New years price hikes

yeah the bus fare for even a coupla stops is now £2 up from £1.50 - that is a steep hike... only a coupla years ago it was 70p, then £1, then £1.20 then £1.50 and now £2 - so the latest increase is double what the usual percentage increase is AND is the second increase in less than a year.. and has the service improved??? do you NEED to ask??

Uk fullstop. Salaries are lower here but so are so many costs of living.

Are the TFL price rises to basically force people to get an Oyster? How did Oyster prices rise?

that's what you get for drinking fruity drinks

The cost of living is fuckin madness over here. I have no idea how people could come here, work minimum wage jobs, pay rent, buy food and then have anything to send home as I understand many workers from eastern europe want to do when they come to the UK to work for a year or two.

If people already established and living in the UK can barely afford to meet the costs of living, how the fuck can anyone else be expected to do it, let alone save or send money to their families?

London's just crazy, when i moved there the single bus trip was £1.20, then £1.50 like LW said, now £2 - mental!!! That said despite all it's faults, London's transport system is excellent compared to anything I've experienced anywhere else in the UK, especially Belfast!!!

For the bus it was from 80p to £1
dunno about the tube.

Eastern europeans can save money by living several to a flat. The one across the road from me has 6 in a one bed flat. People who save and send money back usually work crappy hours and accept living conditions we would not.

I think you are prob. right - after holding out for a while, I find myself forced to get a stupid Oyster card now... the diff. between £1 and £2 is just too great... I THINK also the rise was from 70p, not 80p to £1..so the % increase is similar..but yeah the disincentive to get a card has been replaced by a fiscal need for one..

And wow!! the buses in Belfast must be bad!!

Love

LW X

Hi

Same here. It’s a dichotomy between real experience and prevalent belief. Mind, it helps con people into coming here in the first place. We can only hope someone’s got a message back home to let them know the streets aren’t paved with gold after all.

Love

LR

I will take your word for it...i don't wanna be getting too anal, now... so, then a 20% inc. on the Oyster and a 25% for pay-as-you go??? or is from £1.50 to £2 a third increase [terrible at the most basic maths..]

Yeah it IS 25% and a third isn't it?? Not 20% and 25% .. hard to believe I was in the top set in maths at primary school.. then the first thing we did in secondary school was binary.. and I totally freaked and lost the plot for maths totally after...and it is a shame i am scared of binary being a robot fan and all..

btw..just checked the tfl website and they admit the price changes are designed to get peeps switiching to Oyster so at least they are being honest about their motives.. which is refreshing!!!

Jef

Oh yeah I didn't say they admitted their REAL motive is reducing costs..(some hopes... ) just that they admitted the new structure is designed to encourage peeps to switch to Oyster...they said it was to reduce queuing times on buses and at stations..which of course they CAN do ..by having more staff and more services..!!!!

Love

LW X

That would be so cool. Jump the barrier? The skeletons'll come after you.

These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages?

Was it not clear that I was agreeing with Jef??? i was being mildly sarcastic towrds tfl with my "ooh here's a thought..more staff would do the trick.."

btw i got my Oyster today...a sad day...

That is outrageous, they are bastards, but I have to be honest, the public transport infrastructure in London had me near weeping for shear joy when I was down over the summer; I can only dream of a system that good for Glasgow.

In Glasgow it costs £1.35 to travel more than half a dozen stops, £2.55 all day, but only for first. There are a number of competing bus services, some of which ply the same routes. They all have different fares. You can't use tickets from one service for another company's. A number of the bus services are basically gangster outfits. They use a system whereby they get a VAT rebate for every bus bought, only there is no inspection to check if the bus is ever bought. Services then are brutally infrequent.

A fair chunk of the city is simply not covered by any public transport at all (much of the East End for example is an absolute bastard to get to from the North West, where I live), and a fair bit more is only covered during working hours. If you live in the (fucking huge - 10s of thousands of residents) housing estate Drumchapel, in the West, you can't travel into Glasgow on a Saturday evening; there's about one pub in Drumchapel. You work out the logic?

I regularly get a service from St George's Cross to Bearsden for work (it's a distance of about 5/6 miles). I often wait more than an hour and a half for a bus (the longest I waited was about two and half hours). Buses frequently simply don't show up. The service ends around 6pm. Bearsden is hardly the middle of nowhere. I could get a train from Charing Cross to Bearsden but it's prohibitively expensive (it's something like four quid single) and runs only every half hour during peak times and it's also less convenient as I have to walk twenty minutes one side and thirty minutes the other. There is a later bus ran by first which can take me home but that only comes once an hour after about five and then only till about ten o'clock when it finishes. It takes about 50 mins to an hour to travel the distance because it takes the longest possible route.

There are frequent disruptions and changes to both services. Very often price hikes or changes happen, leaving some stops no longer in operation etc. These are never communicated to passengers, so it's quite frequent to find lots of people waiting literally hours for a service (many are so infrequent and unreliable anyway) before giving up, the service being discontinued or the route changed. Most bustops have no timetable information either. First operates a virtual monopoly on most routes but a number of key routes have competing companies; as I've said however many of these are Johnny-come-lately gangster outfits and they are put out of business regularly by First. Once that happens First will tend to abandon the line, as their only aim in running services along it was to ensure their monopoly. They tend just to run services along certain routes where they can guarrantee X numbers of passengers at all times.

The net effect obviously however is that progressively less and less people use public transport. I don't necessarily think First give a shit about that tho as that's not how they make their money (they're the masters of that VAT gangster trick I mentioned, and they're subsidised to the hilt by the City Council); they also run all the trains in Scotland.

In London I never waited more than a few breaths, comparatively, for a bus. Certainly I doubt I'd wait anything like the hour and a half waits I've experienced here. Everything seemed joined up rather than competing. (in Glasgow trains effectively behave like they're competing with buses, even tho First operate the trains on behalf of Strathclyde Passenger Transport), and you had a nifty wee card that meant you didn't have to fuck about with obscure fares and no change systems that always sees you spending even more. It was also much, much cheaper to travel equivalent distances.

I can't wait for fares to go up in Glasgow, as more routes get cancelled...