(14 Nov 2022, 9:49 pm)Adrian wrote It's not just the poor performance, it's on top of permanent service cuts and temporary reduced timetables (whilst accepting the reasons for those). The fact is that customers are absolutely furious with bus services at the moment, and I don't think confidence in public transport in general has been any lower than it is right now. Some of that within operators controls, some of it outside. This is just another kick in the teeth.

Costs are of course increasing for businesses everywhere, as is the end-product to consumers, but businesses need consumers more than the consumers need a business.

As I said in the GNE thread at the time, it feels that operators are determined to nail shut their own coffin here.

As I said in my initial post, I think the timing of the rises is ridiculous. 

That said, the tables you produced seem to suggest most of the increases are around 9-10% so they're pretty much bang on what would be expected with the current rate of inflation. A decent chunk of the people I know (across multiple industries and levels of seniority) have wages increasing pretty much in line with that, so it's possible that only a handful will actually be massively out of pocket. Obviously you'd also expect unions to be fighting for around the same percentage for bus drivers, which is almost guaranteed to be one of the driving factors behind this raise. 

You then have the constant rise of both diesel costs and gas/electricity costs. Couple that to increasing costs in maintenance, both with staffing cost and parts, and office based costs. 

I'd hope you agree that staff for these companies should be paid properly, so I don't personally see a huge amount of options other than raising fares to help pay for that.