(17 Mar 2021, 9:10 am)tvd wrote 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!

Why would that be the case regarding electric cars. The only reason electric cars are still so expensive is because people think they need ~300 miles range, when a battery half the size with half the range would be more than sufficient. Even still, price of batteries is still coming down, I'd estimate in 5 years the price of electric vehicles will be lower than that of an ICE car since the rest of the parts are so much cheaper.

As for ENCTS, I personally think it should be means tested, and treated as the 'benefit' that it is. I don't think that people who can afford to travel by bus should have free bus travel, in the same way I think it should be open to all ages, based on their need rather than age.