Okay, now do something about how insanely expensive train tickets are. This is a good step forwards, but I feel way more people rely on the train to travel than busses.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Train tickets are priced, among other things, to manage demand and prevent overcrowding. Increasing capacity is a long-term and high-cost process (see HS2) and the government doesn’t have that sort of time or money.
Noooo! Now by cycling to work I am only saving £20 a week rather than £30 a week!
Yay!
Be better if it was free though.
Free would definitely be better, but requires solving other problems in lockstep. E.g. homeless people using the busses as a place to exist/stay warm. It disrupts the bus as a function.
A small (deliberately) token fee gets the best compromise. It's akin to charging 10p for a plastic bag. For most people 10p isn't enough to be problematic, in the grand scheme of things. It does massively reduce frivolous usage.
I would prefer pushing it down to £1 return, or even lower, but £2/trip is still better than the current option.
Oh, and just to clarify I also definitely believe we should be using taxes to give homeless etc somewhere better to exist. The busses/trains/underground are not the place for that to happen.
I could see it being justified as a progressive measure to increase capacity. Lower the prices , increase demand and get more people on the bus paying fares that you can use to expand service to meet the new demand. Once the infrastructure is built to handle the increased demand then you can make it free.
Vs. if you make it free right away demand spikes with no resources to increase capacity.
Small steps :)
There has been research done into this, showing that free stuff can exhaust a resource like this much faster. E.g. cheap tickets could get drivers out of their cars, but not the people who'd walk two blocks. Plenty of countries with free public transport that seem to work just fine, but you might end up happier with cheap public transports rather than entirely free buses. Not having to deal with tickets would be really nice though, for everyone involved.
Link it
The entire municipality of Fredericia has free busses and literally none of the problems everyone keeps describing has happened.
Right, I live in a town where the only public transit are buses which are totally free, it's excellent and nobody is "exhausting the resources" or whatever.
Unfortunately he’s paying for it by scrapping £500m of foreign aid aimed at climate change mitigation.
Do you have a link? Because that turns this minor win into a distraction tactic. I knew this guy was gonna be more centralist than we need but I thought he'd at least fake it for a couple of quarters.
Sounds like it won't be long before he's booted too if this is true.
This action to ease the cost of living is being funded by savings from reprioritising the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s budget, including by switching funding for international climate from grants to loans.
Thank you so much! I'd like to know more of the details on what reprioritizing means in this context, I'm not certain a dollar off of fares is equivalent to some meaningful green energy projects but at least according to this article they're simply moving from grants to loans which on its surface isn't the worst thing. I think grants make more projects possible regardless of their economic feasibility, while loans are potentially more self-sufficient and reoccurring.
I'd also have liked to see a push for more trains, trams, and street cars. Buses seem to me to be the worst of public transit options. But I'm happy they're getting more long term funding. Roads are a plight but if it helps the UK people value public transit more that's a good thing in my book.
The sorts of countries involved can’t necessarily afford the loans. This is going to have a big negative impact in the developing world.
This might do a lot of good towards climate change mitigation, I get it it sucks for whoever was receiving the foreign aid but it's not an entirely bad thing.
I wonder if a study can be conducted of where we could invest having the best impact for the world, but also we have to consider governments are naturally (and should be) incentivized to invest in their own communities.
Anyways, it's a difficult position to just be against or for this proposal, there's an argument to be made about social justice and how the global south will bare the worst consequences for climate change while having contributed the least to it.
Is this guy also going to tax the rich? That would be a game changer. #TaxWealthNotWork !twnw@fedia.io
Enjoy the guy as long as he lasts.
This is where chicago is at about. little over 2 bucks a ride. Its a pretty good compromise between having it cost something but for it to be not to much and low enough that its a great option cost wise. I honestly don't get why so many people don't use it but then again many do. im talking the metro to.
1.1 million people use Chicago transit every day. I don't think a lack of ridership is the issue. It's all the space that's been given entirely over to cars (looking at you, Lake Shore Drive, monument to pestilence that you are)
Im not really pointing out an issue. Honestly LSD would be hard to get rid of but I could see it taken away from cars. Would be a great cooridoor and line park. Would like to see the whole downtown area bounded by the lake, the river, and congress made car free. Just ambulances, busses, and shipping trucks allowed. LSD would need to have exits and cross streets removed in that case. No getting off in that area. If I had one thing it would be that.
I'm confused, why does the measure cost money to the government? Is the government going to pay the remainder?
I'm confused, did you think busses are free to operate?
Ofc not, see other reply
Very likely, when you cap the price of something you have to pay the difference, since the public transport is run by private company. Even if it's government owned company, they still have to pay people that run the company so it will still cost the government if the fare is lower than the cost of running the bus service.
If it was were public I'd understand that.
But if it's private, you're basically increasing demand on the service by artificially lowering the price, without addressing potential overcharges... I guess it's still OK because you reduce traffic and end up saving elsewhere, and you can bargain the price collectively. Still I would prefer that bargaining to happen before the measure is put in place and you start giving away public money to a private company
That's very much the point. There's more to the cost/benefit ratio than just ticket price and the provider's profit margins. There's also the cost to the public of people not using buses: road congestion, which adds to everyone's commute times; the productivity impact of those longer commutes; the need for parking spaces when cars are used; the cost of that parking; the opportunity cost of those parking lots not being used for something else more socially valuable such as housing; the externalities such as additional noise, pollution and fatal accidents; the reduced disposable income that results from more costly (at point of use) options.
Most bus routes are already subsidised, as demand is often low in a rural area. Maybe there’s enough demand for a couple of services per day, but that’s inconvenient. Subsidies mandate minumum service levels, but don’t cover the full operating costs, so fares are necessary.
£2 per journey is not usually enough to cover costs, so the remainder is paid as another subsidy.
There's also a vicious cycle where, especially on rural routes, buses are infrequent, which creates a deterrent to using them at all, which in turn depresses ridership. You're not likely to make a bus trip into town to do some shopping if you can't get back home for eight hours, and you're not going to commute to work by bus if the only bus arrives at the needed destination three hours before you start work.
Hopefully the increase in popularity will reduce per-person costs and at that point the government can do collective bargaining.
Thanks for the replies