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Buses - Why so expensive?

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We're all being told these days that we need to be more environmentally friendly. This is almost certainly true.

 

So, my wife decided the other day to go to Sheffield City centre by bus, instead of driving in. Wow. Bus fares are high, aren't they? £4.30 for a day pass with First - only just cheaper than getting two singles.

 

So if my wife and I want to go to town and back together by bus, it's £8.60, for a round trip of less than six miles.

 

Is it any wonder people go by car? The bus fare to town and back for two of us would buy enough diesel for us to drive to Manchester and back.

 

Public transport will never be as convenient as going by car. It will never be as pleasant. Going by bus will rarely be as quick. If people have a choice, they will only choose the less convenient, slower, less pleasant method if it is cheaper, surely?

 

Whenever someone wants a new road building they always talk of the cost of congestion. Same when they have to close a road. But no-one as far as I know puts a price on the congestion caused by people going by car because of the ludicrous position of it being cheaper than the bus.

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I agree with you. It is also cheaper for me to drive to work, it only costs £3.50 for me to park in town all day. Also much more convinient as i have to collect my son from the childminder on my way back, it would take much longer for me to get home if I did the journey by bus. However, if it was much cheaper, I would do it.

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Theres the Sheff City day rider - £4.90 with travel on all buses and trams, but yeah its stupidly expensive. When I working it was costing me about £75 a month for a pass. :(

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It's so they can run a million 120's, to compete with the tram (which is pointless, because there is the tram that people can catch, der@First), and a million 52's, because it generally annoys everybody else that uses an alternate route and has to wait 20 minutes or half an hour for their busses.

 

As for bus prices... well... privatisation for you isn't it. Shareholders want to make more money year after year, out of a service that doesn't make any. Hence the high prices.

Edited by kingius

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Theres the Sheff City day rider - £4.90 with travel on all buses and trams, but yeah its stupidly expensive. When I working it was costing me about £75 a month for a pass. :(

 

That could work out cheaper if you needed to get lots of buses and trams I suppose, but presumably, on a well designed system, most people should only need one bus or tram?

 

Two of those bad boys would be almost a tenner - you used to be able to fly to Spain for that!

 

Someone seems to have done the comparison costs on an absolute basis - £4.90 could be cheaper than buying a brand new car, taxing it and insuring it I suppose. But most people with cars have one anyway - we need ours to get to see family and for work, for example. So we compare the bus fare with the marginal cost of the car - just the diesel really. We pay the tax, insurance and depreciation anyway, regardless of whether we use it.

 

Public transport needs to be more frequent, and cheaper before people will use it.

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People who use buses have no choice, so they can be shafted.

It's like gas / elec- we have no choice so we get shafted

Petrol- we have no choice so we get shafted

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That could work out cheaper if you needed to get lots of buses and trams I suppose, but presumably, on a well designed system, most people should only need one bus or tram?

 

I catch three a day to get in to work, and three to get home again. Where's this crazy idea that only one a day would be needed to get about South Yorkshire come from?

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It's so they can run a million 120's, to compete with the tram (which is pointless, because there is the tram that people can catch, der@First), and a million 52's, because it generally annoys everybody else that uses an alternate route and has to wait 20 minutes or half an hour for their busses.

 

Quite. Privatisation was clearly never going to work out for what is almost the definition of what economists call a public good.

 

It's better for everyone if the buses are used more, even the people who don't use buses, so we should all pay for them - i.e. subsidise them - which we do anyway. But subsidies should not be paid to private companies.

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I catch three a day to get in to work, and three to get home again. Where's this crazy idea that only one a day would be needed to get about South Yorkshire come from?

 

Not would, should!

 

I lived in the Czech Republic for a bit. The trolleybuses ran every five minutes past my out of town flat, from 5am until 11pm, and then every 15 minutes until 1am.

 

A three month pass for trams, trolleybuses and buses in the whole town was, from memory, £5.

 

They were so frequent that you never needed a timetable, you just went to the stop. And when you had to change, you never needed to wait more than a few minutes; there were a couple of small interchanges on the outskirts of the city (the inner ring road I suppose) and you could generally stay on the bus/tram/trolleybus you were on and go in to the middle, or swap to another, go around the city a bit, hop off and get another one in. Worked beautifully, and was so cheap and reliable that hardly anyone used their car.

 

That's the system we need - and sadly, it's they system we once had.

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People who use buses have no choice, so they can be shafted.

 

This is basically it.

 

Where people have the choice of getting the tram they do,

Where they can walk they do,

If they have a car they use it,

 

Nobody gets a bus by choice.

 

The public transport here is very good and it's a fixed fare for any journey on the TTC regardless of what mode you use, so bus, streetcar and subway are all the same price for any journey. But i guess thats the beauty of having one body incharge of it all, they can control the price to make it actually attractive to customers.

 

Also, I get a tax refund for using public transport.

Edited by Bulgarian

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But subsidies should not be paid to private companies

 

That's arguable; if an industry would collapse without them then subsidies may be the only choice because if that fails, then you've either got no industry left or you have to nationalise it. You're right about the public good point. These services always lost money (as in, didn't make a profit), but because they were paid for by us, the public, it didn't really matter.

 

I wonder if economists will ever learn this lesson. However this is a bit off topic from bus prices, as the original poster intended, really.

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The public transport here is very good and it's a fixed fare for any journey on the TTC

 

What on earth are you doing prowling the Sheffield forum, trolling about how good a service is in another country? Doesn't Toronto have a forum?

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