The facts, just the facts ma'am
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THE EXTENT to which patronage and revenue can be increased by the mere provision of information about services, as distinct from advertising promotions, has been demonstrated by P. B. Ellson, of the Transport and Road Research Laboratory, and G. E. Tebb, of the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, in TR R L reports 990 and 991.
In the small West Yorkshire town of Bingley, £1,200 was spent on printing and distributing 11,000 copies of a cleverly designed new kind of bus and train timetable including maps of bus routes and stops.
They were distributed at bus stops, outside the railway station and at schools, shops, workplaces and elsewhere. Over five months that modest expenditure is estimated to have been repaid at least threefold and perhaps tenfold.
Applauding the experiment, Junior Transport Minister Kenneth Clarke said: "Bus patronage can be increased at no cost to the rates by cost
effective marketing and better information to the public. This an approach the Government would like to see adopted rate than the indiscriminate cheap fares policies which drive up thr rates and penalise local industry ..."
The place to start marketing the bus destination indicator. (t is a lesson that London Transport might relearn merely by looking at pictures of its buses half a century ago.