Stagecoach MCSL - Chester & Wirral Depots

[First Class]

RE: Stagecoach Chester & Wirral

(09/02/2013 16:21)Nicholas Wrote:  The reason for Stagecoach wanting to withdraw from accepting monthly tickets is simple... smart cards! Stagecoach are pressing on with moving monthly tickets onto smart cards (as is currently the case with such tickets in Manchester), and these won't be compatible for use on Arriva services.

Eventually Arriva will migrate tickets on to an ITSO compliant smartcard anyway.

Any company or person can easily read the contents of an ITSO smartcard, and as all (most) new ticket machines have readers, it shouldn't be a problem.

The whole point of "ITSO", (which Stagecoach SMART is based on), is inter-availability between operators.

The actual (and only) reason is revenue abstraction. If Arriva charge £40 for a monthly, (valid on Stagecoach), and Stagecoach charge £50, (valid on Arriva), then Stagecoach will invariably end up with £0 when everyone buys the cheaper Arriva ticket.

With weekly/day tickets, customers generally buy on whatever bus turns up first, so revenue loss isn't really a problem as it is fairly split.

Merseytravel could, of course, make these Statutory schemes and run them like TfL, and basically run them as franchised services which solves the problem.

If I was Arriva, I would bin the 2 QBP, (keep the X2), and reintroduce the X11 every 30 mins.