Beating the
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fare-dodgers
• Fare-dodgers cost Glasgow's buses about £60,000 a year out of their total revenue of f12m. This figure, which is approximate, is less than has been popularly supposed. Revealing this last week, Mr William Murray, general manager of Glasgow Corporation Transport, also said a series of checks had been made on buses recently to catch fare-dodgers and to get an estimate of the amount of uncollected fares.
"The figure is not small, although less than one-half of one per cent of our annual revenue, but by supermarket standards, where there is a high level of pilferage, it is not great," said Mr Murray. "Uncollected fares have caused us concern for many years, but how do you stop it?"
Apart from non-payment, many people who bought a ticket stayed on buses for several stops after they should have got off, Mr Murray explained. It had been thought that this problem of overriding might be much greater with the one-man-operated buses, but this was not the case.
Lately there had been a series of checks by plain-clothes observers on certain one-man routes. "We have been unable to find any evidence that the level of overriding on o-m-o buses is substantially above the level on the buses with a conductor."
Meanwhile, Edinburgh's o-m-o buses are proving highly successful when it comes to collecting fares from passengers. A recent cheek by inspectors found that of about 4000 passengers on those buses only five had not paid their fare on entry, and 12 were travelling beyond the stage they had paid for.
But, at the same time, a cheek of nearly 10,000 passengers on crew-operated buses showed that some 400 did not have tickets and 100 were overriding. A series of "blitz checks" by five or six inspectors on buses in one part of the city have been operated during the past few months, said an official of the department.
"The situation on the o-m-o buses is actually better than the bus with a conductor," he said.