All change please on child fares (From Bournemouth Echo)

All change please on child fares

7:30am Monday 1st February 2010 in

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YOU may think of me as a sophisticated fellow who would never be seen in an old anorak but here’s a confession.

I was once a bus spotter.

As a boy I’d travel around London, with other young spotters, ticking off the Routemasters and RT buses that we spied.

Those seemed safer days when boys of 10 or 11 would travel on buses, unaccompanied, to skulk around bus garages, dodging the men in London Transport uniforms who always looked like Blakey from TV’s On the Buses.

If you got crazily close to a manoeuvring bus, moustaches quivering, they’d shout out something like: “I’ll get you, Buster!”

And you’d scarper, hopping on the next bus home. That boyhood hobby was a cheap one, for we lads went half price on buses in the days when even the full fare was a few pence.

So I’m gobsmacked that here, in 2010, children have to pay the full whack of an adult fare on Wilts & Dorset buses if they travel before 9am on a weekday. How can that be fair? Children are at school after 9am, aren’t they?

And Wilts & Dorset have been doing this since 1973! When they should have been doing everything instead to get youngsters in the habit of using buses, shouldn’t they?

The company has missed the bus in not allowing child fares at all times for the past 37 years but at least it is now reviewing its parsimonious policy. And it plans improve- ments later this month. Good news.

As Blakey used to chortle in On the Buses: “That’s made my day, that ’as.”

Like a bus on a wet day, better late than never.