On a cold morning last week, I jumped on a bus to town and waved my bank card at the ticket machine. For just over a year, I haven’t bothered tapping off because most fares get capped at the maximum fare of £2 anyway. Simples, as that irritating Russian meerkat might say.
But then I thought… it’s £3 not £2 now. Or is it? Because West Yorkshire’s Mayor Tracy Brabin says it’ll stay at £2 for a while longer. Ah, but then the bus I’m on goes out of county so I’m not sure. And then I got to the door and, well, there wasn’t a tap off reader anyway, so should I have told the driver where I was going? Do I tap off at the ticket machine?
I did better than the woman behind me, who tried to get on but only had £2 on her, so had to go home again. But long story short, I do smart ticketing for a living, and I don’t know what to do now the max fare is £3 not £2.
Last year it was beginning to be easy to get a bus and frankly, now it isn’t. This isn’t an argument to keep the cap at £2, but it is an argument for simplicity. Customers tell us consistently that they want the same ease with public transport as they do getting into a car. I’d suggest flat fares or make zones really simple – say one zone in town, one zone out of town? Do capping if you can. I won’t get stuck into the contactless bank card debate here, but if you’ve got a card, it’s an easy system. And it should be easy for customers to check the fare before their journey and after they’ve been charged. Trust in the system matters.
I doubt that most people reading this had anything to do with the £3 decision though and I guess that’s the key point. I suspect it was almost wholly driven by HM Treasury. I worry that the cost benefit analysis of this decision had a single number at the bottom of the page with a reduction in public subsidy. But did it count all the other costs involved? Costs to operators of amending fares tables, cost to suppliers of resetting back-office calculations, cost to Local Authorities of changing fares into systems that feed websites and Apps and on-street information, not to mention extra calls to contact centres. Economists sometimes forget that you can’t assume you’ll get benefits – they depend on real people taking action. If the new policy is counter-intuitive, then maybe we won’t get the expected benefits, which brings me to my last point. If our strategies to encourage a shift to public transport can’t survive a spending review, they aren’t strategies at all, just short-term tactics.
It may be too late to change this decision, but there are friends and colleagues out there who are at various stages on the journey to bus franchising. Let’s show that local decision-making means a simple offer that customers want.
By the way, if Innovatious can help you on your bus franchising journey, give us a shout!
#smartticketing #franchising #bus