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Public transport is an enormous problem in the UK outside of London - the prices are very high, and the service is often dreadful. In my home town for instance

Public transport is an enormous problem in the UK outside of London - the prices are very high, and the service is often dreadful. In my home town for instance the local operator regularly cancelled buses without notification, ran late all the time and repeatedly made hugely over the top above-inflation/fuel price fluctuation price rises every year. On more than one occasion they cancelled last buses stranding people. The company would cheat the monitoring of punctuality by having buses wait at certain points along the route (notably the points at which punctuality measures were made) for sometimes 10 - 15 minutes, whereas wherever you actually wanted to catch a bus from you'd often be left waiting 20-30 minutes for a bus to turn up. The bottom line is, if you want to live there + have any kind of quality of life, you have to own + run a car. Full stop. This is pretty well true for anywhere outside of London (not sure about other major cities, however.) A lot of the issue is the monopolistic nature of any bus service, and the lack of teeth of the government regulator. Personally I think it ought to be run as a public service with some means of ensuring quality (ok so that's a tough problem :) or at least improve the regulator's ability to fine companies that fail to provide a decent service + have some oversight over (already subsidised!) fares.

noss 13y ago
The local operator does not seem to be taking enough responsibility for the work they are supposed to do. In Stockholm you can get your taxi fare paid for up to 400 SEK (~40 EUR) if you are running more than 20 minutes late because of schedule problems. (Details might have changed, was a long time ago since I used it.) You submit the bill and have your own money on the line until/if it is reimbursed. Monitoring a bus by having a "tamper proof" GPS logger on the bus seem more reasonable than having points where punctionality is measured. The local operator themselves would obviously not be the ones verifying reimbursement requests against these GPS logs.

noss 13y ago

The local operator does not seem to be taking enough responsibility for the work they are supposed to do. In Stockholm you can get your taxi fare paid for up to 400 SEK (~40 EUR) if you are running more than 20 minutes late because of schedule problems. (Details might have changed, was a long time ago since I used it.) You submit the bill and have your own money on the line until/if it is reimbursed. Monitoring a bus by having a "tamper proof" GPS logger on the bus seem more reasonable than having points where punctionality is measured. The local operator themselves would obviously not be the ones verifying reimbursement requests against these GPS logs.