Ticketing and Concessionary Travel on Public Transport - United ...

competition test to permit agreements between bus operators, so long as they are in the
public interest.
13. Ten years after it expressed its commitment to promoting integrated bus ticketing,
the Government has achieved too little of practical value. It is a nonsense that the
everyday act of changing buses is still made unnecessarily inconvenient <strong>and</strong> expensive
by poor ticketing arrangements. The Government needs to pay more attention to
resolving these basic problems which penalise passengers <strong>and</strong> deter others from using
buses at all.
Integrated ticketing across modes
14. Multi-modal travel cards are available in most passenger transport executive areas. For
example, in Greater Manchester, one in twelve bus journeys (19 million) were made using
multi-operator <strong>and</strong> multi-modal integrated tickets. However, these can be expensive for
the occasional traveller. Passenger transport executive attempts to develop <strong>and</strong> promote
multi-modal <strong>and</strong> multi-operator schemes can be frustrated by operators who focus on
their own schemes in order to protect their own market share. The more limited, singleoperator
schemes do, however, provide a lower price option for passengers.
15. We recommend that the Traffic Commissioners be given powers, in response to a
reference by either party, to arbitrate where bus companies <strong>and</strong> local transport
authorities are unable to agree terms for multi-operator tickets.
16. In 2006, the major rail <strong>and</strong> bus operators launched PlusBus—a combined bus <strong>and</strong> rail
ticket which allows unlimited bus travel in a defined zone within the main towns <strong>and</strong> cities
outside the metropolitan areas. 17 PlusBus tickets are now available for over 200 towns <strong>and</strong>
cities. Sales are rising fast—76,000 in 2006/07 <strong>and</strong> a forecast of 150,000 in 2007/08 18 —but
still amount to only a tiny fraction of total rail tickets sold <strong>and</strong> the scheme is still relatively
unknown. 19 This is a commercial venture which seems to have potential but it remains to
be seen if the operators are serious about investing sufficient money in it to make it widely
available <strong>and</strong> attractive to the public. 20
17. In 2006/07 approximately 23% of the total distance travelled on passenger transport in
Great Britain was made by coach or non-local bus. 21 By comparison, local bus accounted
for 24%. Despite the scale of coach travel, coach seems to be a st<strong>and</strong>-alone mode with little
ticketing integration in place or planned. There was no reference to coach travel in Putting
Passengers First. This lack of integration is surprising, given the fact that the principal
operator of long distance coaches (National Express) also has local bus operations, metro
<strong>and</strong> rail franchises. Only a h<strong>and</strong>ful of witnesses commented at all on coach issues, with the
general consensus being summed up by Peter Tomlinson of Iosis Associates:
17 Ev 168
18 Local Transport Today 480, 25 October 2007, p14
19 Q86 [Mr Dobbs]
20 Q 440
21 Department for Transport: SB (07) 22: Public Transport Statistics Bulletin GB: 2007 Edition, p50
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