Hassle free commute to work? Sharing your journey with music playing, pot smoking, urinating teens.. (Public Transport in general)

Member Name: SapphireSunflowr

Product:	Public Transport in general
Date:	22/02/09 (47 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can be convinient when it turns up, and is a lot cheaper than owning car despite the rises.

Disadvantages: Becomin more expensive , and the service is terrible on many counts.

In the new year, our local bus service (Travel West Midlands) did their usual price increase - this time making a single ticket jump from £1.50 to £1.70 and a day ticket from £3.30. Given that in many cases petrol prices are set to fall, I cannot see any reason or justification for such high prices when the service that they provide is so dismal. We need to get more people on public transport for the environmental effect they have, but why on earth would people who can (and can afford to) drive choose this option at the moment? I believe that bus companies should not be allowed to automatically raise their prices unless there is also a vast increase in the reliability and quality of the service they provide. There are two main reasons that I begrudge paying such a high price for my bus fare, and here they are:

My first rant is the classic one - buses never, ever run on time. However early I leave the house to try counter balance the fact that the bus I need *will* be missed out, the buses never fail to thwart my attempts to be on time. I've been late for work, for university, once I even left the house over an hour early so I could do some shopping before work, and ended up in town only a few minutes before my shift started - and this from a service that is supposed to run every 15 minutes or less! It's totally ridiculous, and a major reason why no one with a car who needed to actually get to places on time could rely on public transport. It cannot be that hard to keep buses running no more than a few minutes off schedule, the pattern of traffic doesn't change that much each day that the companies couldn't predict how long a route is likely to take at various times.

Secondly, there's the important fact that thanks to anti social behaviour, buses are not very nice places to be and even not very safe. With kids playing horrible music, throwing, shouting, smoking cigarettes and drugs, even urinating (yep, I've seen this twice), and stories of stabbings on buses when passengers have dared to stand up to them, it's a constant shadow. I know this isn't the bus company's direct fault, but they do nothing to combat this problem on their buses. They employ police inspectors to do regular random bus pass checks every so often - with the extra 10% they're getting from us this year is it too much to ask that they get some officials on the buses handing out fines and cautions to the people who make bus travel such a horrible experience? My other half got hassles on the bus by a group of kids, and as he got off the bus driver asked him if he was alright, said he could see what was happening on the mirrors and where were the inspectors when you needed them? I can't blame the drivers for not wanting to get involved, its not their job or their risk to take, but it angers me that the bus companies won't take any responsibility for our safety and comfort when travelling on their service.

Unfortunately, I can't drive and can't afford to if I could, so I basically have no choice about taking public transport. I think the bus companies know this - however bad the service gets, they'll have a core group of customers who just don't have a choice. However with concerns over global warming and pollution in general, they really need to be attracting new customers onto public transport - and pushing up prices in a recession when the service is abysmal is not the way to do it.

Summary: Fingers crossed my numbers come up on the lottery, eh?