Unsurprisingly, mainstream media in England has been heavy with stories of how the impact of an increase in the national bus fare cap to £3 from 1 January 2025 will be felt. The BBC proclaims that it could cost passengers up to £40 more per month where a return journey is made each weekday.
That may be the case for outliers, but rare will be the scenario where a regular passenger cannot do better than paying £6 per day across a week or month’s regular travel.
A period pass will bring the average cost below that, vastly so in many cases. As an example, one Bus Service Improvement Plan-funded weekly ticket, a multi-operator one at that, is £12. In the case offered by the BBC, that puts each single journey at £1.20.
However, suggestion of a potential £40 monthly increase to get to and from work by bus in England via the fare cap change is being presented to the public. That is a problem for the industry. Behaviour of the public is unpredictable, and an unconscious misunderstanding of the situation around the fare cap risks driving passenger away.
The need to emphasise how regular travellers will pay well below the fare cap, on average and how on shorter journeys the standard single fare may also be less than £3, is clear, but time to do so is ticking away. At the date of publication, the cap uplift is eight weeks away.
However, any bus sector concern about accurately publicising what customers will pay may well be batted aside by criticism of how that task is handled when and where no fare cap is in place. While period tickets are well promoted, accessing single prices has often been fiendishly difficult. They are treated almost as state secrets in some cases.
Contactless payment, apps and tap on, tap off – highly valuable tools, each – have removed much of the previous fare anxiety for users, but cap and the Bus Open Data Service aside, why some parts of the industry do not tell their customer bases the cost of services rendered is hard to understand.
Will the Better Buses Bill, and work in Scotland and Wales, seek to ‘encourage’ better public access to fares? Louise Haigh has declared herself the passenger-in-chief, and from the customer’s point of view, unravelling what in some cases is a dark art of fares knowledge once the cap ends once and for all would be seen as a positive.
The rail industry is generally ahead of bus in its approach to disseminating fares data, while the bus landscape is thankfully much simpler in how it ‘layers’ various tiers of fares. So with a clamour to ensure that bus users are not scared away by talk of rises, is it now time that the sector as a whole does its bit and makes its fares much easier to access?
