On 2016-03-04 12:21:41 +0000, Paul Corfield said:

Oh come on. There is a cost to effectively reducing fares for people.

There is - it is an increase for others so that people are effectively
sharing the cost more reasonably rather than some being penalised twice.

It's a not unduly complicated calculation, and should be possible to
obtain from the Oyster data to establish what the new, slightly higher
transfer fare should be.

I suspect users would rather keep their services
even if they had to pay a bit more to do so.

Once again, I am not suggesting a cut to the income from the bus
network. I am simply suggesting dividing it by the number of users
making a point to point journey, rather than by the numbers making a
single-bus journey. You could extrapolate to those using bus+Tube+bus
or similar.

It's just a case of - take the income TfL requires, divide it by the
number of end to end journeys made, and that gives you your fare. You
may want to scale it by zone, but that's not hard maths.

Yes, some will whine, but *overall it will be fairer*. It will open up
opportunities across the network for people who can all of a sudden
afford to use it as what it is - a network. And you will be able to
save a load of money and make the network easier to use overall by
removing pointless duplication. You'll even make everything
operationally easier in the event of disruption - no faffing about with
transfer tickets, no making sure everyone gets the right onward bus -
if a bus terminates short, it's simply a connection, and it costs nowt.
If you have to transfer from Tube to bus, because the Tube is not
running, touch in on the bus - free, it's a connection. Easy.

What's not to like, apart from a stubborn UK-centric view that if the
concept isn't invented here, it's wrong? The old objection used to be
revenue protection, but add Oyster/contactless and that goes away
completely.

Let's say we didn't have the Travelcard. Would you be one of those
arguing against what was and is an excellent concept, used worldwide,
and just needs expanding a bit into single fares?

Go and tell the Chancellor that please because he clearly doesn't
understand it. He does not believe that users should receive any form
of fares or service support. They should pay the economic cost of the
service or else they lose the service.

You can determine the economic cost of any public transport service in
any one of a number of ways. It can be by the whole network divided by
the number of journeys. It can be by route. It could even be by
individual journey.

It's just a pricing model. All I suggest is the abandonment of an
archaic, unfair model into one that befits a 21st century integrated
transport system. Subsidy has nothing to do with it; subsidy would be
added, if available, just to bring the fares down.

Neil
--
Neil Williams
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