I don’t seem to be endearing myself to the Park and Ride clientele. Yesterday a lady got on in the town and told me she’d mislaid her car park ticket which gives a free bus ride to the car park. “I’m sorry” I said, punching the car park fare stage into the ticket machine, “that’ll be 95 pence”. She looked rather startled that I should be charging her and then told me she only had a \u00a310 note. “That’s no problem” I told her “I too don’t have change” (genuine, I often take no money at all) “but I’ll give you a change voucher for \u00a39.05 which you can exchange for cash with any other driver who has it in their bag, or at the bus station. At least it means you can get back to your car”. This made her face display even more displeasure.<\/p>\n
I hate this sort of situation. It is 99.99% certain that she had bought a ticket and lost it because no one would ever want to go to an out of town car park with nothing near it except to get back to their car. If she hadn’t bought a car park ticket she would be in for a \u00a360 fine when she got back. The bus ticket is a tear off portion of the parking ticket which is left on display in the car. So I really can’t see any attempt to swindle a free ride here. However, since I’ve been doing these Park and Ride loops, only a few days, I can’t recall a day when I haven’t been jumped by an Inspector. On one 90 minute duty I got jumped 4 times! Including one stop where 2 inspectors AND the Operations Manager got on checking my ticket machine and the passengers on the bus. So there is no way in the world I’m opening myself up to disciplinary action by allowing the lady who lost her ticket a free ride. I’m thick skinned but I could see some drivers thinking they were being victimised by such intense checking of their bus. I asked the Controllers if I was being suspected of something and they assured me not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t seem to be endearing myself to the Park and Ride clientele. Yesterday a lady got on in the town and told me she’d mislaid her car park ticket which gives a free bus ride to the car park. “I’m sorry” I said, punching the car park fare stage into the ticket machine, “that’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loades.net\/megabusblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}