English National Concessionary Travel Pass - how accurate is usage data?

[whole diary]

[stuving]

You'd probably need an actuary to work that one out. 

I think there is a real concern about who is expected to cope with the reimbursement calculations. That's why I suspect that the option of inventing their own method has not been adopted anywhere. Big cities might be able to do that, and I could believe that London would (but of course its buses are different anyway). Big companies maybe could too, but have a lot of TCAs^▸ (Track Circuit Actuator) to deal with.

For small companies and TCAs, finding someone suitable even to follow the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about)'s formulas could be a problem.

[LiskeardRich]

An acquaintance who is a director of Reading Buses told me that his undertaking receives just over ^0.60 per journey recorded on the concession card readers.

That would seem to suggest the scheme isn't complying with one of it's core aims. That operators should be no better or worse off than if the scheme didn't exist.

Many wouldn't use the bus if it wasn't free. Several older relatives of mine use the bus instead of their cars I'd possible simply because it's free. 60p is more than nothing (the fare if they didn't have the pass) the bus would still be running and the cost of an extra passenger is negligible. You could argue that for those passengers in this circumstance the bus company's are in fact 60p better off.