Only had a skim through the thread, but I don't think anyone has mentioned that if the governments plan to go down the electric car route comes to fruition, in a few short years many more people wont be able to afford a car and will be pushed towards public transport.

We all welcome improvements, and a lot of what they want to do has been around a while and is overdue to be rolled out further I think. Multi-operator tickets? Explorers. Bus/train combined? Plusbus. Local authorites working together makes sense, as does more bus information, next stop announcements and so on.

I'm not sure why Andy Street, the mayor for the West Midlands, was quoted in the article - his part of the world already has a very good public transport network, with buses, trams and trains all over the place. To a lesser extent, same here in places served by the tyne and wear metro.

I hope they dont lose sight of the main issues, which in my opinion is getting buses to people who arent served well or at all, and definately more on an evening and sunday.

I'd also start to charge the ENCTS pass holders a small, token fare per journey to put some money back into the system. It probably wont happen, but hey, a lot of this may not happen!