“A great development for the bus industry has been the free bus travel scheme for young people (Under 22s). It allows us to attract the younger generation to make bus their mode of travel and to choose a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way to move around.
The free bus travel scheme goes beyond that. It helps us shape people’s habits as young people become more involved in their travel way of life. This means that within the long period of time we have with every customer as part of the scheme, we can help shape their perception of bus so that they can continue to choose bus instead of cars or other private modes of transport, for example.
Young people benefitting from the scheme may not even realise that, by just being part of this and moving about sustainably, using the bus networks that are available to them, they are just by that very task, educating the older generations on the use of a sustainable solution that is already in play and that doesn’t require lots of investments.
Buses are an accessible and much faster mode of travel. They are much faster than sitting in a traffic queue. The time you spend in traffic concentrating on driving your car from A to B, you can spend on the bus reading a book, catching up on your social media, people watching through the window, and having fun.
Buses are not just about getting you from one place to another, they are an experience in themselves. It’s a fun, sociable, engaging way to travel. We hope to see more and more people choosing the bus. Mums and dads, aunties and uncles, learning from the younger generation to choose a sustainable way to travel.
Even if people travel once a week by bus, that’s certainly better than nothing. Change comes in small steps, it is gradual, you can’t reinvent things overnight. So, working on change in small steps supported with the movement of young people, is probably a perfect combination to encourage more people out of their cars towards a sustainable travel option, being kind to the environment and looking after our planet, particularly in the current climate emergency.”
