Our Chair, Jim, was on the Isle of Wight last week and came across this interesting advert for the local bus company's fares and tickets.
It wasn't so much the level of fares that impressed Jim, in fact he thought them rather high, although the Isle of Wight does have a comprehensive bus network that runs at frequent intervals well into the evening as well as on Sundays.
What did impress him was the flexibility of the tickets offered. £10 gets you not just a "Day" Ticket but one valid for a full 24-hours. Buy one at eight o' clock at night and you can use it not just to go out for the evening but to get to work and back the next day and even perhaps to go out again the next night!
Of course, on the Isle of Wight the tickets are more likely to be aimed at visitors rather than workers, which probably explains the 48-hour ticket (at a 25% saving over 2 x 24hrs). Buy it on Friday afternoon when you arrive on the Island and that's all your bus travel taken care of until you leave on Sunday! Compare that with a weekend visitor to Morecambe who would probably not bother with a day ticket on Friday afternoon, might get one for Saturday but would wonder whether it was worth it to get another one on Sunday and would therefore probably not travel by bus very much at all during their stay.
But note also the the item at the bottom of the notice: "Buy single tickets to any destination - even if you have to change buses! This, of course, is standard practice on the railways. A rail ticket between any two stations costs the same whether the journey is made on a through train or whether you have to change. Not so on the buses where unless you have a Day ticket you must pay again on each bus you board, a system which prevents passengers making the most efficient use of the network. There may well be special circumstances on the Isle of Wight that make this system workable there when it wouldn't be elsewhere, but it must be worth a look, surely?
