Plusbus helps with the cost if getting a bus to connect with a train, but the lack of non-paper tickets for a lot of the country (I think there's eticket Plusbus trials in Luton and Cambridge?) makes spontaneous journeys less useful if the only way to get a ticket for the bus to the station is at the station.
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How are you all coping with the £3 cap?
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Vexed
Member
But the majority of passengers only travel along part of the route (route dependent of course) so there are probably more cheaper short/medium distance fares sold than expensive end to end. I'm assuming you're talking about the actual fares available here and not sale numbers.
Some operators are getting to £3 in too short a distance.
Fully agree about publishing fare tables. Locally Uno published a very basic one which didn't mention some short distance fares still at £2, one of which I used today (3 miles)! It's better than nothing though. Luckily the full one is at bustimes.org/fares
Being able to buy a train ticket on your phone and include the bus, so you can walk out your door and onto the bus first has to happen as quickly as possible.
Then for many, the bus cap won't matter as you'll have one single ticket and over time the industry and Government can work on more competitive fares that work on multi modal transport.
As you tap in from bus to train to tram to bus, the fare can be divided accordingly and automatically. An e-ticket will be better than plain contactless, which will remain as a convenient alternative but not a replacement entirely.
Then for many, the bus cap won't matter as you'll have one single ticket and over time the industry and Government can work on more competitive fares that work on multi modal transport.
As you tap in from bus to train to tram to bus, the fare can be divided accordingly and automatically. An e-ticket will be better than plain contactless, which will remain as a convenient alternative but not a replacement entirely.
Firstly from previous surveys, fares are not the top factor affect transport use - availability, safety, convenience, ..., come higher.
The really poor only leisure travel for a purpose and the fare is only a small part of the overall trip cost - cost of shopping, entertainment, food and drink, etc is always much more.
Urban single fares (within the fare zone) seem mostly under £3
London £1.75
Manchester £2
Birmingham £2.90
Bristol/Bath £2.40 (and <6 miles out of zone)
Exeter/Torbay/Barnstaple £2
York £1.50 (TOTO) or as much as £3 via the app!
Rural and Interurban fares will have gone up to £3, but that is often not unreasonable.
Various Day/weekly/... cards & caps are usually cheaper than this for multiple journeys.
The really poor only leisure travel for a purpose and the fare is only a small part of the overall trip cost - cost of shopping, entertainment, food and drink, etc is always much more.
Urban single fares (within the fare zone) seem mostly under £3
London £1.75
Manchester £2
Birmingham £2.90
Bristol/Bath £2.40 (and <6 miles out of zone)
Exeter/Torbay/Barnstaple £2
York £1.50 (TOTO) or as much as £3 via the app!
Rural and Interurban fares will have gone up to £3, but that is often not unreasonable.
Various Day/weekly/... cards & caps are usually cheaper than this for multiple journeys.
Yes, I'm a believer in the £2 cap because I usually have to inconvenience myself quite considerably to make the bus work for me. Higher fares to me are a charge for the inconvenience.
TheGrandWazoo
Veteran Member
Surely that's what happens in life... You pay more for a lack of inconvenience/a better service etc.
I don't know who's undertaken these surveys, but that sounds like balderdash to me.
Gloster
Veteran Member
I travelled for the first time today and did not notice any problems: most people on the island either use an ENCTS card or cashless. It is possible that many people using cashless methods do not notice what the fare is: they just hear a beep and that’s it.
Southern Vectis did away with returns many years ago, but in the last couple of years they have made it virtually impossible to buy anything but £2/£3 singles for each leg of a journey if you aren’t using a card or ‘phone. You can get a Day Rover, but I have been unable to find out if they have raised the price now that the fare has gone up to £3; it was £10.80. They have also kept a £2 fare for one section out of Newport on the 1 to Cowes. It should also be possible to buy through fares, which might be better value now: £4.80 for a trip wasn’t worth it before, but will be now if they don’t put the fare up (and some of the younger drivers are unfamiliar with it).
Southern Vectis did away with returns many years ago, but in the last couple of years they have made it virtually impossible to buy anything but £2/£3 singles for each leg of a journey if you aren’t using a card or ‘phone. You can get a Day Rover, but I have been unable to find out if they have raised the price now that the fare has gone up to £3; it was £10.80. They have also kept a £2 fare for one section out of Newport on the 1 to Cowes. It should also be possible to buy through fares, which might be better value now: £4.80 for a trip wasn’t worth it before, but will be now if they don’t put the fare up (and some of the younger drivers are unfamiliar with it).
Try looking at Transportfocus, https://www.transportfocus.org.uk/
MAKING-GREAT-BUS-JOURNEYS-final-191124.pdf Link to 2024 Survey
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YouLostAStar
Member
in the Southwest our tickets are supposed to be £2.40 but buying them on the app they are £3
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dodecahedron67
Member
Again, having seen the data, it is a lot more £3 fares than shorter ones. From Theatre Royal on the 6 for example, as soon as you get past the hospital it is £2.60 and after Burton Stone Lane it’s £3 (if I’ve read it right)
York’s £1.50 fare is for up to 3 stops in very short succession. Most singles in York are £3 not £1.50
Thanks for quoting
Perhaps it's just with bus travel in that case, as I can't see it being that way for all modes !
GusB
Established Member
It isn't nonsense. The fare cap, as intended, was supposed to take some of the financial pressure off existing bus users, which it largely did. It was never intended to be a permanent measure.
I agree that the cap will have attracted a certain amount of new business, and that those passengers will technically be seeing a 50% increase. If they are using the bus for a short hop in town I can see why some may feel aggreived, but it was clear from the outset that the measure was temporary. It doesn't change the fact that for many bus journeys, a £3 single fare is still very good value.
I'm not going to disagree with you on this point. There is certainly a conversation to be had about fares being too expensive in the first place, but who bears the cost? If the government has to pay the subsidy, that money has to come from somewhere
I suspect that ENCTS holders (and Local Authority issued school bus pass holders, if interviewed) will have a different view of value for money than those travelling short distances on flat fares?
That's a fair point.
I currently have no view on bus fares in West Yorkshire as they're effectively already pre-paid as part of my Metro card. I imagine such situations are commonplace on the buses.
JKP
Member
I think you will find that reliability comes at or very near the top of the list followed by the others. Fares come in around 4th.
Lewisham2221
Established Member
But the cap wasn't introduced as a means of attracting people onto buses, it was a temporary stop gap introduced during a time of rampant inflation and out of control energy costs. Both have since settled, and the minimum wage has risen twice since the fare cap was introduced.
Oddly, the fare cap was significantly more than that. It didn't simply prevent operators from raising fares as a result of inflation/energy costs, it significantly reduced almost every existing bus fare, thus making fares artificially low. Locally, pre-cap fares were £1.80 - £2.70 for local journeys and £3.00 - £6.00 for longer journeys (upto around 18 miles).That was two years ago, those fares - after being artificially suppressed for 2 years - are now £1.90 - £3.00. The cynic in me thinks that if .gov had changed the cap to £2.50, operators would've totally done away with any sub-£2.50 fares, leaving us in a worse situation.
Of course, none of this is taking into account the existence of daily/weekly etc tickets, contactless capping etc either. I have no doubt that there are some people having to pay cash for a single on each leg of a multi-leg journey, in areas where they have to catch multiple buses operated by different companies. I also have no doubt that almost all of those people will still be better off with a £3 cap than they were before.
Hopefully the new powers that local authorities will have over bus services will mean more multi operator tickets and caps will be able to be brought in which will help with the "have to catch two buses with different operators" cases which must be a tiny minority anyway.
Kite159
Veteran Member
I wasn't on about the Interavailable tickets including multiple modes of transport (Buses/Trams/Trains), but better promotion of those multi-operator Bus Only products, like the "MyBus Oxfordshire" Ticket. Ones which tend to be hidden away as the bus operator would prefer to sell punters a day ticket for their buses only for a similar amount.
Indeed but most places lack a scheme of that kind, or have one but it costs more than £6 a day.
Kite159
Veteran Member
However for someone who has to use 2 (or more) buses to get from A to B (and hence will now be paying £6 each way rather than £4) they can work out better value.
While this is of course true, changing buses is usually deeply unattractive. There is very rarely an indoor waiting area and very rarely are both routes frequent enough that it's a viable option given the high risk of missing the connection. If you have car access you'd use that over a journey with a change between buses. Realistically nobody is going to switch from driving to four buses per day unless have no choice, or are an enthusiast, and in that case they will already know about all of the ticket options because they'll have looked into them.
And in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority region, until at least the end of March
but it doesn't explain how a price which has gone up 50% for some people is justified if we want to encourage the use of public transport. Your justification (or explanation) is just "Devil take the hindmost."
But they are worse off than they were with a £2 fare cap. That’s the simple fact. Yes minimum wage has increased, but in real terms wages have stagnated. Fuel duty, meanwhile, has been frozen.
And if the long term plan is to eliminate the cap entirely and return to the world of inflated fares that are not just patently bad value, but also likely to be a mystery until you board, fine - but we should expect people to return to their cars in droves (or simply not make discretionary journeys.) If the government actually want bus patronage to increase, we can’t go back.
johncrossley
Established Member
But what choice is there? For most people, hardly any journeys are possible by direct bus. If we assume that journeys that can't be done by direct bus have to be done by car, we might as well give up now.
Giving up before you've even started is definitely a good description for how a lot of the population see bus travel. And it's why some fairly long direct services work.
Baxenden Bank
Established Member
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Manchester to Rawtenstall 50 minutes for £3 I would still consider to be a bargain (Burnley Bus Co X43), the short trip after that is also £3 but for a ride of just a few minutes (Rosso 464) not such a bargain in comparison or as a standalone journey. Combined £6 is okay but I much preferred £4! The round trip I actually make would be the £14 Transdev day ticket without any cap, is £9 at the current cap, but has been £6 for the past 21 months.
johncrossley
Established Member
In other countries, they realise it is impossible to offer direct buses to everybody so they make it as easy as possible to change. In cities where they achieve high modal share for public transport they manage to get people to change between buses/trams/metros etc. When you have the whole network at your disposal then you have vastly more journey opportunities compared to a direct bus.
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