The move from driving a car to using the bus

[whole diary]

[stuving]

That area was not unique, and recent media coverage suggests it is going to get worse. By coincidence today I was told that Reading Buses get 80p for older persons pass trip. Gone up from 60p a few years ago. In a place like Reading that might be sustainable with all the other fare payers, but probably a very different situation in rural areas.

The ENCTS^▸ (English National Concessionary Travel Scheme. Bus passes for senior/disabled persons) payment per ride is worked out for each authority area, so as theoretically (and it is very much based on economic theory) to give operators no gain or loss due to the scheme. It should be based on operator's fares and costs and usage data, but how often it is updated I'm not sure (each LTA^▸ (Local Transport Authority) works out its own numbers).

[TaplowGreen]

Just wondering on the same principle, why not extend free travel for "pensioners" to the railways too?

There are an awful lot of people who have parents living a fair distance away (myself included), who are perhaps not so confident when it comes to driving long distances due to age etc, but would like to visit family and grandchildren, or travel long distance for other reasons and local bus passes wouldn't really cut the mustard for those purposes.

Takes cars off the roads and helps older people to travel and keep in touch more easily - how about a publicly funded "train pass" too?

[grahame]

I don't think that our vehicular habits need to be a matter of great secrecy, grahame, and there is a good discussion starting here.

Difficult call .. and now hypothetical as it's been made. 38 members have voted on the new thread and a dozen different people commented and I know that a none-zero number of those would not have posted as openly in public. I have quoted much of the recent discussion here in public onto the thread as that data seeds and cherishes the topic.

The general principle applied in making the call is that there is a proportion of their personal or near-personsal data that members are happy to share with our known "club" of perhaps 400 who have established themselves as responsible members by making a certain number of posts without ringing alarm bells, but do not want to share with the 6,000 people who happen to visit the site, uncontrolled, each month and who can easily copy, paste, quote, misuse that information in any way they wish.

Your personal story / follow up is an excellent one to follow up the conversation and (give me  a few minutes to put on a pot of coffee) I will follow it up, quoted, in frequent posters now.