Do you think public transport is expensive?

Velcro_Hotdog

Pound wrote: »

Sorry but did any of you actually read what I posted? I said if you buy a saver ticket you can get unlimited travel for a fixed fee. It doesn't matter if you travel 1 mile or 50,000 miles, you pay the same flat fee of £37.80 per month or £491 per year. This is obviously much cheaper than running a car.

£491 to listen to other peoples Ipod, sit in chewing gum and god knows what else and not have any air con? Winner!!

rev_henry

Where I live public transport is a joke. 15 mile return journey to the nearest city by train is about £4.50. My car costs just less than that in petrol. If you want to go to the other town a similar distance away its £10 return on the bus (no I am not joking). In the aforesaid city, if you then want to get a bus its a ripoff as well. I paid £2.70 single the other day for a 4 mile journey, and that was up 20p from last time I did it a couple of months ago.

Essentially the trains are ok but buses are not. If you have a railcard the trains are fairly reasonable I suppose, but now I have a car its not worth getting one.

gravitytolls

Yeah, it's dead expensive.

HappyMJ

Is it expensive? On a per mile basis it is about the same but it is inconvenient. My town in Staffordshire has 3 bus companies. Arriva, Midland Classic and TrentBarton. The saver tickets cannot be used on another company's bus so if an Arriva bus turns up but you have a TrentBarton day ticket then you have to wait another 20 minutes for the Arriva bus. When the buses go into town they do just that it's a half mile from the railway station either a 10 minute walk from town or another bus journey. I'd love a car myself but the occasional user that I am I can't justify the cost.

PasturesNew

If I had to rely on public transport I'd have to move. When they do bother turning up it's pricey, uncomfortable and long-winded as they take well over an hour to go 15 miles or so as they go through every tiny village and hamlet.

As for those shared cars, nearest to me is 200 miles away.

First train out of here in the morning is 10:30 and it travels at about 10mph and is a branch line that joins to the main line in about an hour (15 miles) ... although usually (including today) the trains are cancelled and it's a bus service replacing it.

I wouldn't be able to benefit from unlimited travel because the buses are too slow and meandering, so you'd never get far. In fact, I looked up one journey one day across the county and the bus takes so long to get there, you have to stay on it as that's the bus you'd need to come home on.

And prices... horrendous, especially bearing in mind you can't take a bike with you, struggle with luggage, have long waits between changes, etc. Here to London by cheapest/months in advance is about £200. I can drive there and back for £70-100, chuck my bike and luggage in the back and have my sandwiches on the seat beside me... and start out/arrive at my chosen times.

Doom_and_Gloom

My partner uses his bike not just for work. He goes all over the SE on it. A SE bus saver ticket is £80/4 weeks - £1,040/year (£72 for an m-ticket/4 weeks or £936/year). My partners bike insurance was £600 last year (most it's been due to his last bike that was stolen), £15 for bike tax and he spends around £260/year on petrol - so that comes to £875/year. It's not only cheaper for him to use his bike buthe can use it when he wants to.

Yes public transport is expencive here in the SE. I doubt anything would make my partner get shot of his bike and the transport costs being what they are is certainly not helping. After all we live on the bus route that goes to my partners work but even though for just work the bus would cost around £50/4 week (£650 a year) so less than his bike it's not worth it. The bus times are weird, the one that goes to his work and back doesn't run for the end of his shifts and doesn't run at all on a Sunday either.

Trains are a bit better but even they aren't cheap to be fair even for season tickets.

wabuthu

To answer your question...i think it definitely depends where you live.

I lived in dundee for 2 years...and everything was within 10minutes walking distance...ie free, and after a while when i started working abit of a distance from the town centre would buy a bus pass for about £36 per month.

Now i live in london and £36 can only buy me a week's worth of transport (tube/train/bus) EEK!:eek:

thescouselander

Pound wrote: »

People can come up with lots of valid reasons why a bus isn't feasible. I've given an argument against one of these in the OP but there's many and I think there is a counter-argument against the majority of them, although I appreciate some people genuinely can not do without a car.


I don't think you lose much freedom. You can still travel anywhere you want but obviously you will need to plan ahead (ie. look at bus times). You lose the freedom to spontaneously jump in a car and go somewhere but giving up that freedom seems worthwhile to me in order to be enjoy the financial and health benefits.


Sometimes you need to think outside the box on a lot of things.
Your local council will, for a fee, take your old settee away.

Need to take your granny out for dinner now and again? Use a taxi.
Need to go to Cornwall for a week and can't do without car? Rent a car.

You pay more for these things but over a year you'll probably save money.

Not ours, they stopped doing this ages ago now - its £15 per large item removed now.

alleycat`

thescouselander wrote: »

Not ours, they stopped doing this ages ago now - its £15 per large item removed now.

Cheap way to get get shot of the missus?

Strider590

If you have a car then yes it's expensive, your car costs say average £90 a week (all costs). If you have no car then public transport is going to cost a lot less, but if you have a car then your adding the cost of public transport to the cost of running a car.....

Additionally a train from my home town to where I work is £4.80 (its literally the next stop away), parking in the city is £4 a day. But I drive in, park a mile from work and then walk in the rest of the way, saving me £80 a month!

Refueling costs me £60-£65 every 3 weeks..... That's £3 a day to drive in to work.

So for me it's a choice between £4.80 a day + car running costs sat at home, OR £3 a day + car running costs.

Car wins every time!!