Claire Walters, CEO of Bus Users UK, asks whether cashless bus services can lead to patronage decline
Congestion is clearly a growing problem for buses, and not just in London. While this has been the case for years now, TfL insists on citing congestion as the predominant reason for the recent fall in passenger numbers, almost to the exclusion of any other factor. Others blame online shopping and lately, cycling, but there’s clearly an elephant in the room. [wlm_nonmember][…]
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Since the early 1990s there’s been strong growth in London bus usage. And although the rate of growth had slowed significantly, according to TfL’s recent London’s Travel Report, the decline in usage has only come about since 2014. Coincidentally, 2014 happens to be the year that TfL decided its buses would be cashless, despite just one third of people in its own consultation on the issue actually supporting that position.
It’s time TfL considered the possibility of a link between the lack of spontaneous travel options on its buses, and the decline in passenger numbers.
Tourists are confused at not being able to simply hop on an iconic London bus and pay for a single journey, if only to say they have done so. Fewer than half of Europeans and only a small fraction of Americans use contactless payments. In fact, very few US debit or credit cards are even equipped with the near-field technology required to make this possible. With the vast majority of international tourists to London being from Europe or the USA, they first have to navigate their way around buying an Oyster card before they can hope to navigate their way around the capital.
While contactless technology is far more widespread in the UK than in the rest of Europe, only around two thirds of British people have made a contactless payment according to Visa’s annual Digital Payments Study. Then there are the countless others who don’t even have the option to use contactless payments.
Over 1.5m UK citizens have no bank account at all and a further 1m Londoners who do have a bank account, choose not to use it for a wide variety of reasons related to financial exclusion, including the need to control budgets which is simply easier with cash. Access to affordable credit is also unlikely to be available for many of these people, so the purchase of best-value tickets is not an option. Rather than making bus travel easier, cashless buses can be a barrier to travel, particularly if public transport is your only reasonable option.
The belief that this is only a problem for older, less technologically able people is also a myth. Research from the Centre for Household Assets and Savings Management at the University of Birmingham found that proportionally, younger people are more likely to be affected: 8% of 18-19 year olds have no access to a bank account, along with 4% of 20-24 year olds and 3% of 25-29 year olds. And only 61% of the population of the UK has a smartphone, which could be used as a means of payment assuming, of course, that it can be linked to a bank account…
While the obvious solution to all this would be for TfL to start accepting cash on buses again, it seems as if that ship has sailed. What we need to do now is to find alternative ways of enabling people using cash to travel by bus in London, and there are plenty of options.
The simplest, perhaps, would be to enable existing retail outlets to sell single tickets with no fee, which is what makes Oyster so inaccessible to so many. Another might be to provide travel card dispensing machines which accept and dispense tickets in any cash amount of the purchasers choosing.
If London is to be open for business to all-comers, and we are to arrest the decline in passenger numbers, TfL needs to pay attention to this issue and find a swift and accessible solution. First, however, it needs to accept that for many people, cashless buses are actually the problem.
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