Hmmm, so you’re clearly emotive but here goes.

Fair points on the ticket pricing, genuinely. That one's hard to defend. And yeah, safety on the Metro at night is a real issue. But I think you're bundling three separate problems together and blaming franchising for all of them.

Let's start with the tickets. Prices going up isn't unique to the current model, is it? That's just inflation plus operational costs. The Rover was loss-making and unsustainable. Nobody wants to talk about that bit, but it's true. Whether Kim McGuinness communicated it well is another question, but franchising doesn't make that worse. If anything, it lets you hold one operator accountable instead of trying to figure out who's responsible across five different companies as is the case for many at the moment.

On safety, and I get why you're angry about this, but that's a policing problem, not an operator problem. The Metro being chaotic at night isn't because of the bus model. The current system hasn't fixed it either, so franchising won't magic that away. But at least with one franchised operator, you've got a single entity to hold responsible instead of everyone pointing fingers. I regularly use haymarket and monument at peak commuting and post match hours and there’s a strong police and security presence.

The route planning bit is where the logic gets a bit shaky though. You're saying "what if they cut routes that don't serve a purpose," then treating that like a bad thing. That's the whole point of planning. You should replace inefficient routes with better ones. The M71 survived because people actually used it. That's the system working, not failing.

On the Metro to Washington. I get it's controversial, but "it serves no reason to be there" doesn't really stack up. It's extending the network to an area that currently has only buses. Worth debating? Sure. Pointless? Not obviously. And you've kind of answered your own question: if buses will duplicate it, then it's clearly serving somewhere people want to go.

Here's the thing about "buses for public, not profit." That's ideology, not operations. Buses cost money. If operators run at a loss, they go under or start cutting corners. Franchising actually lets you have it both ways. Public control over routes and fares, but operators who can stay solvent. That's the compromise everyone's looking for.

Is Kim McGuinness going to deliver on this? Fair to be sceptical about. But the answer isn't sticking with a fragmented, unaccountable system because you don't trust the alternative. The real problem is underfunding and poor integration. That's not a franchising fault, that's what franchising is supposed to fix.