Paper One Day Bus & Tram Pass withdrawn

[ainsworth74]

I've been informed that from 2 March 2025 the paper version of the One Day Bus & Tram Pass has been withdrawn from sale by TfL. There is apparently a version available on Oyster which is available from Oyster Ticket Stops. That being said apparently customer advice is to use contactless or PAYG as the daily bus and team cap is £5.25 whilst the ticket is £6.

I presume that sales were extremely low as I'd never heard of such a ticket until someone told me it had been withdrawn! Of course this is another poke in the eye for those that don't want to embrace modern ticketing and prefer paper based travel

 

[Tetchytyke]

Gosh, I thought they’d abolished that years ago, back when they took out the ticket machines on Tramlink.

 

[PeterC]

Daily bus passes in various guises predate Oyster and flat fares by a long way. The withdrawal of cash fares combined with capping made them obsolete years ago. I am surprised that they survived this long.

 

[dmncf]

There is apparently a version available on Oyster which is available from Oyster Ticket Stops.

Is this a version that's a paper smartcard?

 

[ainsworth74]

I assume it's a version that is loaded onto a regular Oyster card but I do not know for certain.

 

[stadler]

I've been informed that from 2 March 2025 the paper version of the One Day Bus & Tram Pass has been withdrawn from sale by TfL. There is apparently a version available on Oyster which is available from Oyster Ticket Stops. That being said apparently customer advice is to use contactless or PAYG as the daily bus and team cap is £5.25 whilst the ticket is £6.

I presume that sales were extremely low as I'd never heard of such a ticket until someone told me it had been withdrawn! Of course this is another poke in the eye for those that don't want to embrace modern ticketing and prefer paper based travel

Is the paper Bus & Tram Pass still available from National Rail ticket offices? It is not clear whether only TFL are withdrawing them?

I assume it's a version that is loaded onto a regular Oyster card but I do not know for certain.

No it is a special green Oyster Card with Bus & Tram Pass branding. It is single use and can not be reloaded. They have been sold for at least fifteen years now. The convenience shops that do Oyster Card top ups have them.

 

[ainsworth74]

Is the paper Bus & Tram Pass still available from National Rail ticket offices? It is not clear whether only TFL are withdrawing them?

The briefing says that the paper version will no longer be available to buy. So I would assume not.

No it is a special green Oyster Card with Bus & Tram Pass branding. It is single use and can not be reloaded. They have been sold for at least fifteen years now. The convenience shops that do Oyster Card top ups have them.

Ah fair enough! As I say I wasn't even aware it existed as a product so didn't know there was a special Oyster to go with it!

 

[stadler]

The briefing says that the paper version will no longer be available to buy. So I would assume not.

Ah fair enough! As I say I wasn't even aware it existed as a product so didn't know there was a special Oyster to go with it!

Just checked on BR Fares and it has dissappeared from there. So i suspect you are right. This is very annoying. I purchase this ticket about once or twice a month. I normally get it from various SN or SWR ticket offices. It is a very useful and good value alternative to the Travelcard if you only want buses.

I think it is more popular than you might think. One of the clerks at Dorking ticket office was telling me last year that he sells a couple a month. Some passengers for the 465 buy it and it could be especially useful with TFL buses being cashless.

What exactly are TFL achieving by withdrawing this ticket. It is not like it allows them to remove ticket machines or save costs. The ticket machines will comtinue to exist for selling other tickets. It is just an inconvenience for passengers who bought this ticket.

This is the document that TFL published in relation to the withdrawal:



It has a photo of the green Oyster Card that convinience shops sell. It is such a waste of money producing a plastic Oyster Card for single use. The paper ticket is surely much cheaper for them.

 

[Joe Paxton]

I'd long been curious about this, in terms of the version being retailed by National Rail - though evidently not curious enough to post a question about it on here!

The LT / TfL One Day Bus Pass has a long pedigree of course, but traditionally it wasn't sold at National Rail (or indeed British Rail) stations. So my question is when this NR-retailed version was introduced? I wonder if it was connected with the withdrawal of cash acceptance on London buses back in 2014? (And TfL having an input into National Rail ticketing via London Overground might have made introducing it to the NR ticketing world easier.)

[...]
It has a photo of the green Oyster Card that convinience shops sell. It is such a waste of money producing a plastic Oyster Card for single use. The paper ticket is surely much cheaper for them.

I really don't think that many are sold.

 

[Haywain]

. I purchase this ticket about once or twice a month.

Why not just use contactless or Oyster and benefit from the lower price cap?

 

[Lewisham2221]

Just checked on BR Fares and it has dissappeared from there. So i suspect you are right. This is very annoying. I purchase this ticket about once or twice a month. I normally get it from various SN or SWR ticket offices. It is a very useful and good value alternative to the Travelcard if you only want buses.

I think it is more popular than you might think. One of the clerks at Dorking ticket office was telling me last year that he sells a couple a month. Some passengers for the 465 buy it and it could be especially useful with TFL buses being cashless.

What exactly are TFL achieving by withdrawing this ticket. It is not like it allows them to remove ticket machines or save costs. The ticket machines will comtinue to exist for selling other tickets. It is just an inconvenience for passengers who bought this ticket.

This is the document that TFL published in relation to the withdrawal:

View attachment 175881

It has a photo of the green Oyster Card that convinience shops sell. It is such a waste of money producing a plastic Oyster Card for single use. The paper ticket is surely much cheaper for them.

I imagine the Oyster version is significantly more difficult to fraudulently produce/use and will also provide more accurate usage figures through "tapping-on" than a paper ticket that relies on manual logging - if drivers even still do that? (or nothing at all on the trams?)

 

[Edvid]

Yes, bus drivers still (sometimes) manually record use of paper tickets in my experience.* Tram drivers obviously aren't involved and I've never seen a tram ticket inspector record paper ticket counts (admittedly it's also been years since I've had a ticket inspected).

[* Which reminds me - isn't edition six of the Big Red Book set for publication sometime this year?]

 

[redreni]

When TfL decided / threatened to withdraw the paper day Travelcard, one of the arguments I saw on here against retaining that ticket was that it requires visual inspection by bus drivers. It was also said the continued existence of paper day Travelcards would be an impediment to getting rid of ticket barriers that accept mag stripe tickets in due course.

I did suggest at the time that a single-use oyster day travelcard, issued on a credit-card-sized ticket but working on Oyster/Contactless readers rather than needing to be inserted into the ticket barrier, might be a potential solution. I knew tickets like this existed elsewhere (e.g. Lisbon). What I didn't know was that TfL already issues such tickets!

Does anyone know if there's any technical reason why there couldn't be a single-use oyster version of the Day Travelcard issued on the same kind of ticket stock as these green oyster bus & tram day passes? Could it not be made to work, for example, on oyster/contactless readers at tube and rail stations in the same way as it does on buses?

 

[DelW]

Yes, bus drivers still (sometimes) manually record use of paper tickets in my experience.* Tram drivers obviously aren't involved and I've never seen a tram ticket inspector record paper ticket counts (admittedly it's also been years since I've had a ticket inspected).

Don't bus drivers still have to inspect, and manually record use of, out-of-town ENCTS passes, since they don't work Oyster readers? That must be quite a lot of visual inspections on some routes.

 

[Haywain]

Don't bus drivers still have to inspect, and manually record use of, out-of-town ENCTS passes, since they don't work Oyster readers? That must be quite a lot of visual inspections on some routes.

If they are supposed to be doing that, my experience suggests that it is definitely not happening.

 

[DelW]

If they are supposed to be doing that, my experience suggests that it is definitely not happening.

I believe they're still supposed to, though I don't know how important the relevant accounting process actually is. Between about 2015 and 2020 I regularly used an ENCTS pass on London buses, and usually the driver nodded to me and tapped some sort of counter with his left hand.

 

[stadler]

I wonder if the Bus Saver Tickets will be the next to be scrapped. Now that the paper Bus & Tram Pass is scrapped i worry that this will be next. It seems like TFL want to scrap all paper tickets.

I always do a big order of Bus Saver Tickets once a year. I just ordered my last ones before Christmas two months ago. They cost the same price as Contactless or Oyster but are a paper ticket. Obviously they do not include the hopper fare but the major benefit is that they never expire. So whenever TFL increase the bus fares i always make sure to order a big batch of them just before. So they are a great way to beat the fare increases. If you are doing 4 or more journeys then the Bus & Tram Pass was always the cheapest. But the Bus Saver Tickets work out excellent value for 3 or less journeys.

It looks like the Bus Saver Ticket will be my main ticket going forward when i do not have a Travelcard ticket. So i really hope they do not get rid of this. But i think it is probably quite likely that this will go next as they seem to be trying to get rid of as many paper tickets as possible.

 

[RJ]

I sold those bus tickets on rare occasions, usually cash sales for people with no payment or smart cards to hand. Somebody pinned the H611 code up in the ticket office as people did request them and it made it easier to find. I read about the withdrawal of this on a random website a few days ago and spread the word at work.

The product is nothing to do with the railways really but it seems a shame to lose a whole network of retailers for it. That said, are any stations on the bus network far from a ticket stop?

 

[stadler]

I sold those bus tickets on rare occasions, usually cash sales for people with no payment or smart cards to hand. Somebody pinned the H611 code up in the ticket office as people did request them and it made it easier to find. I read about the withdrawal of this on a random website a few days ago and spread the word at work.

The product is nothing to do with the railways really but it seems a shame to lose a whole network of retailers for it. That said, are any stations on the bus network far from a ticket stop?

The only ones i can think of are Esher and Hinchley Wood which both have some TFL bus services. The nearest ticket stop to both is a shop near Claygate station roughly thirty minutes walk from either station.

Everywhere else seems to have a ticket stop nearby. Even miles outside of London in both Dorking and Leatherhead they have one ticket stop each in the town centres. Redhill has two ticket stops. Westerham even has one.

 

[Sonic1234]

It seems like TFL want to scrap all paper tickets

Ironic, because for rail ticketing, TfL are the reason a lot of paper tickets are still issued.

 

[Edvid]

A briefing note and Equality Impact Assessment form have just been published in response to a FoI request. Curiously the majority of these passes (the Oyster issue, of which stocks are expected to run out next year) are sold within Enfield Borough, particularly in Edmonton.

 

[infobleep]

A briefing note and Equality Impact Assessment form have just been published in response to a FoI request. Curiously the majority of these passes (the Oyster issue, of which stocks are expected to run out next year) are sold within Enfield Borough, particularly in Edmonton.

Well that is one way to get out of date information removed from the National Rail Enquiry Web site.

 

[ainsworth74]

Well that is one way to get out of date information removed from the National Rail Enquiry Web site.

Sometimes you have to use the tools at hand, even if they're not the right tools. I used FOI to get TPE to fix a data error once when they made the interchange time at Middlesbrough 20 minutes

 

[infobleep]

Sometimes you have to use the tools at hand, even if they're not the right tools. I used FOI to get TPE to fix a data error once when they made the interchange time at Middlesbrough 20 minutes

Very good. I like it. Off topic but you have reminded me I need to claim some delay repay.