Doubling? Did I miss something?
You say that a 20 carnet trip costs £22, and a week pass costs £12. So buying 2 week passes, costs £24.
I would hardly hardly consider a £2 add on as doubling the cost of transport!
Glasgow's new smart tickets, for use on the city's underground network, aren't smart enough to count the journeys made, forcing the operator to withdraw carnet tickets at the end of June. Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) has named the new system Bramble, eschewing its traditional seafood nomenclature. Bramble, which …
The original card was for 20 journeys, if you worked Mon-Fri and didn't travel at weekends it would last 4 working weeks.
The new card is a 7 day pass so over the same period you would need to buy an extra two passes to get you through 4 working weeks, a total of £48.
Or if you divided it up into single journeys it would be £1.10 against £1.71 per journey.
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is it the case that it was 20 RETURN journeys under the old system - otherwise the numbers don't seem to stack.?
Whether £1.10 for a single trip or return it is spectacularly cheap commuting. On a bus round here I could barely go a few stops for the same price.
£1.10 is the cost of the underground, given that it only serves some parts of the city some parts of the day (not night service and little on a Sunday), the price is fair.
FristBus hold a near monopoly on buses in Glasgow (and as the city council are bunch of gutless wasters spunking money on jumped-up sports days when no destroying the local architecture - e.g. George Square); FirstBus get away with totally eye-watering prices (and a dreadful service).
The glasgow system, under the current 20 journey 'carnet', or 20 multi-journey as its called is as follows:
it costs you 22 quid.
it gives you 20 single journeys on the underground, not 20 days or something like that.
if you travel TO and BACK from work, that is 2 journeys. therefore, if you travel 5 days a week, both ways, and do not go out on weekends, then one 20 multi-journey ticket will last you 2 weeks.
Am a bit confused at the journo's assertian that prices have doubled as well... glasgow underground like to keep their price hikes small and often.. a doubling would just make it too obvious :)
"I understood it to mean you buy a days journey on the carnet valid for 20 journey days not individual journeys.
Once stamped the ticket is valid for the whole day you travel."
Hmm. And from the article, the relevant part that everyone commenting in this thread so far must be very familiar with:
"A commuter paying £22 for a 20-journey carnet (at £1.10 per trip, enough for two weeks commuting) will instead have to buy two seven-day passes at £12 a pop, more than doubling the cost of travel."
"20-journey" (not "20 journey days") and "enough for two weeks" (which fits with twenty individual journeys - five days per week, one trip each way) - all of which strongly indicates that the increase over two weeks is £2, and not "more than doubling the cost of travel" which it then goes on to actually state.
I think Bill Ray may have read (and quoted) that it more than doubles the cost, and read the 20 journeys without realising it meant journey days, doing his own maths to establish that it lasts two weeks, without spotting that the two things are contradictory.
OK, seriously, when I lived in Glasgow, the police and ambulance service made a public appeal for this practice to stop. Apparently, people who found themselves wanting to go somewhere that was roughly on the way to the hospital were faking an injury or illness of some sort, calling an ambulance, and then announcing a miraculous recovery and asking to be let out when they reached their destination.
"Er, please explain to a non-Glaswegian how I would only need one journey per working day 'cos where I live I make two journeys every working day, so 5 x 2 = 10 per week."
The clockwork orange goes in one big loop, so you just stay on, and get back to your house eventually. An additional bonus is you don't need an office to go to. One downside is there's no internet connection. And it's not very good for your health (going through places like Ibrox)
So you go to work every day but you don't return home?
Commuting involves 2 trips per day, 20 / 2 is 10 so you get 10 days travel on a 20 trip ticket. Which is 2 weeks commute.
So the old tickets were £22 for 2 weeks commute and the new tickets are £24 for two weeks commute.
So it's a pound a week more. Hardly breaking the bank and definitely not doubl.ing the cost.
Extra detention to redo your maths all round.
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Every other carnet system I've ever seen or used is a book of single journeys, either they were previously very generously all-day-fill-your-boots tickets for £1.10 which is insanely cheap (£7-odd here in the West Country for buses only £12.30 to add in some trains), or whoever did the sums can't count.
The original calculations failed to mention that most of the carnet users only use one ticket per day, they get on the train in the morning and then spend the rest of the day riding around without ever getting off the train. It's nice to have somewhere warm and dry to drink all that Buckfast.
It is as they claim 'better value' could they please come to a televised forum and explain why?
Obviously it has been introduced to increase revenue at the expense of travellers......
In Brazil the Government quickly changed its mind over the fare increases there, it just depends on how strongly you feel about it and if you want to protest.
Reported in the Herald diary recently: A couple of Glaswegians were walking through the city centre one Sunday and saw it prepared for shooting a disaster movie. Rubble all over the place, burned our cars and buses strewn around. One turned to the other and said, calmly, "I see Celtic lost at home yesterday".
""You could protest if you wish, but would the result of a riot in Glasgow have any noticable impact on the area? It's already World War Z as it is...."
Any more stereotpyes? Any one? The trolls that post here are so predictable.
And you wonder why no one takes you seriously?"
You've missed that fact that Glasgow was actually the shooting location for some of the scenes in World War Z.
Bit of a sad story here pal, mah wifes been bitten and ah just need fifty pee tae get the bus up tae Dennistoun tae finish her aff afore she turns mah wean.
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"They could have called it 'cod'."
How about "Docker's oyster card"?
On a slightly more serious note, why didn't the daft bu99ers just use the same Oyster card system as London. All the R&D's done, it works on buses, trams and tubes, and it works very well.
they do them every so often.. at about 4-5 times the speed of inflation :)
Also, fuck the ticketing system, that's the least of their useless money squandering... they decided to upgrade the entire underground system in time for the 2014 commonwealth games.. which apparently didn’t mean extend service, opening of new stations, new trains or extending the circle line (the only line), but DID mean ripping up all the classy looking brown/beige tile off the walls and slap white slaughterhouse tiles everywhere making the stations converted so far look like abbatoirs… putting in more metal and orange lights.. and now seemingly putting up new barriers.. because the old magnet stripe tickets were working too well? Because they were running out of paper? Because they had more money than they knew what to do with?
Piss on them, I now ride a bike to work.
"the Clockwork Orange, as _everyone else seems to think_ Glaswegians fondly refer to their subway network". There, fixed that for you.
They just don't; in 20 years here, I've never heard it referred to as such, except by outsiders. It was officially called the Underground for long enough but changed officially to the Subway as that's all Weegies ever, ever call it.
That is all.
The Glasgow Underground was certainly popularly referred to as the Clockwork Orange when it was rebuilt in the late 70s - I remember it well as a child living there. I don't live in Glasgow any more, but I don't think I ever hear anyone using the term now when I visit. But as demonstrated by some of the stereotypes above, perceptions of Glasgow in the rest of the UK still seem to be based on what things were like a couple of decades ago.
> perceptions of Glasgow in the rest of the UK still seem to be based on what things were like a couple of decades ago.
Or maybe some of us have just been up some of the side-streets off Alexandra Parade. Or worked in an all-night garage on the Red Road. (One night only. NEVER AGAIN.)
I don't believe you. I lived in Glasgow when it was rebuilt, and I never, ever heard it referred to as the Clockwork Orange. That terms seems to be wholly a figment of the imagination of lazy journalists. Give me half a dozen contemporary written citations by non-journalists and I'll maybe change my mind.
Just get everyone to have a "Bramble" card if they want discounted travel. That worked well in London with Oyster. People without pay full whack - and soon enough the people without are tourists, exactly the people we want to subsidise our daily work commute.
Oyster still has the problem that it is sometimes cheaper to do two single journeys each day, five days a week, rather than buying a weekly travelcard. I could see something like a commuter travelcard being popular - and hence it will never be introduced.
The underground is only good if you are travelling from/to the city centre from the West End or the South-West.
They are talking about getting a RFID card on the monopoly that is First buses for the Commonwealth Games, I assume that is going to be Bramble.
In London, it still costs £4.50 (WTF!?!) cash or £2.10 (still not good) on an Oyster for a journey on zone one, even if that's from Leicester Square to Covent Garden and you've probably walked further down to the train and up again than it is between the two stations.
Paris, because their Metro prices are better than London's.
In London, it still costs £4.50 (WTF!?!) cash or £2.10 (still not good) on an Oyster for a journey on zone one…
The price of a cash fare is deliberate, it is to maximise the revenue from tourists and visitors to London without affecting the residents.
…a journey on zone one, even if that's from Leicester Square to Covent Garden
That one stop route keeps TFL in gravy.
No, it is not cheap. Bus travel is expensive - £1.90 single or £4 for a day pass in Glasgow. More expensive than when London offfered bus-only passes (Boris has now banned bus-passes, you now have to pay for trains as well).
The Subway in Glasgow is very small, a single circuit and only serves a small part of the City. And a ticket costs £1.40 (single) - not all that cheap bearing in mind its range.
The advantage of the old 20 journal tickets is that they do not expire and they can be used by anyone. For those who do not need a daily (or weekdaily) usage prices are now going up 27% from £1.10 to £1.40. For the weekday commuters prices are going up from £1,10 to £1.20 (though that is with a seven day pass for £12)
Alas, you are falling for the hype. If you allow the people selling the tickets to define the calculation then it will never be a rise (or not one of any significance anyway). As has been mentioned above, this wonderful deal is only a wonderful deal if you intend to spend large portions of your life enjoying the Subway. If you are a commuter then the inference is that you are using it to travel to work and back home hence 2 journeys per day, 5 days per week. Since these people make up a very large proportion of the users then the fact they have to pay more to cover their current usage means it actually is a rise.
"So weekly passes are being reduced from £16 to £12 which will in fact cost exactly the same a the current 10 ticket carnet (but you get unlimited travel) and this is a price RISE?"
Yes, because nobody every buys the 10 journey tickets... the cheapest one is the 20 journey... currently priced at 22 pounds.
the new weekly pass at 12 pounds is _almost_ as good.. as it works out at 24 quid for every 2 weeks.
this holds true as long as:
*you are never off work sick
*you plan all your holidays around your weekly travel pass
*you travel to and back from work on the underground every day
(to be fair the new proposed system is actually slightly better if you also travel around glasgow on the underground during the weekend.. or if you travel more than twice on the underground per day.... say into city centre to work in the morning.. into the west end for a drink after work... and them home before the underground shuts.. unless u live in the west end to begin with, obviously :))
Yes, it is a price rise to everyone except commuters. From £1.10 per single to £1.40. Although £12 per week is cheap for commuters Glasgow is small and the Subway even smaller and very few Subway users need return tickets each and every trip. With the random weather the carnet was useful for when it rained and useful for taking home shopping (without having to pay to go into town).
... and I am expecting a much greater screwups than this.
It is already 3 months overdue on roll out (from their own documentation received with my smart card), and I cannot get a straight answer out of them as to whether it will still be possible to buy the 4 weekly pass online, as I do now, or whether I will lose the 10% discount for online purchase.
3 months overdue? Crikey mate they've been planning to implement the Pop card system since before DB Regio took over. Nexus first tabled the plans for the new ticket machines back in 2007. They first planned the barriers in 2011. Of course both have just only completed rollout this year and heaven knows when we're actually going to see the smartcard system.
Of course that didn't stop them hiking up the prices. They eliminated off-peak fares entirely c. 2009 on the promise of "more flexible ticketing soon". An evening return ticket to town from zone 3 went from £2.30 to £4 overnight on the basis that smartcard ticketing would be much cheaper, as it is in London. 4 years on, they're now £4.30 and those smartcards are like hen's teeth.
Total omnishambles.
from the ever trushworthy wikipedia:
Fare zone 1 is the central zone of Transport for London's zonal fare system used by the London Underground... It is about 6 miles (9.7 km) from west to east and 4 miles (6.4 km) from north to south, approximately 62.08 km2.....
aparently you also have 83 stations there, and 11 lines in that zone alone... and a single of those lines in zone 1 alone is the quivalent length of glasgows entire subway network...
I'm not sure what number you should multiply 12 quid a week with if you compare this to glasgow with its 15 stations and 6.5 miles of track, but the lowest one I found is about 66 quid a week ;)
On a related note.. I wish they had just got a deal with transport for london so we could use oyster cards on both subways... in stead of all these independent systems all over the place...
Oyster is a proprietary system that only works in London but Tfl have themselves been upgrading their gates and introducing new back office software to enable interoperable smart tickets to be used there too.There are numerous other commercial smart ticketing deployments being rolled out across the UK that are interoperable with Bramble. The Bramble card will be capable of being used in London as it is based on an interoperable open standard ( mandated by the UK government) so no need to buy Oyster cards when Glaswegians visit London.
I just got back from Japan, and they have recently lined up pretty much all of their metro systems to run on any city card. So whilst each city has a different card "brand" they all work everywhere. You have seriously no idea how convenient that was!
If they can get the same thing happening in the UK, trust me, you will be a happy camper in the long run!
You need to visit a third tier city like Bristol. The buses are extraordinarily expensive and unreliable. The urban rail north of the river is a dream but doesn't really go to the right places.
The thought of having a town/city wide smart card for public transport for many of the UK's inhabitants is a wild dream, and the thought of it working interoperably in other cities country wide is some sort of utopian day dream.
On the plus side, £30 instead of £12, and you get to be in London, not Glasgow.
Nothing wrong with Glasgow, but it's no London - compared side by side for jobs, income, property prices, theatres, galleries, museums, airports and international links, it's a little unfair to pick on just one axis.
Fortunately Melbourne hasn't been inflicted with any of these price rise woes with the introduction of the new system, in fact most people now travel free because the machines tend to break down every 5 minutes, except of course you take the risk of getting caught by, and beaten up by, the railway police. The excuse that the only working machine on the system happens to be the one at the destination station carries little weight, you should have walked there, validated your ticket, walked back and then caught the train there.
I would imagine that, where he works, the house prices are SIGNIFICANTLY more than £3000pa more expensive on a mortgage.
Like just about everyone else of the millions of people who live in suburbs and work in cities.
I know that if I had £3000pa extra "free" to buy another house, it would barely cover moving costs in the first year, and would then work out at £250 extra a month on the mortgage, which wouldn't get me a mortgage significantly different from the one I have, and wouldn't get me to move closer to work without some other MASSIVE detriment (like moving to a much worse area, losing a room in the house, having no garden / car parking / whatever, etc.).
People who commute to work do so for a reason - it's the most profitable way for that person to live, or they really wouldn't be doing it. City-salaries, suburbs-costs. Even with travel expenses, they work out better. But that doesn't mean that the railways aren't taking the mick either.
The slight price rise can easily be offset by wandering around the bus stops in Union Street at about 10pm asking everyone you see if they've got a "spare" 20p for you to get home. You get a bit of money, plus you get to do your bit to preserve an ancient tradition.
Glasgow is a great and marvellous city of more than 1 million people including its suburbs. In the early Paleolithic Era (OK, in Victorian times), a small, twee but interesting underground railway loop was built under Glasgow, one of the first of its kind in the world. Since then, there has been almost nil investment in that system, other than to upgrade the trains maybe, and the signalling, and of course the logo. Classic mid to late 20th century British investment policy. What a shame! With the exception of London, other cities in Britain are also treated in this way: take Manchester, a city of 2.5 million people in its metropolitan area. It has an unbelievably dinky tramway as its primary public transit network. When I say 'dinky', you must have experienced the shaky ride from Victoria station to Bury to know what I mean. I couldn't believe it. Not only that, most of it was built on existing railway lines that were DOWNGRADED to "light rail" status to allow for the dinky tram to travel on them, presumably saving money in the process by stopping the "heavy rail". Meanwhile, many cities of just 250 thousand people in boring old Europe have full-on metro systems or professional tram systems. Though I admit that they are somewhat lacking in 'deregulation', 'free competition', 'franchises' and...logos.
Where is all the money going? Or what's wrong? Can anybody enlighten me?
You probably forgot to include vehicle depreciation in your calculation, but then again...the prices are so ridiculous now, that even that can be factored in and still be cheaper.
UK railways are the worst in Europe, for how much we pay. FFS - with a flat rate 50% discount card (which everyone can get, and can be for almost *any* journey), even rail travel in Switzerland is cheaper.
Thanks for this interesting article, giving us some technical background about this. And suggesting that SPT, the operator of Glasgow's subway, is lying when they say the new tickets are not capable of handling multi-journey tickets, if I understand that right (not that it comes as a surprise).
Some very interesting comments here as well - I think some facts might help to understand the situation in Glasgow.
First of all, Glasgow has no integrated public transport (unlike, say, London), so you need separate tickets for the bus (in fact, one for each of the several bus companies operating in the city), the train and the subway. It means that the quoted prices are for the subway "network" only, which happens to be a single circle line with 15 stations. One round takes 24 minutes to complete.
You also have to take into account the service times of the Glasgow subway, these are 6.30 am - 11.30 pm Mon-Sat, and less frequent trains on Sundays from 10 am - 6 pm (yes, that's right: http://www.spt.co.uk/subway/timetables/ )
So are the current prices cheap? I don't think so. And now they are scrapping the only half-good value tickets, because the new "smart" system supposedly cannot handle them.
Another overlooked fact so far is that a lot of people use the subway regularly, but not daily, and the best ticket option for this is the multi-journey ticket, which is now to be scrapped. Granted, you can then top up your new "smart" card with 28 £ and use this. However this equals a price increase of 27.3 % compared to the current 20 journey ticket for 22 £ (that price was increased from 20 to 22 £ last year, equalling a 10 % increase). All this without any real service improvements, i.e. faster journeys or longer opening times.
It's also worth noting that the Glasgow Subway operator SPT is a publicly owned and run body, and it seems they are looking for a way to pay for their 300m GBP "upgrade" of the subway.
For those wondering about lack of protest, there is a quickly growing online petition with well over 500 signatures already. I will post the link in a separate comment, so it can easily be deleted by the admins/publishers, as this happened every other time I posted this somewhere.
I use the Glasgow underground once or twice a week. I buy a multi-journey ticket. I pay in advance, get a slight discount over the basic fare, and I don't have to queue up to pay cash every time I travel. They are abolishing these multi-journey tickets, either because of a stupid technical restriction, or else as a revenue-raising trick. I will now have to queue up for a ticket every time I travel, as a weekly pass would be very expensive for the odd journey. This is less efficient and will cost me more.
This is less efficient and will cost me more
Ha, ha, that's not inefficient. If you want a true masterclasss in creating an epic clusterfuck of an "efficient transport system", travel 40 miles east to witness the glorious Edinburgh trams. An epic failure on so many levels it defines all logical explanation.
"You say that a 20 carnet trip costs £22, and a week pass costs £12. So buying 2 week passes, costs £24."
20 trips is enough for 10 work days (home to work and then back again same day), so 20 trips costing £22 = £1.10 per trip.
Buying 2x 7 day tickets, costs £24.....but if you are only using it for the same 20 trips (over 10 workdays), that makes £1.20 per trip.
If one worked 7 days a week, making 28 trips in the 2 week period, it's cheaper than the 20 carnet ticket @ 85p per trip.
>>But then I would lose 12k...
That would then be a case of making your choices and living with them. 'Fraid I can't join you in shedding tears. I used to pay over £6k/year to travel to work, but I made a decision to take a job that paid well enough for that to be a good idea. Sounds like you've done likewise?
If the trains are crappy or full, have you considered first class BTW? It's what it's there for.
I hated it a few years back when they abolished the 28 day ticket (we used to have one) - going to the 20 Journey tickets actually increased my outgoings).
However, now it's back and it's only £45 a month (at least until they go to Bramble, then who the hell knows what price it'll go up to) - should save a a little.
I'm a tad uneasy at this interim step, but I'm happy to only have to buy a ticket once a month (or two, depending on when the days fall), rather than 3 times a month again.
Either way, I know I'm going to end up paying more, so might as well get used to it - given that gas, electricity, council tax and house insurance have all went up this year, it would be a bit of a shock if the Underground didn't (it'll never be the Subway).
In response to the uncharacteristically humourless Weegie who keeps complaining that the jokes being made here are based on an out-of-date fantasy....
I love Glasgow to bits. It's one of my favourite places on Earth, and I regard it as home. So I'm not trying to slag it off. But these are still real things that I saw there:
I was threatened with physical violence by my downstairs neighbour because, when he and a friend had tried to break my front door down the previous day, I hadn't opened the door and invited them in.
I saw a man using the bus's emergency door-open mechanism in order to jump back on the bus and lean around the bus-driver's anti-assault shield to spit in his face after the bus driver refused to give his obviously at-least-ten-year-old kids free tickets for the under-fives.
A friend lived in a street in Castlemilk that was terrorised by a local psycho: he'd set light to cars and she couldn't open any of her windows because he'd immediately sneak in, just to scare her. The police told her quite openly that they had a policy of not responding to any 999 calls from that street because the last case against him had collapsed and they were waiting for him to do something and leave better evidence next time.
Waiting for a bus outside the Odeon at Renfrew Street, I watched a pished ned regale an old woman with a surprisingly in-depth explanation of just how much he loved Buckfast. "It's just really, really... like, nice. I dinnae know what it is exactly. I mean, I do like other drinks, but. But I just really love Buckfast. Something about it, it's just pure brilliant, know what I mean? I remember when I first tried it...." For fifteen minutes.
Some local kids set fire to my building, with me in it, three times, so they could jump on the back of the fire engines.
A flat up the road from me got blown up -- proper exploded -- by drug dealers.
A bunch of gangsters had a little turf war on the Alexandra Parade, which involved bombing each other's shops.
My downstairs neighbour (a different one this time) chucked his girlfriend out of the flat in the middle of the night. So she kicked the door down. He used to play Bonnie Tyler records loud enough to be heard three streets away, so there were mitigating circumstances.
A friend of mine got jumped and hospitalised by a huge gang. For a laugh.
When I went to see Primal Scream on Glasgow Green, some bampot was stabbing a syringe into random members of the crowd. (Yeah, yeah, I know: it was probably Bobby Gillespie.)
I had fireworks thrown at me by pedestrians and from moving cars for the four weeks prior to Guy Fawke's Night every year. I was once with a friend from the West End, who was actually startled by the bang, while the rest of us Southsiders barely noticed it, it's that routine.
It was completely normal (before First took over the buses and bought some new ones) to find bus seats missing. Not just vandalised: gone.
Course, when the seats were still there, they had often been set alight.
I lost track of the number of times people would ask me, on learning that I lived in Govanhill, "Is it not a bit of a problem with all they pakis?"
I watched fights kick off on the buses regularly. One involved almost an entire busload of boys in tracksuits singing sectarian songs. The police sent a squad car to stop the bus that time. One involved projectile pizza.
And, most memorably, I once opened my front door to find a man standing there with his jeans round his knees injecting heroin into the base of his penis.
No place to raise kids, but God, I love Glasgow.
London's no better these days.
I had a vagabond regail me for a few pounds as I paused outside my home to smell some flowers.
I told him to get a job and he called me a bloody snob.
Fortunately my butler heard, ran out of the house and punched the ill-mannered chap in the goolies.
I recommend you hire a butler.
I am maybe a corner case, I use the underground sparingly, and many times once a day, as after work I might walk to the train station.
A 20 jouney ticket can last me up to 3 months, thanks to walking and lift-shares.
They are going to replace that ticket with a 1 week all I can ride ticket.
There will be other 'occasional' subway users. For that category of person, it will make the price per journey go from £1.10 to £1.40 at the moment.
Every time they refurbish a station, prices go up - expect them to with this new system. Last time they did anything pressworthy (Hillhead refurb/Mural/Alisdair Gray) they put the prices up 10%. If Glasgow Subway increase their tickets at the same rate for every station refurbishment a single ticket will cost £12.12.
Finally - they did this with 2 weeks notice essentially. Giving me no time to use up my journesy!
Rant over.