Andy Burnham's £2 Bus Fare Cap

Why It's Important

The Acme Buses £3 bus ticket! (Fictional bus company, but real ticket price.)

The UK's latest Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has declared that the current provincial £3 (£2.50 within the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority (NEMSA), formerly the North East Mayoral Combined Authority (NEMCA)), bus fare cap is to be reduced to its former level of £2, starting from next year.

It's significant news for passengers.

Public buses are the most commonly used form of public transport in the UK, with four billion passenger journeys made each year.

Yet bus services are typically overlooked by politicians and the mainstream/legacy media.

Responses to Burnham's announcement varied. A 'business owner' on X (formerly Twitter), 'James', delivered a shoulder-shrugging response, complaining that the cap wouldn't be of any benefit to those having their own, private transport, such as himself. I can't display the post as he's since restricted who can view them, but the replies from others are still visible, such as the following:

Many of those four billion passenger journeys will be being made by people to get to their place of employment, perhaps that of 'business owner' 'James'.

Politicians can be just as bad. I remember the then Labour Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, standing at the dispatch box in the House of Commons and referencing the importance of bus travel. To which a fellow MP, most likely a Conservative one, shouted, 'Taxi!', which was followed by much laughter, again, most likely coming from the Conservative benches, the Conservative middle-classes' personal public transport experiences thus attentions focused, rather, on commuter train travel. The then PM Margaret Thatcher is claimed to have expressed the view that anyone using buses beyond the age of thirty is a failure (the expression may well have originated in the US as it was someone there from whom I first heard it, many years ago). Note, however, that it was a recent Conservative government that introduced the cap.

Short clip from classic UK TV comedy series 'The Inbetweeners', depicting the four main characters driving past a bus queue, Jay leaning out of the front passenger seat and shouting 'bus wankers' at them.

Even UK national radio phone-in presenter and avowed progressive James O'Brien (LBC, weekdays 10am–1pm) had fun with the topic, playing a variety of sound clips, à la fellow, satirical presenter Nick Abbot, of people saying the word 'London' each time he mentioned the capital city in his opening monologue, London, in the main, having excellent public transport and other provisions compared to elsewhere, a situation assertively defended by the capital's residents, including O'Brien, and jealously complained about by those living elsewhere in the country.

Bus in a snowstorm in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside, UK, at 11:46 GMT, Thursday, 30 November, 2017
Source: me (Gary Hayward)

I know that treating the issue of bus services seriously is seen as ridiculous. I know it comes across as pathetic, vicariously embarrassing whining about nothing. Something akin to Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis' head-and-shoulders 'sermon on the mount' piece to camera at the beginning of the episode following some vandals' breaking into the Blue Peter garden and trashing the place, in which she earnestly admonished peace, love and harmony in the world. All of which the kids at my comprehensive school the next day found hilariously and utterly cringeworthy. Talking about bus issues is something painfully 'square'  'Inbetweeners' character John Webster ('Big John') might be caught doing. (By the way, if you haven't seen 'The Inbetweeners'—the classic UK TV comedy series, not the dire US knock-off, plus the two movies—you've been missing out! 🤣 Fortunately, though, it seems to be on almost continuous rotation on some or other channel.)

But it's a serious issue. And it's not just the cost of bus travel. As I explained in my Buses blog (see link in the 'Pages' menu), there can be a major difference between getting from 'A' to 'B' by bus and doing the same by car. Hint: it's not the bus option that's the time-beater.

Other, current issues also to do with bus travel include:

• Outdated, poorly maintained, scruffy vehicles, prone to breaking down;
• Lack of accommodation of those having physical and/or mental impairments. And, even where facilities do exist, these may be routinely non-operational, such as automated, audio-visual stop announcements being turned off;
• Infrequency;
• Late running, although this is usually because of circumstances outside the operator's and driver's control, such as traffic congestion; accident/highway maintenance diversions; bad weather.

The fictional bus company ticket, above, is the real price of a bus fare from the suburb I live in to my local high street. It's just under two miles by shortest road distance, which is the route the buses follow, a ten-minute trip. It's quite likely that the bus fare would be even higher were it not for the current Government £3 cap. In fact, the cost of two tickets, to cover the round trip, now matches the price of the operator's local-area one-day-all-day-unlimited-travel saver, so one might as well buy one of those, regardless of whether planning to make extra journeys later in the day. As for return tickets, cheaper than two singles, they've been done away with; it's singles or savers or nothing.

Walking into town and back would take me around forty minutes each way. In fine weather it's doable, but a pain. And it's only one-way if it's to do a significant amount of grocery shopping; there's a limit to the amount I can carry by hand, and how far I can walk with it in a reasonable amount of time.

There's one thing that seems to go particularly unappreciated, which is being effectively housebound. The fact is that being able to get out and about and doing so is almost always a benefit to not just one's physical fitness but one's mental health, too, regardless of whether it's for it's own sake, or, for example, to attend a medical appointment that would otherwise have to be missed. And there's the negative psychological effect of having to do something as opposed to merely otherwise wanting to: just as you might open a window and enjoy a chilly but refreshing winter's air when you know you can afford to put the heating on, but feel colder even with the window shut when you can't, a walk into town when you know you can afford to take the bus can feel a lot different to a walk into town when you haven't any other option.

Everyone takes the issue of high energy and grocery costs seriously, so let's give Andy Burnham the credit he deserves for treating the cost of bus services likewise and doing something about them that will actually make a small but positive difference.

Any similarities to any actual company's name, logo or other intellectual property are entirely co-incidental.