Taper the money paid to bus operators on a cap and collar contract. If you run services on a £2 fare route and you’re making a tidy profit off of it, then there shouldn’t be subsidy provided.This is a topic which occupies us at work, especially as we write the 2024 update to our Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) where it asks about such things.
Someone here suggested that most town bus fares should be under £2.50 even without a cap, and for our towns I'd agree. Indeed as almost all are council supported we could probably achieve that. But I'm not so sure that the inter-urban routes have similar fares for their "in town" sections, and as they are commercial we could only ask. Certainly something to consider though. Our city, with a dominate operator and a commercial network had rather higher fares, pre-cap, so intervention there would be harder, and more costly.
The same post suggested that a £2.50 rural fare would increase rural mobility, and again I agree. Where its a supported route, and if its into the nearest town I could see we might be able to make a good case, although I'm not sure our councillors would find a way to make up the revenue shortfall - someone has to pay after all.
That post didn't mention the longer inter-urban routes, where fares are higher due to distance and passengers are travelling around about 10 miles to a larger town. We're not talking £16 return Leeds - Scarborough types here, but still commercial, fairly frequent routes where a return is probably around £9 (often sold as that operators day ticket). What should we say £3.00? £3.50 each way? Bit of a jump from £2.00, but still better than it was. These are the routes we see good growth on, and where we want to invest in better bus stops to help that growth. We're also using BSIP2 (formerly BSIP+) funding to increase frequencies on some, but it would be hard to argue "rural connectivity" on most of them, and they are commercial so the operator would be looking for something at least as good as the current scheme. Those are the tricky ones.
Equally tricky, how can the council justify capped fares on "rural" routes but not on inter-urbans? "Why should I pay more just because of where I live?" would be the cry, especially when the inter-urbans have the best hope of achieving modal shift and a reduction in congestion and pollution both of which the council wants to achieve.
Answers on a Post Card please, and we'll use the best one in our BSIP!
Perhaps the fare setting should be distance based too. Anything deemed a large conurbation being £2, conurbation to conurbation for 10 miles, £3, etc. There should be incentive for operators to increase hours of service also - the fare cost to the end user really is only one small segment of it. The £2 simply draws the customer into the product!