National multi-operator ticket/bus pass

[joieman]

Not living in a city, and living in a town with several bus operators, I think it's a bit of an inconvenience that there isn't a multi-operator day/season ticket covering my area. My town has several different buses operators. The £2 fare cap is excellent and I make liberal use of it on my college commutes, but I think it would also be a nice idea to have a multi-operator day/season ticket that would cover all bus services in, say, all of England. This would, for instance, mean that someone would not have to pay two bus fares for a journey beginning with one operator outside of a city and ending with another operator inside the city, and it would also make long-distance journeys and journeys outside cities cheaper and simpler to use. What do you think?

 

[stevieinselby]

Not living in a city, and living in a town with several bus operators, I think it's a bit of an inconvenience that there isn't a multi-operator day/season ticket covering my area. My town has several different buses operators. The £2 fare cap is excellent and I make liberal use of it on my college commutes, but I think it would also be a nice idea to have a multi-operator day/season ticket that would cover all bus services in, say, all of England. This would, for instance, mean that someone would not have to pay two bus fares for a journey beginning with one operator outside of a city and ending with another operator inside the city, and it would also make long-distance journeys and journeys outside cities cheaper and simpler to use. What do you think?

It's a good idea, and it would be great to see more areas offering it, but (especially if the £2 fare cap ends) it could be problematic to implement – for example, there are buses running in Yorkshire that previously had single fares up to about £15 and returns getting on for £20. For a day ticket to be of use to more than a handful of people, it would need to be no more than about £10 ... but at that price, a lot of longer routes would be losing significant levels of income which would need to be clawed back from somewhere or the service would decline.