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Recliner[_2_] · February 15th 14, 05:04 AM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote:
In article
,
(Recliner) wrote:

wrote:
In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 16:25:43 -0600,
wrote:

Those are gross costs with no account of fare income?

Yes but that's irrelevant in London as all the revenue goes to TfL.
The bus network is subsidised to the tune of £440m per annum. There is
no revenue apportionment to route level in London and 99% of revenue
is collected off bus anyway. There is also disproportionate (relative
to rail) use of concessions on the buses (child travel, income
support, jobseekers discounts).

I guess TfL could take a view as to the level of off bus revenue to be
attributed to each route by analysing Oyster card data but I am not
aware that it does this as any sort of routine activity. If it does do
that analysis it has never published the data to show what routes
might be "profitable".

It was the intention many years ago that there would be route level
apportionment of off bus ticketing and concessionary permit use when
the government had prescribed a regime of Net Cost Contracting. The
Mayor and TfL pretty quickly killed off that regime once they were
responsible for the buses.

Yes, I understand the network is far too complex to allocate
revenue at all fully. I was only thinking of something cruder
presumably gained from survey data, to tell TfL how much revenue is
attracted by the RM routes.

Probably very little. Maybe better to contract a private tour company to
run officially licensed RM tourist routes.

At separate fares like the sightseeing tour buses?

Yes