Il percorso degli autobus rurali costa £ 180 per passeggero per correre
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zrdzzk1jo
di grapplinggigahertz
Il percorso degli autobus rurali costa £ 180 per passeggero per correre
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zrdzzk1jo
di grapplinggigahertz
28 commenti
No doubt my bus, which takes 100,000+ passengers per year, is the one that’s axed.
That’s not too surprising to me.
Not all bus routes are meant to be profitable. If we go down the route of public transport only where it’s very very popular, we end up with tons of areas of the country that can’t “afford” public transport.
Rural public transport is a nice thing to have, but yes it costs money.
I’d rather not become a country where owning a car is mandatory from like 16 because you can’t get anywhere unless you live in a city.
Where exactly do you draw the line?
If public transport is supposed to be irrelevant in terms of profit, why shouldn’t this be allowed?
Or do we draw the line somewhere? If so, where?
Is this the part where we have a knee-jerk reaction and get behind cuts to public services?
Lime bikes etc would actually be really useful in rural areas instead of clogging up city streets
> The number 15 between Haslingfield, Cambridgeshire and Royston, Hertfordshire, cost £50,668.61 in the year to April 2025 and carried 281 passengers.
r/slownewsday – underutilized service has high cost per head.
Just another way to clear the country side of plebs with no money. Leave it for the rich and upper middle class who don’t need *public transport* yuck!
And the urban routes will cost pennies per passenger.
It all evens out.
I do wonder if spending a bit more on rural bus services might actually reduce the cost per passenger in the long run. Where I grew up, where my parents still live, there was a bus service, but it was so infrequent and unreliable that no one could actually use it day to day. Everyone ended up needing a car, and most kids got mopeds as soon as they turned 16 just so they could leave the village.
If the service had been more frequent and dependable, I would have happily used it to get to and from work. But the last bus left the local town centre at 5 pm, so if you had a normal 9 to 5 job, you had already missed it.
It is the actual cost or does it include profit margins and retrun on investment for shareholders and the council is tanking those.
Not all bus routes are supposed to be profitable and a model for making profit in such essential thing should be banned
I want self driving cars so this will be a problem of the past. And I can go drink all the time.
The article doesn’t make clear whether or not this is the nett cost after taking into account the fares being charged.
How do people normally make it out of rural areas if they don’t have connections and are not rich? Is it through education? Use student loans to move out for university and never return?
I can’t imagine facing this obstacle growing up as someone that lives in the suburbs of a city.
> The report said it was also investigating why annual passenger numbers on the **once-weekly number 15 bus** had dropped from 400 to 281 in a year.
How exactly does a bus service that only runs 52 times a year cost £50k to run. Surely it should be a bus and driver that are running other routes through the rest of the week and therefore the cost of running it should be 1/7th of the total cost of a bus (driver salary, insurance, maintenance and fuel).
And they are investigating why passenger numbers have fallen, perhaps it’s because a once-weekly bus service is only one step up from a chocolate tea pot in usefulness.
They should use minibuses. It would reduce the cost markedly. Would likely still be unprofitable
This bus only runs once a week on a Wednesday morning, there and back again: https://bustimes.org/services/15-st-ives-over-2
Obviously the utility of a service like that is incredibly limited, but it’ll be a vital lifeline for those who do use it. Without a regular, reliable service you’re never going to get large numbers of travellers. Its just not feasible for workers, school kids and leisure travellers who live along the route to actually use a bus like this.
There was a bus route where i grew up that got axed (then turned into a crappy DRT) due to a local authority pulling funding for it, yet ironically, one of the villages it served had enough demand to support a train station with i believe 1tph each way. It just feels like alot of local authorites want to axe rural buses or run them into the ground sometimes because they can’t make money (which shouldn’t be the goal of public transit whatsoever; it’s a public service)
As someone who grew up in bumfuck nowhere, where the buses in to town or to my friends places were basically non existent, I celebrate this.
My entire teenage years were spent basically twiddling my thumbs because we were poor, had no transport and nothing to do or anywhere to go. The saving grace was the very rare occasion a bus would actually show up and take me to my friends place.
Yeah sure. Now tell me about the total public spend per capita of inner city London workers, instead of picking on rural people that just need a bus to get to town.
This is the problem.
Rural areas mention how they lack sufficient transport and become isolated. Yet buses, demand responsive transport and even taxis are put on and people don’t use them. Leading to huge subsidies needed per passenger to make it work, which are unsustainable given local government funding.
So they are cut. For 90%+ of rural residents this is no problem as they have a car or can get a lift. But for the few who really need them – usually the elderly who cannot drive or low paid agricultural workers – they get screwed.
And to cap it all off, we cannot plan this as a network as most of the buses are run privately, its extremely difficult to integrate fares and services without being accused of collusion, and while franchising is going good guns in larger cities the rural areas cannot afford it and so get screwed over.
Transport planning in this country really needs to be rebooted.
>The report said it was also investigating why annual passenger numbers on the once-weekly number 15 bus had dropped from 400 to 281 in a year.
I’m not a transport expert so I’m just throwing ideas out. Is it possible that no one is going to rely on a once-weekly bus service unless they have no choice, and that might cause low passenger numbers?
Presumably they mean per passenger journey rather than per passenger?
“Essential Public service Costs Money”
There we are, fixed the headline 👍
Public transport shouldn’t just be about profit, it’s about accessibility for everyone, even if some routes aren’t packed. That said, £180 per passenger does seem wild when other vital routes are getting cut left and right. There’s gotta be a smarter way to balance service with sustainability.
Society should accept a cost to help people that need it.
BBC not explaining network effects here is a bit of a missed opportunity to educate the reader.
The very fact that the bus has these sorts of routes and goes to more places may be what’s driving more people to use it in the first place.
Another example would be free delivery on parcels. If you live in a remote area, it’s possible a business loses money on providing you, specifically, with free delivery… But the very fact that they provide free delivery is what’s driving more sales to the people who are profitable to deliver to.
Its like a loss leader, something you provide to enhance the overall brand.
It is either build more roads so people can drive easily or build more apartments so public transport can be run easily. Cant do both simultaneously.
Yeah this is how public transportation franchising works, the idea is that you sell packages of both profitable and unprofitable routes to private companies. The companies lose the franchise if they refuse to provide a certain level of coverage on the bad routes.