Bus pass danger

If you have a concessionary bus pass, be alarmed and logically outraged at the danger involved in finding that the words printed on it may not be honoured.

A pass bears a date that it is "valid until." That means it is valid on the day concerned, that is the common usage of valid - valid until the day which is the last day of validity.

The scanners that read the passes when you get on the bus may not agree, and worst, they are not all following the same line everywhere. On the pass's last day, you can use it on First Bus, totally normally, travel miles from home, then find that Lothian Buses' scanners reject it and deem it as expired already.

What is most dangerous about this illegal mess, is that you are miles from home when this happens, as it did to me today on the way to work. You have begun your travel on a basis that the pass is okay. What if this happened at the other end of the country? What if you were coming home from holiday on the pass's last day?

Folks who are not getting a new pass will thus find themselves conned as to the oast day of the facility's availability. This will happen to folks who have a pass on grounds of DLA and whose level of DLA changes.

Most passholders, me included, are getting a new pass, and I was relieved to get my application accepted at the library 3 weeks ago after, when I tried at 6 weeks, getting told I had to wait until only 2 weeks, which would have been a kife-edge discomfort. But I have written here already about my strong view on the dangerous unworkability of needing to carry any physcial identfiier at all to entitle you to travel, because of what can happen, how massively your day can go wrong, if it gets lost or stolen which is not your fault. This is made a disability discrimination issue by our spectrum, in particular by ADHD and dyspraxia, which carry an increased risk of losing things. This as far as I am concerned already makes all need for physical tickets and passes an illegal medical discrimination. But obviously, the political world has not yet chosen to buy a message that makes such a radical change, never mind the danger that all public transport passengers are in at all times.

That is why I would have felt completely stupid and humiliated if I lost my new pass while still having the old one valid, it was wrong to choose to take that risk. Hence I chose instead to keep on using my old pass right up to its last day.

The scanners have never been necessary either. They are only there to count passengers for the company to claim back their fares. When bus passes began there were no scanners, it just worked by show Most pass users know how the scanners have periodic phases of unreliability, especially on Stagecoach. They cause frustrations and practical delaya at stops, and concerned baffled oldies find their scanners not resistering until several atempts.

Now, who is going to take responsibility for putting the system right urgently? Transport ministry, council office that issues passes, or Lothian Buses for having its scanners set wrong? Meanwhile this can happen to anyone any day, which is misleading hence illegal. We have written to the council office first. Intowork had been put to extra inconvenience to drive me to work.

The position now, is that the authorities can no longer answer, without by it acknowledging the safety case that passes and tickets must be totally abolished. All we need to effect a massive reform overdue by 2 centuries, is for you to take an interest in their answer and not run away from the issue's originality. Remember, these safety issues can happen to you, in any travel.

When you have a bus pass in recognition with special needs that is actually in recognition that coping with transport operators' self-interested demands on passengers and relating successfully to their staff can be difficult. Hence, the powers that be now stand asked directly: should folks with an acknowldged extra need and a communication diffculty look after our own safety when we travel. They can't answer no. See, that would be an open statement of englect of us and our safety. Don't take care of your own safety? The whole health and safety system and the whole law of negligence would collapse. Hence they have to answer yes, no alternative.

But in answering yes, to my reason for caring for my safety by continuing to use my old pass up to the last day - they acknowledge the fact that reliance on physical losable passes and tickets is unsafe. That makes it illegal and invalid, an acknowledged violation of safety, for them to allow tickets and passes and passports and any system at all of carried physical documents verifying your status, to continue to exist.

Maurice Frank