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[email protected] · July 4th 10, 09:23 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article ,
(tim....) wrote:

wrote in message
...
In article ,
(tim....) wrote:

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 19:44:28 on
Sat, 3 Jul 2010, Paul Terry remarked:
AIUI, from comments in u.t.l. by Colin Rosentheil and others, the
costs don't fall equitably on local authorities at present - in
particular, those that are popular holiday resorts or tourist
destinations end up paying for a lot of "out of area" visitors.

They are allegedly "not compensated enough" for those out-of-area
visitors. It doesn't seem very difficult to tweak the formulae a
little to take account of this[1], so the bad guys here are those
who don't want to do that.

I can't remember where it is but there is at least one council who
quite happily admits to making a profit on the current deal

Almost any council with few bus services. A local example is
Fenland.

I would have thought that was taking into account when working out
the grant.

It's the number of "non local" users that makes it go wrong.

Mainly but not exclusively. Chesterfield has been utterly clobbered
because it's the bus hub for its locality so loads of people from
neighbouring districts change buses there and Chesterfield has to pay for
their onward journeys.

Fenland pays little because it has few bus services to carry its
pensioners while Cambridge's bill is higher because there are far more
buses here. However, South Cambs has to pay half the inwards park and ride
journeys because some of the car parks are outside the City and in their
district. The City has to pay all the return trips of course.

--
Colin Rosenstiel