(25/02/2013 18:46)wirralbus Wrote: [ -> ]Merseytravel fares will soon be half the price of the commercial fare if they arent already.
Somebody with a bit more time on there hands could probably tell who has the cheapest and dearest commercial fares on Merseyside.
To go from Liverpool to Birkenhead on the 423 (and all other crossriver services) costs £3.20 as i'm sure you know.. the last 1/2 evening 423 services are tendered costing £1.10 - thats nearly triple the tendered fare!
I understand they need to make profit, and theyre investing - but surley they can afford to lower the fares slightly - using common sense lowering fares would probably result in more passenger thus increasing profit in some cases! Wouldnt it be nice if they lowered the fares after the hybrids have entered service due to less money being spent on fuel! Shame it won't!
The thing is its £2.50 single and £2.90 return from Birkenhead to liverpool on the train , so the bus fares are only just above the going rate .
I have heard people from Southern England commenting that our bus and train fares are dirt cheap.
It also depends if you are only making that journey on the day, if you are making other journeys during the day you get a day ticket and then the cost of getting over is cheap.
(25/02/2013 21:21)wirralbus Wrote: [ -> ]The thing is its £2.50 single and £2.90 return from Birkenhead to liverpool on the train , so the bus fares are only just above the going rate .
I have heard people from Southern England commenting that our bus and train fares are dirt cheap.
They sure are cheap in Merseyside! In Doncaster, fares are very expensive - and, when I stayed there, First offered a poor evening service. By poor, I mean the majority of evening services were regularly cancelled and passengers, like myself, were FORCED to walk home (from Doncaster to Scawthorpe, in my case). I didn't keep spare taxi money during my day! If I remember correctly, it was about £4.00-ish for a fare from Scawthorpe to Doncaster - equivalent to a journey from, say, Old Swan to Liverpool...
I'll be honest - we're quite lucky in Merseyside to have so many services funded by Merseytravel. We're also lucky to have a flat fare system. Overall, a structured system could result in higher overall fares (depending on how the companies structured them). The increases may seem unfair, but they're actually not too bad (in comparison to Doncaster!).
prices are still an overall joke, i wonder, does annyone know if stagecoach are putting prices up at the same time? if not theres more passengers buying their tickets on QBP routes (hopefully monthlys so arriva dont get the share)
going onn about tendered prices my dad gets HTL 137 coz its cheap at 1:10 when arrivas fares go up they will be charging 2 pound 10
The prices are only really expensive if you are buying singles, if you are getting a daily or weekly and you are getting 4 buses a day for example then they are reasonable.
i find 19 pound for a weekly ticket a bit of a joke mate, no need for prices like that
If you break it down though, assuming you use 4 buses per day, in a 5 day working week you only pay 95p per bus. When you think about it like that, is it really so awful? Especially when you consider the fact that you could also get weekend use out of it. Even if you only used 2 buses per day in that 5 day period, it's £1.90 per bus which, when you consider most of Arriva's routes are more direct than Merseytravel services and are more frequent, is again not so atrocious.
am looking more at other companys prices, am not to bothered whats more direct myself i just want a reliable service at a decent price, getting harder to find these days
At 95p per bus, you'd struggle to find a company undercutting that. Even at £1.90 it's actually very reasonable along longer stints.