£2 Fare Cap from January - Time for nationwide contactless/tap & go?

With the reduction in the bus fare price cap to £2 being implemented in January 2027, is it time to introduce a simple, contactless tap and go payment scheme on all bus services?

No need to ask the fare, simply tap on when you board the bus, no tickets issued, no cash taken on board the bus, just like in London. (I don’t think London buses have accepted cash for over 10 years!)
No change to concessionary travel, simply tap on using your concessionary pass like now.

The only issue possibly is for children, but perhaps preloaded cards could be purchased from PayPoint outlets or similar for say £20 which allows 20 x £1 rides, or an app which parents could preload with similar amounts of credit, seeing as though virtually every child over 12 seems to have a smart phone !

This would speed boarding times, avoid fare confusion, no cash security issues on board the bus, counting the cash at the depot or taking the cash to the bank.

The flat fare is future proof because if the cap is raised to £2.50 or more then it’s still a flat tap on tap off fare.

All season tickets would be scrapped but a London and Manchester interchange facility would allow a change of bus within an hour at no extra charge. A daily cap of £5 or £20 per week could also be introduced to replace season tickets.

The cap is still, officially at least, a temporary measure even if there seems to be no credible exit strategy. Additionally, there are still a number of operators that do not participate in the scheme.

There will be a tap and go payment system on all buses eventually however the technology is still in development (Stagecoach need their new Ticketer machines for example), especially for the back office to allow multi-operator capping.

Mollman said:

There will be a tap and go payment system on all buses eventually however the technology is still in development (Stagecoach need their new Ticketer machines for example), especially for the back office to allow multi-operator capping.

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We already have multi-operator tap on/off capping in North Wales so the technology must already exist.

I mostly agree - but what about those routes on which the fare is under £2? One of the routes I drive has single fares as low as 50p! (25p for kids!)

mmh said:

We already have multi-operator tap on/off capping in North Wales so the technology must already exist.

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With a monopoly operator for the back end processing .

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ACBest said:

I mostly agree - but what about those routes on which the fare is under £2? One of the routes I drive has single fares as low as 50p! (25p for kids!)

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Also the current cap is per person. A child pays half* the uncapped at fare up to the same fare cap ( currently £3). Changing thus would push up the cost of the scheme

*assuming the operator prices child fares at 50% of the adult fare. Not all do.

A contactless payment broker for TOTO is currently under development in the West Midlands. When it goes live it'll be ready for local authorities across England to adopt for their own planned TOTO schemes.

More details in the thread below.

PeterC said:

With a monopoly operator for the back end processing

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The back end inherently has to be a monopoly.

mmh said:

The back end inherently has to be a monopoly.

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And that isn't a problem in and of itself. If you don't want to just give it to say GBR to do (probably too soon for that) you get supplier competition at the point of letting the contract. No different than if you tender a bus service (almost all bus services are a monopoly of sorts, on-road competition is fairly rare in practice).

Llandudno said:

With the reduction in the bus fare price cap to £2 being implemented in January 2027, is it time to introduce a simple, contactless tap and go payment scheme on all bus services?

No need to ask the fare, simply tap on when you board the bus, no tickets issued, no cash taken on board the bus, just like in London. (I don’t think London buses have accepted cash for over 10 years!)
No change to concessionary travel, simply tap on using your concessionary pass like now.

The only issue possibly is for children, but perhaps preloaded cards could be purchased from PayPoint outlets or similar for say £20 which allows 20 x £1 rides, or an app which parents could preload with similar amounts of credit, seeing as though virtually every child over 12 seems to have a smart phone !

This would speed boarding times, avoid fare confusion, no cash security issues on board the bus, counting the cash at the depot or taking the cash to the bank.

The flat fare is future proof because if the cap is raised to £2.50 or more then it’s still a flat tap on tap off fare.

All season tickets would be scrapped but a London and Manchester interchange facility would allow a change of bus within an hour at no extra charge. A daily cap of £5 or £20 per week could also be introduced to replace season tickets.

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Why shouldn't passengers be allowed to pay by cash? Surely pne of the big advantages of £2 being a nice round figure is that you only need one or two coins to pay it rather than fiddling around with change if it was, say, £2.25?

That would make my season ticket £8.50 a week more expensive, no thanks!

CaptainHaddock said:

Why shouldn't passengers be allowed to pay by cash? Surely pne of the big advantages of £2 being a nice round figure is that you only need one or two coins to pay it rather than fiddling around with change if it was, say, £2.25?

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From the operators' point of view, removing cash allows a reduction in theft, driver assault, driver pilfering and costs of counting and secure transport.

That doesn't mean to say it should be abolished as a payment method, but those are certainly the reasons why the likes of TfL (years ago now) have moved away from it.

As for replacing seasons, the obvious answer there is local weekly caps. TfL have been through this already, we largely just need to copy it.

We have been through these arguments multiple times in recent months on various threads, and I'm not entirely sure we need to repeat them all again! Especially given it is unlikely that anyone's mind will be changed by arguments which at times, are simply stating and restating what's best for the poster personally!

Bus operators inhabit something of a strange place in the world of business: precisely because there are often no on-road alternatives, there is a lot of regulation from above (often with little thought to how it would work in practice), e.g. fare caps, ENCTS passes, PSVAIR, yet when equally convenient to be left "hanging", they often are - e.g. when local councils change road layouts, roadworks, etc. This is recognized by the Traffic Commissioners, who note that they have to balance any enforcement action with a "loss of business" - i.e. only in very serious cases can they remove someone's business from them (in much the same way as the Police can't just seize your car because you ran a red light).

Could we imagine a situation where a gas fitter (for the sake of argument, as another trade with mandatory licensing and ongoing training requirements) was told they couldn't charge more than X amount for a service or be accused of "money grabbing", had to give all over 67's their annual boiler service for free, and be fluent in alternative communication methods, e.g. British sign language, as part of their licensing conditions? And then, just for good measure, with 10 days notice they suddenly also had to give free services to any household with an under-16, but just for the one month?

Where are you planning to find a few billion pounds to pay for this?

Well would also be great is a national daily cap. Say £7.00. Available if you use the same bank card throughout the day with tap on.

Edvid said:

A contactless payment broker for TOTO is currently under development in the West Midlands. When it goes live it'll be ready for local authorities across England to adopt for their own planned TOTO schemes.

More details in the thread below.

Project Coral contactless EMV Broker (multi-operator PAYG) progress

Back in July the West Midlands Combined Authority agreed a £13.4m drawdown of their City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement to progress the creation of a cEMV broker that non-London local authorities across England can eventually utilise for their various planned multi-operator contactless...

www.railforums.co.uk

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why spend tax payers money on a new system when the existing west midlands system works well

satters said:

why spend tax payers money on a new system when the existing west midlands system works well

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The existing system (Swift) is an ITSO smartcard scheme that won't expand beyond the West Midlands, whereas the Coral broker - to be piloted there - is intended to be at least England-wide in scope.

I actually meant using a bank cash point card, its just tap on, and is capped automatically

satters said:

I actually meant using a bank cash point card, its just tap on, and is capped automatically

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I'm guessing you travel with NXWM.

Their scheme is one of many single-operator TOTO schemes across the UK, which is fine if you only use one operator within a defined zone - I'm aware >90% of West Midlands bus journeys are with NXWM - but no good otherwise.

Precious few multi-operator TOTO schemes currently exist because of the additional requirements back-offices must be configured to handle (revenue apportionment rules etc), but once it's ready for TfWM to use the Coral broker will enable other local transport bodies to implement multi-operator TOTO without going to the expense of designing and installing their own payment infrastructure. Journeys within the scope of single-operator schemes will continue to be processed by existing back-offices.

Multi operator TOTO schemes can work. Leicester for example has TOTO across Arriva, First, Stagecoach, Kinch, Centrebus and Central Connect. With all the operators now offering the flexi day ticket instead of their own day tickets it's very much operator agnostic.

I would imagine nationwide TOTO is very low down on people's priorities and just localised TOTO makes more sense as most people don't travel the length of the country in a day on the bus. Well, most.

BuhSnarf said:

Multi operator TOTO schemes can work. Leicester for example has TOTO across Arriva, First, Stagecoach, Kinch, Centrebus and Central Connect. With all the operators now offering the flexi day ticket instead of their own day tickets it's very much operator agnostic.

I would imagine nationwide TOTO is very low down on people's priorities and just localised TOTO makes more sense as most people don't travel the length of the country in a day on the bus. Well, most.

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Multi-operator capping in Leicester is not available across all of those operators though - it’s only available on Arriva, Centrebus and First.

It isn’t available on Stagecoach, Kinchbus or Central Connect.

ACBest said:

Multi-operator capping in Leicester is not available across all of those operators though - it’s only available on Arriva, Centrebus and First.

It isn’t available on Stagecoach, Kinchbus or Central Connect.

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I've just checked and you are right.

That's quite misleading on Leicester Buses behalf as the website implied any bus you catch inside the Flexi zone is covered.

'Travelling in the Leicester Flexi Area? Travel with ease and peace of mind, knowing that you will receive the ‘best value’ adult fare on all bus companies in the network.'