have the Hopper ticket and that's now becoming a huge financial burden.
I'm not so sure it is, at least when you consider things holistically.
The Hopper fare removes the financial penalty for having to take more than one bus to complete your journey. On face value this costs money- instead of getting two lots of £1.75, you only get one. Someone doing a simple return trip using four buses would previously have hit the bus-only cap at £5.25 but now they only pay £3.50.
But the Hopper fare, and the removal of that financial penalty, has given TfL the political headroom to make some pretty swingeing cuts to bus provision, especially within zone one. The Hopper fare means that it doesn't matter if your bus now terminates on the edge of zone one because it's free to complete your journey on a second bus. TfL have been able to really thin out the bus provision in zone one and gone are the days when Oxford Street would be gridlocked with hundreds of buses all with only a handful of people on them.
www.bbc.co.uk
