I use my Bus Pass mainly for travel to and from a walking trip, to save having to return to the car and therefore have to do a circular route every time. I also used to have to travel to work on the buses when I was on an apprentice's wage many years ago and so I appreciate the high relative costs involved for young people, as Fester points out.
At the moment when you get on a bus and submit your pass, the machine registers the point of entry to the bus but not the point of exit, which could be the next stop or 40 miles down the road, and you also do not get a ticket now on Arriva but you do on other companies. I assume that the bus company gets the same amount from Conwy Council for each concessionary journey taken, but they cannot know the duration, which I agree cannot be fair.
Surely a system similar to the "Cerdyn" used on the WHR, which gives you a substantial discount based on the distance travelled on the journey, so the more you use it the more you pay rather than a flat rate every time, or free as it is at present. This is somewhat like the idea which frequently comes up about scrapping the car tax and putting up petrol prices, so the more you use your car the more you pay to use the roads. I also use my bike whenever I can locally instead of the car, (yes, I am that motorist's nightmare, a pensioner on a bike!), mainly because it is quicker to get to town that way and you don't have to drive round looking for a parking space.
