Around And About (4)

More From TrawsCymru After This ...

A lengthy Press Release somewhat abridged by fbb. In essence, First Aberdeen is the first First company to introduce fare capping, a system with which Oyster and Contactless users in London are familiar.

First Aberdeen is set to make it even easier to use the bus as they roll out the next phase of contactless payments with Tap & Cap.

Tap & Cap uses contactless payments to cap your travel charges, so you’ll never pay more than £4.40 a day or £18 per week, no matter how many journeys you make. If you’re currently paying by cash or with contactless, moving to Tap & Cap could save you money on your bus travel.

With Tap & Cap there's no need to work out which ticket you should buy, as we work out the cheapest on-bus fare for you. The price you pay is based on the number of journeys you make and will never be more than our Day or Week ticket price. This way, if your travel plans change, you'll never pay for more travel than you need.

Your first journey of the day will cost the same price as a single ticket. For your second journey, you will be charged the difference between a single and day ticket, totalling your fares at £4.40, our day ticket price. Any subsequent journeys made that same day will then be free as your fare is capped automatically at the Day ticket price.

We’ll also track your bus travel across 7 days and apply our weekly cap. So, when the cost of your travel reaches the price of our Week ticket, the price you pay is capped again. This would be a saving to the customer of up to £12.80 compared to normal contactless payments for 7 days travel.

And there is a diagram to explain it all.

As presented it raises some questions which might be easily answered by locals familiar with the fares structure in the city.

But the web site does go on the explain the limitations of the scheme.

Anyone can use Tap & Cap to buy their Day and Week tickets. However, the Tap & Cap scheme doesn’t apply to the purchase of the short hop (£1.70) single, child, student, month or multiple tickets.

There are more little diagrams to help the confused and/or wary.

Contactless (without cap) has a wider validity.

But a question remains. How does the system know whether your contactless card is being used under the contactless system OR the Tap and Cap system.

Or is fbb being thick?

TrawsCymru Explored (A bit!)

What drew fbb's attention to the Welsh network was the launch of brand new buses for the T4 and T14.

The T4 has its origins in the Traws Cambria 704 ...

... operated by Stagecoach. Its replacement, the rebranded T4, runs north from Cardiff via Brecon to Newtown ...

... with an impressive frequency of every two hours.

It is enhanced to hourly between Cardiff and Brecon by the much newer T14.

Between Brecon and Hereford this has supplanted Stagecoach's long standing route 39.

Also at Brecon, there is an opportunity to transfer to the hourly T6 and zoom off to Swansea.

It is operated by New Adventure Travel (NAT) ...

... and is something of an improvement over the old Stagecoach 63 from the GBBTT of year 2000.

The final piece of the Brecon jigsaw is the X43 to Abergavenny, formerly route 21 ...

... and more formerly, route 43!

This has become today's Stagecoach 43/X43.

This is NOT a TrawsCymru service, but is tagged "Connect" ...

... which means that the day rover is valid, but fbb is not sure about weekend travel. Two other services, numbered with "T" are also so branded.

Maybe a comment writer can explain the difference.

This has been a rather "shallow" blog, but it does illustrate that the Principality has a genuine and productive desire to improve and extend its bus services.

Well done Wales.

Would someone from the dizzy heights of the Cardiff administration nip up to London and explain to Boris and his team how it should be done.

Which takes us very nicely to Derbyshire!

 Next new service blog - Thursday 25th July