Post by dwarfer1979 on Feb 19, 2023 11:38:58 GMT 1
What does "a proper integrated network with mass transit options" actually mean?
And as for the person who said that Oxford centre is thriving. Yes Baldrick, we know that, because as I said, it's a world renowned city which is a tourist magnet. The same doesn't really apply to Middlesbrough or Rotherham does it?
The car restrictions in Oxford came about because the bus was an established quality alternative, it didn't create that situation. If you want to introduce those sort of restrictions you need the alternative in place, established and widely used before you can even propose it. Oxford had extensive Park & Rides running 40 years ago (the only place that can compete for duration, extent & quality to Oxford for Park & Rides is York) and the city bus operators have been considered leading lights of innovation & quality for almost as long. The same applies to other lauded cities like Nottingham, Brighton etc - the car reduction measures came in after the bus network achieved a certain level of quality and a certain level of penetration of all levels of society and reaching this level came through close co-operation between the local authority doing what they could do on infrastructure and support and the operators doing what they can do on quality delivery and marketing.
The suggestion that buses aren't used by adult farepayers is woefully wrong as a general statement, there may be certain areas, certain types of routes or specific services where such a statement could be made but generally it just isn't right and in major urban areas is really inaccurate. I was travelling around the Midlands yesterday, both interurban outside & more urban inside the West Midlands conurbation, and I'm not sure any of the buses I used during the day had less than 50% adult farepaying age passengers (the one trip on a small minibus was close depending on the age of a couple of the younger passengers who looked close to 18).
The issue with the £2 fare is that it wasn't officially intended to be passenger generating (as stated it was always about reducing the cost of travel as part of dealing with the cost of living crisis). The notice (the operators only had 2 weeks notice of participation which included both Christmas & New Year so launch marketing was somewhat subdued) and timing (no one thinks that January to March is the time to generate discretionary growth, these are always the quietest time of year) indicate that this was never going to generate massive growth and a 10% increase isn't something to be sniffed at (a lot of operators didn't see much more than that in terms of concessionary passenger usage growth when it went free for them) and how much of a deal it is will be inconsistent for passengers so growth potential is also inconsistent (many may not have saved anything once you factor in returns or season ticket prices coming out at less than £4 per day).
It will be interesting to see what happens with the extension as we will be moving into a period where leisure travel growth may be anticipated and with improving weather more people may consider switching. Additionally there will be some questions for operators, there will be those who declined to participate because it was only for 3 months with no clear path out and little potential to make back loses through growth and some operators who only participated because it was only for 3 months so any losses could be weathered for that period to avoid other downsides (such as passenger transfer to parallel operators who were participating). You need to remember that reimbursement is a fixed sum and calculated against a pre-scheme O-License wide average and then effectively calculated as a share of the national pot so it is difficult to guess who is doing well out of this and who isn't (we have a depot with a high proportion of long distance high fare work but because it is on the same O-License as a much larger depot which is almost entirely low fare urban network it is actually not doing well out of this so it can't be looked at as an individual route but as a whole company).