£2 national bus fare cap from 1st January 2027 for a year

SnowMan

At the moment the £3 national bus fare cap applies until 31st March 2027. It has been announced this will be replaced by a £2 national bus fare cap from 1st January 2027 for a year. The £3 scheme will continue until 31st December 2026.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cheaper-travel-for-millions-with-a-third-off-fares

born_again

Sticking plaster. The issue is bus reliability & route coverage.

They could make them free & people would still not be able to use them. As they have no way of getting where they want.

AssemblyGMX

I agree, born_again, it is like a sticking plaster. Before Covid we had access to four different bus numbers going to a number of important places and all available at nearby bus stops to reach: GP Surgery, the nearest hospital, into town, into the smaller nearby town centre as well as to the next 3 small towns with various facilities.

Now we have two buses from different bus stops, both bus services are one an hour and both are unreliable being cancelled at no notice. Most of the time it involves changing once or sometimes twice and the bus journeys are much longer than the service before Covid. Several times the bus has run past the bus stop several of us were waiting at because it was already full.

For workers there is no direct bus to the nearest industrial site where many local people work.

If the buses are running late they sometimes "skip" the town centre (one bus an hour) and people hoping to board the bus there are left with no option but to wait another hour or pay for a taxi.

No matter how cheap a ticket is, as born_again says, it is futile if the buses are unreliale or do not even go to the nearest hospital/GP surgeries/ shops etc.

For some the £2 ticket will be better than nothing but, if there are no direct bus routes to some important places, it will cost more (both ways) if having to change buses.

pseudodox

My car was in dock a couple of weeks ago. A journey I needed to make that is a 35 minute drive took 2 hrs 20 mins by public transport. Wonder why I don't use bus/train more often . . . .

daveyjp

Last time this happened my wife had to go back to using her car as the buses were too busy during rush hour. Probbly because over the years our main bus route has gone from 6 services an hour at peak times to two an hour at all times.

Grumpy_chap

Making Oyster Card accepted on all public transport across the country would be a good change as it just makes using the services simple and easy.

flaneurs_lobster

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82077301#Comment_82077301

Just the sort of London/SE bias that Burnham is trying to change - let's make the rest of the country adopt a system that we use in London.

A system that TfL have been trying to kill for over 10 years.

I'd settle for my City having a public transport network that allowed you to pay with a single card that also applied my senior discount.

Or is that Oyster? I do know that getting a Railcard discount added to an Oyster card is a right PITA.

elsien

the issue where I live is that the bus service is terrible. Doesn’t go where you need to go at the days and times you need to get there. go - for example you can’t get to the nearest city during commuter hours because the buses run between nine and five.
But no other bus company wants to bid for the routes. I presume that’s a local authority decision around the amount of money that they are willing to subsidise and I’m not sure if there’s much the government can do about that.

Herzlos

My big concern with reducing the cap is that it'll cause operators to drop the less profitable routes and make it harder for the people who really need buses.

If we can avoid that happening I think it's a great idea. I got a bus from one end of town to the other to pick up my car and it was something crazy like £3.40 to travel about a mile and a half. I could have walked but what if I couldn't?

Grumpy_chap

Question about details and not a political comment.

It was saying on the news that, because transport is a devolved issue, the new cap is for England and then Scotland, Wales, NI will receive an equivalent funding. What happens in London (where bus fare is already <£2) and Manchester? Do those areas also receive "equivalent funding"?

(For completeness of comment, because I am unsure, the new cap might apply to England and Wales in which case the equivalent funding comment would not include Wales.)

spenderdave

The £2 cap does not apply to London which has its own fares with a £1.75 single ride charge for buses, cheaper than £2.