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Old December 5th 19, 03:57 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london
Recliner[_4_] Recliner[_4_] is offline
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Certes wrote:
On 05/12/2019 13:02, Recliner wrote:
On Thu, 5 Dec 2019 12:42:13 +0000, Certes wrote:

On 05/12/2019 12:29, Recliner wrote:
On Thu, 5 Dec 2019 11:25:00 +0000, Sam Wilson
wrote:

On 2019-11-29 12:42:44 +0000, said:

Am Freitag, 29. November 2019 13:37:04 UTC+1 schrieb Certes:
On 29/11/2019 07:04, MissRiaElaine wrote:
On 29/11/2019 00:21, Recliner wrote:

Nobody queues around here. They just stand around all over the place,
blocking the pavement, smoking or fiddling with their phones, then when
a bus arrives they all try and get on at the same time with no regard to
who was there first and never mind people getting off (we don't have
separate exit doors here, unlike London. Very few places do, never
understood why).

Exit doors cost money, take up the space of two or four seats, and run
the
risk of people sneaking on without paying.

Doesn't seem to happen a lot in London, though. Centre doors seem to
have been much more of a success there than anywhere else, at least in
the UK.

Edinburgh is bringing back the system of entry door at the front and
exit door in the middle, which used to be the norm there before
single-door buses were introduced in the 1990s. It may help that
almost all routes have a flat fare regardless of distance.

Tickets do not include changes, do they?

The standard Edinburgh ticket is for a single trip on a single bus with
no changes and costs £1.70.

That's interesting: it's only £1.50 in London, and for that, you can
have unlimited changes within one hour. It also includes the tram
network.


The other option is a day ticket which
costs £4.00, so less than three single tickets, and gives unlimited
travel for the day. Going to the airport costs more.

London bus journeys are capped at £4.40, so just under three tickets.
You don't have to buy a day ticket, as the cap is applied
automatically, and of course the valid area is far larger. It doesn't
cost any extra to go to the two airports within the London bus area,
and in fact the London buses are free in and around Heathrow.

Edinburgh's buses aren't subsidised. They are required to make a profit
to pay some of the tram line's debts.


No subsidy at all?

From:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-19-00428/

... for financial year 2017/18, the BSOG [Bus Service Operators Grant]
payments made by Transport Scotland to Lothian Region Bus Group were
as follows:

Lothian Buses = £6,410,519.70

East Coast Buses (an entity of Lothian Buses) = £530,533,30


Thanks; that's interesting. The buses used to make a small profit,
and are about to have another £20m "dividend" siphoned off for trams.

£7m is almost 1% of what London gets (for a larger area, of course):
https://railpage.com.au/news/s/london-bus-subsidies-cost-722-million


Yes, London buses consume a large subsidy, but it doesn't come from the
government. It's a cross-subsidy from the Tube. The much-hyped Boris buses
have made it worse, being almost twice as expensive as conventional hybrid
double-deckers, heavier on fuel, and with a fare evasion problem. London
Buses would be in much better shape without them.

TfL's finances are in poor shape, partly because of the fares freeze, and
partly because of the absence of the expected revenue from Crossrail. Tens
of millions were also squandered on the mythical Garden Bridge.