Cheap single bus tickets considered harmful

Here in the UK, the government placed a £2 cap on single bus fares. Cheaper bus fares is a good thing, surely?

The snag with this limit is that, at least in Cambridge, it makes 2 single tickets cheaper than a return (OK, there isn't a return, there's a day ticket). It's even cheaper that the advance flexi ticket (which is the day ticket on the smartphone app).

(One possibility is that the single prices have distorted the ticket pricing structure, and that Stagecoach have had to increase the prices of the other tickets - the ones that you would expect to be discounted - in order to avoid making a loss.)

What this means is that instead of buying a day ticket, or using the app, people - including myself - buy a separate single for every journey.

The time it takes for everyone to buy a ticket on the bus is significant - yesterday I timed it and it was typically 10s per passenger. You have to let the driver know your destination and what ticket you want, the ticket machine needs to be set for that, you have to tap your smartcard, the machine has to register it, and the ticket has to be printed and collected. That's when it works, as occasionally the ticket machine doesn't read the card first time (it seems even less reliable with payments by phone, perhaps the technology hasn't quite matured enough).

Some time ago I wrote about The effect of passenger boarding on bus services. For the last couple of years, largely due to the extensive use of the app which meant that people just marched onto the bus at full speed waving their phone at the driver, the fraction of time a bus sits waiting for passengers to board had actually declined sharply. The effect of the lower single fares is that now the time spent waiting for passengers to board is even worse than it was when I looked at it 5 to 6 years ago.

Yesterday, with a full bus at peak afternoon times, the impact on my supposedly 30 minute journey into time was an extra 10 minutes at least. There basically isn't any slop in the timetable, so add this to the roads being congested with too many cars and it's hardly surprising that buses become ridiculously late during rush hour.

Another example of unintended consequences.