Yahoo News Local £1 bus fare cap at weekends and evenings could continue
The council is looking to extend the local £1 bus fare cap for weekend and evening travel into the New Year.
The national bus fare cap will rise to £3 in 2025, but discounts at certain times of the week specific to North East Lincolnshire buses could continue - at least initially.
Council progress on the area's Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP), agreed in 2023, was discussed by its transport, infrastructure and strategic housing scrutiny panel. Since November 2023, the council and its delivery partner Equans has run a £1 'leisure and shopper ticket'.
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This offers a £1 cap on single fares for trips within the borough on weekends, bank holidays, and after 6pm on weekday evenings.
"We would like to still deliver the £1 fare cap, if funding permits it, into next year," a council officer stated. There may be discussion further along with bus operators to increase the local cap in line with the national rise so there is less of a gap between the two.
Details of future BSIP government funding were not yet known. The council received £4.7m for the April 2023 to March 2025 BSIP period.
"We have encouraging figures here to say how the bus service is returning to pre-Covid levels and it's even improving," said Cllr Swinburn of passenger data, supplied by Stagecoach East Midlands. There were 5,866,685 passengers in 2023/24, up five per cent from the year before. This is 88 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.
Youth travel has increased by 57 per cent since 2019, with discounted megarider tickets available for young people.
Cllr Trevor Crofts said the BSIP report update was "good news". "Once we get the new [Horizon] Youth Centre up, we need to be making sure that we can still capture some of those from further afield with these low prices."
"It needs to be thinking about everybody, not just Grimsby and Cleethorpes," he added.
