Hopping Mad

Most of the time, at least, the good people at Transport for London really understand how public transport needs to work. (I've got some examples of when it doesn't work, which I'll show you again.) They've announced a new innovation this week, called the Hopper fare. I don't know how it would work in practice, but here's the blurb from the TfL website:

Make a journey using pay as you go (contactless or Oyster) on a bus or tram, and you can now make unlimited bus and tram journeys for free within one hour of first touching in.
Touch in using the same card on all the bus and tram journeys you make and the free fares will be applied automatically.
Hopper fares apply to all pay as you go journeys.
You can now travel on Tube, DLR, London Overground, TfL Rail, Emirates Air Line, River Bus or National Rail services between Hopper journeys, and Hopper fares will still apply.
Hopper fares will not apply if your Oyster card has a negative pay as you go balance after the first journey. If you clear the negative balance within one hour of touching in, subsequent journeys made within the hour will still be free.
Fares for bus and tram journeys are shown in our fares tables.

I've bored you with tales of the Oyster card before. I've often suggested that something like that needs to be rolled out across Wales, allowing passengers to switch between the trains and the buses operated by many different companies. If including the whole of Wales is impractical, then we could start by rolling out an Oyster-style card (the Leek? the Daffodil? the Lamb and Laverbread?) across the so-called Cardiff City Region.

Take, for example, the journey from Glynneath to Cardiff. At present, that involves a bus to Aberdare (forty minutes), followed by the train (just over an hour). A day ticket from Glynneath to Aberdare is actually more expensive than an Aberdare Day Rider, which currently weighs in at a fiver. On top of that you have to buy a rail ticket, which is another eight quid or so.

Now, try to imagine a card which you could top up in advance – either at a PayPoint shop, or online, or at the railway station. This card would take you from bus to train at no extra cost. It would save you time and money, because you wouldn't be fiddling about with change most of the time. And the maximum you'd pay would be capped, depending on how far you travelled.

Can you picture that, ladies and gentlemen? Well, brace yourselves for a shock. That's exactly what the Oyster card does!

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a return journey to Cardiff from the terminus (Merthyr, Aberdare, Treherbert, Rhymney, Maesteg, Ebbw Vale) costs £8.00. With an Oyster-style scheme, the connecting bus services at either end would also be included – until you hit the daily cap, at which point you wouldn't pay any more. You could go from (say) Glynneath to (say) Cardiff Gate, with your Stagecoach bus journey, your Arriva train journey, and your Cardiff Bus journey, all on one capped ticket.

Here's an example. Let's say the daily cap was £12.50. You could catch a bus from Glynneath to Aberdare, then a train to Cardiff, then a bus out to the suburbs. You'd pay £12.50 instead of £16.50 and a bit. You wouldn't need your Stagecoach Megarider and your weekly train ticket and your iff card. One handy piece of plastic would cover the whole journey from start to finish. A weekly ticket would build in a bigger discount, and a monthly a bigger discount again.

On the other hand, if you travelled from my bus stop to Cardiff, you'd pay for the bus ticket and the train ticket as normal: £9.50 or so. If you didn't catch the bus home for any reason, then you wouldn't spend any more. Of course, weekly and monthly tickets would be available as well, incentivising people to leave the car at home and use public transport.

All this, needless to say, would be contingent on a decent public service in the first place. At present there's no point in doing the Glynneath to Cardiff Gate journey by any means other the car. The first bus to Aberdare doesn't leave until 0735, arriving at 0815. That's an 8.30 a.m. start in Cardiff city centre (or even a 9.00 start) out of the window to begin with. And the last bus back to Glynneath leaves Aberdare at 1750.

I'll explore this subject in more detail next time. Suffice to say that the Hopper fare is just one example of how public transport should work, and (at present) the Cardiff City Region is an awful warning of what happens when it doesn't.