What Should A Bus Ticket Cost?

AAlmost every argument about urban transport narrows in the end to a single figure: the price printed on the ticket. Councils defend increases as the price of solvency, opponents denounce them as a tax on people with no alternative, and both sides behave as though the number of passengers rose and fell with that figure alone. The habit is reinforced by the accounting. Transport authorities are judged on the farebox ratio, the share of operating costs recovered from passengers, and a ratio that slips below the level written into the funding agreement, usually somewhere near 40 per cent, brings an inquiry within weeks. Nothing similar happens when a route becomes slower or less punctual, because no comparable number exists. What is measured therefore becomes what is argued about, and the fare, visible, printed and easy to change overnight, has kept its place at the centre of a debate in which, on the evidence of the past decade, it may not deserve to stand.

BThe most instructive test of that suspicion came from an accident of scheduling. Between 2014 and 2018 two comparable cities in the same region spent almost identical sums on their bus networks but spent them differently: Karnholm reduced every fare by roughly a third, while Estbury left prices untouched and put the money into running more buses along the same routes. Ines Vaquero, an economist at the Cordera School of Transport Studies, followed both. Karnholm's ridership rose by 6 per cent across the four years; Estbury's rose by 19 per cent, and the gap between them widened rather than closed as the period went on. Vaquero's interpretation is that a passenger buys a journey rather than a ticket, and that the larger part of what a journey costs is time, above all the time spent waiting, which is unproductive and feels longer than it is. Cutting a fare, she contends, reduces the smaller half of the price.

CDaniel Ashworth, at the Merrow Institute, is not persuaded that the comparison is as clean as it looks. Estbury, he points out, had replaced two-thirds of its fleet shortly before the period began and had a denser street pattern, so its buses were both newer and less often delayed for reasons that had nothing to do with how frequently they ran; moreover 19 of every 100 additional passengers there travelled on just five corridors rebuilt in the same years. Vaquero's result, he maintains, may record the effect of those corridors rather than of the timetable. His reanalysis, however, rests on eleven months of ticketing data and leaves out school travel altogether, which in Estbury accounts for a fifth of morning boardings. Ashworth concedes that the direction of the finding survives his corrections; what he questions is its size. Even his own estimate leaves frequency ahead of price.

DA later paper from Vaquero's group qualifies the finding in a way that matters more for policy than either headline. Extra buses change behaviour, they argue, chiefly by removing the need to consult a timetable, and that effect appears only once a route carries at least six buses an hour; below that threshold passengers plan their day around the service, and one more bus merely shortens a wait for which they had already prepared. On the thinner routes examined, those with three or four departures an hour, a fare reduction of a third did more for ridership than a comparable sum spent on frequency, although neither achieved a great deal. The practical implication is uncomfortable for a councillor. Money spent on frequency works best where the service is already good, which is seldom where the political pressure is strongest.

EFares also decide who travels, and here the arithmetic runs the other way. A flat fare, the simplest system to administer and the one passengers say they prefer, charges the same for two stops as for twenty, and in most cities the households with the lowest incomes make the shortest journeys, so such a fare takes a larger share of a small income than of a large one. Pricing by distance corrects that, but it penalises exactly the households pushed to the edge of a city by the cost of housing, among whom a long commute is not a choice. Neither system is fair in any simple sense; each is unfair to a different group. Targeted discounts sidestep the dilemma, and the half-price pass introduced in Karnholm in 2019 for holders of a means-tested benefit reached 71 per cent of those eligible, well above the 43 per cent typical of schemes that require an application form.

FWhere the evidence points is not towards a cheaper ticket or a dearer one but towards a different question. The useful thing to ask of any proposed fare change is what else the same money could buy, and for most networks the honest answer, on Vaquero's figures as corrected by Ashworth, is more buses on the routes that already carry many. That answer is politically unattractive, since it offers nothing immediate to the passengers who complain loudest, and it is easily misread as a case for leaving fares where they are. It is not. Fares remain the instrument for deciding who can afford to travel, which is a different problem from deciding how many people travel, and the two are confused so routinely that the confusion has been built into the way transport departments report what they have achieved.