h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3175003.stm

"Peter Hendy said the ticket machines will enable passengers to buy £1 single journey tickets or £2 one-day passes."

Does it really cost a minimum of £1 to travel on a London bus these days?

What about kids ?

Costs on London buses are 70p for a journey outside Zone 1 (central London) or £1 for any journey that goes into or out of Zone 1. Child fares are a flat rate of 40p.

Thats not too bad. I was bussing around glasgow yesterday - £2 per trip.

That's out-bloody-rageous! How on earth are you going to encourage people to leave their cars at home and use public transport with fares like that?

Acid override - you can get an all day bus ticket in Glasgow for just over two quid. What were you travelling on?!?

West Midlands fares are something like £2-20 all day ticket, but here the problem is the total lack of buses.

Its a lottery if one will turn up or not.

Just for comparison, Edmonton's (Canada) adult transit fair is $2.00, which I figure works out to a little over one British pound. This entitles the rider to 90 minutes on any combination of busses or LRT trains (subway). For most purposes, I find, 90 minutes is enough for a round trip if things are planned carefully. In any case, $4.00 for an extended round trip to some places (Downtown, University, Hospital Emergency Rooms) is cheaper than the parking fee would be. Also, at certain impossible to remember times the LRT is free in the downtown core.

I would pay the equivalent of about 1 pound here in NZ if i had a pound key on my keyboard!

This is to get into the CBD from my house - by car a 30 min drive at rush hour, 20 mins other times. Students, the elderly, the blind, the disabled etc are all subsidised by local rates (the buses are owned and run by the multinational Stagecoach ) so they pay less.

It is relatively expensive here - privatising the public transport was supposed to keep prices down but the inevitable monopoly, along with local authorities dominated by the right, have certainly not delivered on the cheaper buses promise.

In addition, Auckland is so spread out that it costs quite a lot to go anywhere, especially as you will have to catch several different buses. There are busabout passes, where you pay (i think $7) and you can go anywhere you like (on one bus company), but you have to travel between 10am and 4pm... The buses are so slow and circuitous in their routes that you wouldn't have time to do anything but sit on the bus!

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The bus service here in Austin is pretty damn good for a town in Texas. They don't run anywhere near as frequently as I'm used to in London - mostly every 20-30 minutes on a weekday and 30-40 minutes (or not at all) in the evening and at weekends, but it's cheap. Fifty cents a trip, which also gets me a transfer that last for 90 minutes and which I can use on two more buses, so I too can do a round trip on one fare if I plan it right.

I can also get a book of prepaid tickets which get me half price travel, and still allow me to use a transfer, so I can go downtown and get back home for 25c. Not bad.

But trying to get most Texans out of their car and onto a bus is like trying to get blood out of a stone

Actually you can pay a mere 65p per journey anywhere in London, including on night buses, if you buy a book of six Saver tickets (available at all good newsagents). I think that's pretty good.

So does everyone else, which means that all good newsagents often run out of Saver books as people buy ten at a time!

If your bus system is anything at all like it is here in Pa, unless you live right *in* the city and just happen to live on the proper bus route so that you can take a single bus to get to where you need to go, it not only takes several times longer to get where you need to go on a bus, you'll need to spend still more time walking at least several blocks (or several miles) to the bus stop, or from your bus stop to your destination. In addition, you'll pay several times as much for the bus trip as you would for your car for the same trip - and that includes not only gas at the exhorbitant price they're charging for it right now, but the cost of the car (averaged out over the number of car trips you make during the life of the car), upkeep, car insurance, etc.

I've figured out that it would probably take approximately 3 hours to take a bus from my home to the mall, involve at least 2 transfers (one of which involves walking several blocks through downtown to get to the closest bus stop that happens to be where the bus stops that goes to the mall)... a drive that only takes about 10 minutes by car, because there are much more direct routes available.

I have a friend who lived in the city and took the busses to her job at the mall for years. Her bus trip took approximately 1-1/2 hours - but mind you she was already *in* the city, which is where you have to go to catch the only bus that goes to the Mall. She still had to either walk halfway across town to catch that bus, or make a transfer that involved walking several blocks to the proper bus stop and wait 30 minutes for the mall bus to come by, because the routes were timed so that there was no way to make it from the stop where she got off downtown to the one where she caught the mall bus in a more timely fashion.

Is it any wonder we all drive? The public transportation system here seems to be designed to discourage use by anyone who has *any* other means of transportation at their disposal.

"...and that includes not only gas at the exhorbitant price they're charging for it right now"

Sorry Lady Scott, but it always brings a wry to my face when I hear Americans complaining about the 'high' price of petrol Like the Californians I heard not long ago bleating that $2 a gallon (about 1/4 of the price of petrol in most European countries) was outrageous and something should be done about it

It was expensive because it was a night bus (my cousin got into a fistfight after the minimeet and I practically had to drag him home)

Bus prices depend on the social and practical conditions. In birmingham they need to get more people on buses - so the prices are comparitively cheaper. Wheras in some countires where the bus service is efficient or the rate of car ownership is much lower the bus companies can afford to charge more because people prefer to use them.

Everything's relative, Gosho - in this country, gas prices have never been this high before (at least *I* don't recall them being this high before, but then I live under a rock, so don't take anything I say as absolute truth ). I know we're spoiled compared to what European countries have been paying to fill their tanks for ages, but just a couple of weeks ago gas was a good bit cheaper, and a few months ago, gas prices were considerably lower.

If we go back to when I was a kid, gas prices were a mere fraction of what they are now, but that all changed of course in the 70's with the energy crisis.

I realize that the supply and demand of summer vacation time (and the whims of the oil producing countries) affects the price considerably, but some of this is just the gas companies seeing a chance to make more money because everyone seems to be driving a lot more right now, what with the last of vacation season and parents of college age kids needing to move them back to school. You can be pretty certain that the prices will suddenly drop off again, just as soon as all the college kids are back in school and most people have decided it's too cold to go to the beach.

I haven't been on a bus in the UK since July 1996, which, by coincidence happens to the month I bought my first car.

No sorry I tell a lie. I did use the bus once after dropping off and then later picking up my car from a repair garage that happened to be on the other side of town. Nasty experience it was too

I must admit that I too stopped using buses for a while after I passed my driving test (at the age of 29 - and first time, in case you were thinking I'd been trying since I was 17 ), but the traffic in London got so bad I went back to using public transport each and every time I could because I ended up hated driving so much. Bit of a pain really considering I was doing it for a living.

I drove for about a year when I came to here cos I understood that I could do that without taking a Texas driving test, but by then I'd realised that the drivers here make London drivers look like little old ladies on a Sunday outing. Mrs Gosho wants me to take my test now because we're starting to run a little business which involves a lot more running around than just commuting back and forth to work on the bus like I used to, so I reckon I'll have to cave in and do it

Having recrently spent an hour on the M6 (main north south motorway in the UK) I am on the verge of giving up driving lessons adn using public transport forever. We all have public transport horror stories, but city driving (esp in Birmingham) is a complete nightmare.

I spend about £120 pounds a term for a strudent travel card that includes all buses and trains in the county, and it's worth every penny. ALso when I'm delayed on a train you can claim compensation and read a book, I can't do that when i'm delayed in traffic jam.

"...when I'm delayed.. [I can] read a book, I can't do that when i'm delayed in traffic jam."

I think you'll find you can