Tomorrow Brian Paddick and I are boarding our first campaign bus together, and what better way to celebrate than using it to launch our great One Hour Bus Ticket policy.
We’ll be travelling round eight London boroughs informing residents that the Lib Dems are dedicated to targeting fare reductions at those Londoners who need them most. Our Fairer Fares package proposes six ways to save, one of which is a One Hour Bus Ticket that will allow people to hop-on and hop-off buses as many times as needed within one hour, paying only one single fare.
The scheme works successfully in several European cities ensuring that multiple journeys on one of the most popular forms of transport are kept as low as possible. From the moment an Oyster card is swiped on a reader , or a paper ticket is printed, passengers would have 60 minutes in which to make additional journeys without any extra cost.
Our Fairer Fares package, including the One Hour Bus Ticket, is a realistic and fully costed proposal that shows we’re committed to keeping fares as low as possible, offering discounts for those who travel out of peak hours, bringing in a part time travelcard and ending the scandal of Oyster overcharging – sensible money saving policies.
The One Hour Bus Ticket would help the one in six passengers who use a second bus within 60 minutes of the first, and those who find their bus terminating short of its destination forcing them to pay again for the next bus.
In conjunction with our bus tour tomorrow, we will also be launching a One Hour Bus Ticket saver calculator on www.brianpaddick.com where existing bus users can enter their current journey to discover how much they would save. This and our bus tour are great reasons for us all to get tweeting and see whether we can get the One Hour Bus Ticket trending. We’re asking for your help to join in the tweetathon at Midday tomorrow, about an hour into the bus tour, with a link to the calculator, mention of the tour and the hashtag #onehourbusticket.
For more information about how to get involved in tomorrow’s tweetathon, please contact [email protected]
* Caroline Pidgeon is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords and was previously aLondon Assembly Member and Deputy Chair of the London Assembly Transport Committee. She is also chair of the English Party.
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2 Comments
Good luck with this – I live in the regions but am a great supporter of public transport (although what we have here is a parody of that being badly run service by a private company) and anything that promotes its use and makes it more user-friendly is a bonus.
I wish Brian Paddick all my best for the election – he is a decent man with good ideas and doesn’t get the publicity he deserves with ‘Laurel and Hardy’ taking all the publicity
Hi Caroline, like the public transport proposals very sensible and realistic. The one hour bus ticket exists in Brussels (I use it when I’m there) and I could never figure out why it didn’t exist in London.
In Brussels it works by taking a “trip” off your (paper or electronic) pay as you go ticket and then doing a “transfer” each time you change within that hour (you have to swipe/punch your ticket each time you change). Once the hour is up, if you change again, you’ll be charged one more trip. I could imagine that even in London it’s rare to spend more than 2 hours travelling by bus, so even long journeys should cost only maximum 2x a single oyster bus fare.
Important information point: when a bus changes destination after you got on it (i.e. ends up terminating before your stop forcing you to change when you normally would not) , you can ask the driver for a transfer ticket if you are using a pay and go Oyster card.
However, I only found this out by accident when I saw another passenger do it. Prior to that I just paid twice and felt ripped off! I don’t know if transfer tickets are an official TFL policy, but since I found out about this procedure, I’ve never had a driver refuse to give me one nor another driver refuse to accept it.