I would like to see a move to regional or even a national daily cap myself. The problem with buses in most areas is they are run by different companies that don't accept each others tickets and many journeys at the shorter end often require 2 buses. For example, most areas of Harlow, Essex to its rail station require a change of bus (many routes only go to the town centre). A daily cap of £5 to £10 depending on the size of a region, town or city would be a good idea. About time, more places copied London or Manchester, were capping includes multiple modes of public transport. The £3 cap is good for being simple but should evolve into something even better, which along with route and service improvements, could be encouraging modal shift and use of ALL public transport in an area. I'd like to see a rail ticket cap too!
Multi-modal but not, on the bus side, multi-operator (though the rail is slightly different, but then the structure is as well in terms of how fares work) since regardless of the contractor the Bee Network or TfL network are effectively a single operator on a single fare collection system.
Neither London or Manchester include non-franchised operators in their capping system, though places like Leicester & Oxford show there is no technological or ideological barrier to such being done and I do agree it is something that should be pursued more widely.
It isn't a simple system to set up, knowing how to do it doesn't make it any less complex, in places where there aren't any multi-operator fare structures in place already it will be even more complex to agree the multi-operator price points and there is a significant cost to the upgrades to ticket machines & extra equipment to make it work smoothly (you can do without the extra equipment, but that does risk slowing boarding/alighting as people need to access the ticket machine when they alight slowing the process) that does require investment funding from somewhere, but none of this is preventative and there are many places where much of this is in place, and it is only the procurement and set-up that is needed.
Multi-modal schemes would be more complicated as rail does have a tendency to demand a higher proportion of the income than usage would support (in part due to their average fare being higher) - we have one multi-modal ticket scheme where rail took a huge share of the income of what is largely a bus ticket, and we are only still in the scheme because demand has proved not really transferable (we did pull out for a period but saw no increase in sales of other tickets in compensation so it is just extra revenue for whatever we carry, but it is not proportionate to usage).
A national scheme would be much more difficult to agree, price points would be harder to line up and given how badly concessionary fares and fare cap funding is managed there is probably not a lot of trust that operators would be fairly funded, so negotiations at that level would be much more difficult. Not insurmountable but much more complex than locally focussed regional schemes where those relationships exist and trust has been established.
