Merseyside Night Buses

[mr t]

RE: Merseyside Night Buses

(24/08/2016 21:18)Barney Wrote:  Over a thousand night buses operate in London on a typical weekend and not a penny is paid in cash fares. When the various private operators - including Arriva and Stagecoach - bid for the routes in London they do it with the knowledge that they will have to run 24/7 and that payment will be made through an Oyster card. Arriva and Stagecoach have their own smart card payment systems and are happy to take customers' money - and make a profit - but not provide a service for six hours of any given day.

If I was to take your argument to its logical conclusion we should return to a situation that existed decades ago whereby every single journey would be a cash fare. Now that really would be a surefire way to lose business.

Sadly what the Arriva and Stagecoach business and finance people expect is a return for every journey or service - look at how many routes have been chopped especially by Arriva over the last couple of years, and high profile ones too that allegedly no longer pay, even though there is a fair % that use the day or weekly tickets and thus dont get recorded getting on or off buses, so therefore certain services look like they dont carry anyone when actually they could all be half full and the mangers dont see that, so its like a victim of their own success - if passengers simply scanned their tickets every time they boarded a bus the depots would then know exactly who and how many times that person uses the bus and what ones etc. We finally got the Merseytravel passes to scan, but still no operator ones do, so the service providers realistically has no idea how people use their own services at the moment, which is surely wrong in this digital and computer age - if we were all tracked then there might be patterns of people using certain routes or 2 routes to get to places and then they could respond to that by having a new services etc.
Sadly passsenger needs and providing a "full" service has disappeared in this age since deregulation. The only way things will change is if bus franchising is introduced where the timetables are stipulated or if Merseytravel has an increase in its bus fund to introduce more services that it used to support until the budgets keep getting cut over the last 5 years. Otherwise, its the shareholders that are the most important people in bus companies these days