Lord Bracknell
On fire
They DON'T have a "monopoly franchise". ANY bus company can come in and provide whatever services they like in competition with Brighton & Hove Buses. The fact of the matter is that no-one is interested in doing so.
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Labour - Just DO ONE and have your conference somewhere else.
- Thread starter Uncle Spielberg
- Start date
The Large One
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Norman Baker suck my lozenge
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Could be a good week to avoid Brighton,got a nasty feeling Omars army could be planning something big,last chance,probably for about 15 years to have a pop at a labour government in conferance,watch out for some angry jihadis in natty waistcoats.
There are alternatives: the Big Lemon company serves Lewes Rd to the Unis and Stagecoach serves some routes west of Brighton.
However, unlike London where an Oyster card can be used on buses, trains, tubes and trams, a Big Lemon ticket can't be used on B&H buses and a B&H ticket can't be used on Stagecoach - so the poor traveller could have an all-day ticket and still have to pay twice.
Actually I should have realised that. A couple of years ago at Christmas Big Lemon ran a rival service and GoAhead dropped their prices as a 'Chritsmas present'. Big Lemon couldn't compete and last Christmas GoAhead were once again the only bus company. Did they drop their prices again? I'll give you one guess ...
Consequently they are a de facto monopoly even though they are not a monopoly de jure. As you can see from Storer's post (which I guess is quoted from their website) they've invested a lot of money in their Brighton fleet and they haven't done it for altruistic purposes, they've done it to make money. Their industrial and financial might means they can see off any small-fry one-man-and-a-dog rival operators whilst the amount they've invested acts as a deterrent to any large rival who would have to make a similar investment in order to compete. And it wouldn't be worth a large rival competing as the shared revenue wouldn't be sufficient to generate a decent return on their investment - to say nothing of the fact that the total revenue available to both companies would have been reduced by price competition.
So there's no incentive for a serious rival to start up a service. Indeed as an old leftie I wouldn't be 100% surprised to find they've got a cosy cartel whereby other transport providers stay out of Brighton and in return GoAhead stay out of other cities thus maximising revenue for all concerned It's actually a classic example of why 'market forces' is an absolutely shit way of running public services.
In fact the situation is probably worse than I thought because unlike the railways I'm guessing there is no franchise to buy? Consequently we gain absoutely nothing from the current arrangement whilst acting as a cash cow for a private company.
But that's the thing - most people don't want to spend all day riding around on buses. You want to go in to Brighton, do whatever you've got to do, then come home. And why is it £3 from Portslade and £3.60 from Fiveways?
Private monopolies are nearly always a bad idea (in fact, I can't think of one that isn't) and in the UK we seem to have loads of them - mainly in travel (although I'm not too impressed that I have to buy my broadband from Virgin as there's no other competitor).
In transport, you either have public monopolies (which most of Europe has) or private competition; the system we have has been designed to screw customers.
Oh, TLO was quoting the price of an advance one-day ticket. It would be £3.60 if you bought in the bus.