Plusbus

[whole diary]

[basset44]

Hi All,

I have a season ticket for travel between Trefforest and Cardiff and yesterday I needed to use the bus in Cardiff. So I looked at the plusbus site and thought I ask at the station about buying a Ticket.

The person at the Trefforest did not know if I could just buy the ticket and suggested I checked at Cardiff and when I arrived at Cardiff there was a queue so i thought I know where I could get the answer?

 1 If you have a season ticket for travel from A to B can you buy a plubus ticket?

 2 Are plusbus tickets only valid for destination or could you buy a ticket say from Cardiff to Bristol with plusbus valid at both destination's ?

Thanks

Basset

[inspector_blakey]

1. Yes - all you need to do to buy a PlusBus ticket at your destination is show your valid rail ticket to the booking office, then they will sell you the additional ticket (which will say, for eaxmple, from "Oxford" to "Oxford+Bus"). You can buy a season ticket that includes PlusBus if you use it every day, or just buy a day PlusBus ticket on odd occasions if that suits you better.

2. You can buy PlusBus at both origin and destination. The problem is that a bit of planning is required since PlusBus tickets are only available from stations in conjunction with a rail ticket, and are NOT available from bus drivers. So to take your example you could purchase a ticket from Cardiff+bus to Bristol+Bus and have the use of buses at both ends of the journey.

[basset44]

Thanks Inspector_Blakey,

Its best to know the facts, armed with this information I will ask for a Cardiff Plusbus next time I go to use the bus.

I will also try buying Cardiff+Bus to Bristol+Bus

Basset

[PTF62]

Plusbus has always struck me as one of those things that is a damned good idea, but completely let down by implementation.

As mentioned earlier, you can buy a Plusbus ticket to take you to the station, but you have to go to the station to buy it? OK if you are regular traveler and plan ahead, but utterly useless for the occasional traveler. Would it be possible to design a more stupid system?

[matt473]

It's also problematic that Plusbus also seems to only operate in Urban areas. A lost opporunity if I'm honest as people in rural areas could benefit just as much, if not more from a Plusnbus scheme yet do not have access to one

[Brucey]

It's also problematic that Plusbus also seems to only operate in Urban areas. A lost opporunity if I'm honest as people in rural areas could benefit just as much, if not more from a Plusnbus scheme yet do not have access to one

I agree.  I regularly travel to Cosham station, which is outside Portsmouth.  The only Plusbus tickets available are Portsmouth & Southsea + Bus or Portsmouth Harbour + Bus.  The Plusbus zone on both of these tickets includes Cosham station but there is no Cosham + Bus available.  The area in which the ticket can be used is also too small as it only covers Portsea Island and none of the outskirts.

[vacman]

you can buy plus bus seasons aswell, i.e. turo to truro+bus

[paul7575]

It's also problematic that Plusbus also seems to only operate in Urban areas. A lost opporunity if I'm honest as people in rural areas could benefit just as much, if not more from a Plusnbus scheme yet do not have access to one

I agree.  I regularly travel to Cosham station, which is outside Portsmouth.  The only Plusbus tickets available are Portsmouth & Southsea + Bus or Portsmouth Harbour + Bus.  The Plusbus zone on both of these tickets includes Cosham station but there is no Cosham + Bus available.  The area in which the ticket can be used is also too small as it only covers Portsea Island and none of the outskirts.

According to the plusbus site, the 'Portsmouth plusbus area' can't really go any further east or west, because it comes up against Havant or Fareham plusbus areas. We were discussing this a week or so back in the SWT^▸ (South West Trains) yahoo group, where exactly the same problem exists that you can't get a Portchester plusbus, as it is part of the Fareham area, as is Swanwick.  I can only assume as the areas get bigger, the bus company (or bus companies) in the locality would want the plusbus price to rise?

Difficult to see what the answer to this is, but making either adjacent area available (at somewhere like Portchester which appears to be on the boundary) could make sense though. Our earlier discussion suggested the Portsmouth area is also available at Fratton, so can't see any major issues with Portsmouth being available at Cosham as well?

What I do suspect, is that this is entirely a 'bus product', and the availability is purely down to the bus company(ies) in an area. As far as I can see the values of sales, and therefore any commision due, are probably an irrelevance to most TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) in comparison to rail tickets, so any improvements to availability would need to be addressed towards the bus companies...

Paul

[RailCornwall]

I wonder what the maximum number of stations within a single plusbus area is ... Falmouth has four - FAL, FMT, PNM and PYN.

[TerminalJunkie]

Exeter has eight - St Davids, Central, St Thomas, St James Park, Polsloe Bridge, Digby and Sowton, Topsham and Pinhoe.

[Lee]

I regularly travel to Cosham station, which is outside Portsmouth.

I regularly travel from Cosham, so our paths have probably crossed on a number of occasions 

[thetrout]

From my experience obtaining a PlusBus even on First Class tickets has never been too much of a hassle, even at the destination station... However it's a shame that can't be said for the Freedom Pass...

When I got on the #73 In Bristol, I wanted a Freedom Pass Ticket to use in Bath as well as Bristol, however the driver had absolutely no clue what I was on about and let me travel ticketless down to the centre of Bristol and said I could probably buy the ticket on the #8/9 (that could have been interesting to explain to an RPI^▸ (Revenue Protection Inspector (or Retail Price Index, depending on the context)) )

I did get the #8 and the bus driver had a vague idea of what I wanted and sold me a Freedom Pass... trouble was, he only sold me the Bristol Zone Only ticket... But I don't know what was more worrying, the fact I only noticed after I completed my Journey in Bath, or the fact that an FGW^▸ (First Great Western) Ticket Collector, Gateline Assistant and 3 Bus Drivers failed to also notice that I didn't have a valid ticket...

Now by saying this i'm not encouraging not having a valid ticket, as if somebody had pointed it out to me, I would have been more than happy to pay the excess, and to this day I probably wouldn't have noticed until my friend pointed out to me on the ticket that it said Bristol Zone Only...! When we then checked the First Group website, the price I had paid was indeed a Bristol Zone Only ticket...

[Tim]

Plusbus has always struck me as one of those things that is a damned good idea, but completely let down by implementation.

It is better than nothing, but the real challenger for proper integration would be to get the timetables sorted so that buses and trains connect.  Integratingteh fares is the easy bit and makes it slightly easier and cheaper for those who already use teh services but integrating timetables woudl be teh thing to attract new users

[paul7575]

Makes a great deal of sense if the bus frequency and train frequency are the same, and both tending to the low end of the scale, eg 1 or 2 bus or train per hour max.

Take Fareham as an example - 5 tph off peak each way at a through station, so 10 tph as far as arrivals and departures are concerned. So little point in coordination, esp if you are only trying to get to the town centre, which is a fair walk if elderly or a pushchair or luggage is involved, as buses pass reasonably frequently.

But my rural area north of Fareham only has one bus per hour, so although it (The 69 - Winchester Rly Stn -  Fareham Rly Stn via Bishops Waltham) does go to two main stations  - there is no point in coordinating it with any of the trains, at either end of its route.

Paul

[inspector_blakey]

Only being able to buy PlusBus tickets at stations with a rail ticket and not on buses is an irritation, but actually quite logical when you think about it. After all, it can technically only be bought in conjunction with a valid rail ticket - in many cases the tickets are so cheap compared to a local bus "day rover" (in fact, in Oxford the PlusBus ticket used to cost me less than a single bus ticket home from the station, so I used it all the time!) that there would no doubt be plenty of people "abusing" the system by purchasing the ticket when they had no intention of making a rail journey.