(24 Nov 2020, 12:25 pm)Jamie M wrote From my experience, single tickets are frequently sold. Now, I don't understand passenger models, but since it's my job to sell them, I'd be inclined to say you're wrong about that.
With the pandemic, there has been a huge pick-up in scanning passes too, which leads me to believe passengers generally either have prepaid cards, codes, or ENCTS or want a single. I'd say the day of the return is dying a death. This would make the TOTO scheme a great tool to pin point where people board/exit in an identifiable way. Currently Ticketer just tells you numbers of people getting on/off, which doesn't give the best picture of journey's being made. You have to assume some passenger's activity, where as a scanning tool, will allow a direct log of journeys - real data vs assumed data.
I personally don't understand why so many people buy single tickets, other than, like I say the £1.20 under 19 ticket. 90% of the time, you'll be going home the same day, and a return is almost guaranteed to be cheaper than two singles. Plus, with return tickets being capped at the price of a day ticket, unless you're only going a couple stops, they rarely make financial sense anyway.
I think a lot of it has to do with people just not knowing how much better value day tickets are. I have a friend that doesn't really know much about the buses so I'm constantly getting asked 'Am I better off getting two singles or a day ticket', and my answer is always 'Just get a day ticket' because a single alone is the best part of £4, and a day ticket for her is only £4.50!
I'm not saying TOTO is bad, in fact I'd absolutely love for it to be rolled out everywhere, I just think isolating the trial to one route is a strange decision.
(24 Nov 2020, 12:52 pm)Andreos1 wrote That's the key to this. Whilst a fleetwide roll out can make a huge difference, seeing it introduced now is pleasing to see.
To think how many changes and revisions there have been based on data (which to be totally frank, is flawed on so many levels), is scary.
People's lives and commutes have been impacted on the assumed data impacting on the vast revisions to services seen in the last 14/15 years.
Definitely, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to roll something like this out.
Something similar has been in operation on the Metro for years now, using the same POP cards that are accepted on GNE services.
While I'm not sure of the technical crap behind the Ticketer machine, I'd assume it's just a software change and an additional RFID reader, so realistically it'll not be that expensive to roll out fleet wide. But then again, an RFID reader that costs at most £1 to make will no doubt cost at least £100 once you'd tacked on the 'commercial use' tax on to it!