READING Borough Council has welcomed the U-turn on scrapping One Day Travelcards after Transport for London (TfL) announced they would not be scrapping them.
Yesterday TfL said that they had reached an agreement with the government and the Rail Delivery Group after plans to scrap the travelcards were teed up earlier this year.
Now the scheme, which means customers are able to use a single ticket to travel into and around London, is tipped to stay.
Reading Borough Council has welcomed the U-turn, which they argued would have unfairly impacted those travelling into London from Reading.
It was among a number of local authorities who criticised the scrapping of the scheme, despite TfL’s figures showing it costed the transport provider around £40m a year in lost ticket sales.
If scrapped, Reading commuters would have seen the price of an off-peak adult return jump up from £29.60 to £38.90– an increase of more than 30%.
John Ennis, Reading Borough Council’s lead councillor for climate strategy and transport, said: “I’m sure many regular commuters from Reading into London will breathe a sigh of relief at this u-turn as the proposed 31% increase would have been unacceptable at a time when the cost-of-living crisis continues to impact on residents.
“While the proposal only came forward as a result of the conditions of Government funding settlements for TfL, we are pleased that all sides have come to a solution after talks and seen sense.
He explained: “As a Council we have made significant progress in recent years on cutting our carbon footprint.
“A big part of our success to date is attributable to developing realistic and cheap alternatives to the private car, through investment in bus services and cheaper fares in Reading, building more priority routes for buses and delivering new and improved cycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
“Rail travel also plays an essential role and anything which would have encouraged commuters away from sustainable travel options would have been counterproductive to the progress being made both in Reading, and indeed in London by the Mayor.”
“In that respect, the average 3 per cent one-off price increase on day travelcards bought outside zones 1 – 6 from next March, also announced by TfL this week, is not so welcome but I’m certain Reading residents would prefer that to the alternative.”
