The £5.10 dayrider ticket is specifically a 'Torbay Dayrider' and only covers Newton Abbot/Torquay/Paignton/Brixham. It sounds like a big patch but all of these towns are only a few miles from each other and actually doing the maximum journey possible can only be achieved by using the main '12' service which essentially links the town centres together on main roads and so even then you're not doing many miles. Certainly you can cover much bigger areas for much less on other dayrider schemes.wells wrote:Still pricing will be set on a market by market basis and the poster you were responding to was clearly talking about a ticket that takes him inbetween several towns.JAS84 wrote:You imagine wrong. There used to be, but now Stagecoach does almost all services in Hull and East Yorkshire Motor Services does routes which lead into the East Riding. So Stagecoach pretty much have a monopoly here.
My issue isn't so much around the pricing of the dayrider - £5.10 is still good value if you are actually going to use it as intended and hop on and off a lot of buses all day. My issue is that they've deliberately priced all return tickets to be more than the dayrider so you're still shelling out the £5.10 even though you're only going to do a single return journey between 2 towns that are only 3 miles apart! 85p / mile to travel by bus is not good value for money, local economics considered or not.
Other nasties like still operating a peak time on Saturdays & Sundays and not moving to any kind of off peak pricing until 7PM (when you can get a much better priced 'Nightrider' ticket for £2 covering the same patch as the dayrider) only add to the sense of being ripped off.
As I said in my earlier post, if you want to travel between 2 points that are close to a railway station then the railway should have the buses knocked into a cocked hat here, with them charging much less to do a much shorter journey, yet they don't seem to bother with the insanities of the timetable and infrequency of the service. They *have* since December introduced additional trains on the Newton Abbot-Paignton line which they've been very vocal about, but these are almost all daytime services and are restricted to weekdays which are not much use when it's peak time connections and weekend services that are the main problem. The stock used to run them is very questionable too - the other day I did actually get on one and ended up on a 4 car train consisting of a 3 car 158 with a 153 on the back even though there were less than 10 people on it, yet in the evenings I still get piled into a 2 car pacer with 100 people standing all the way. And FGW are STILL using 150/1s to operate 4 hour+ Penzance-Bristol services but yet are now happy to let a 158 potter about doing 15 minute trips between Newton Abbot and Paignton. A bizarre use of stock if ever there was one.
