Plans to cut Tyne and Wear Metro ticket prices for young people have been approved.
Cheaper fares will be introduced next month for passengers aged 21 and under who use a Pop smartcard to travel on the network. From May 7, Pop customers aged 16 to 21 will pay just £1 for a single Metro journey and a maximum of £2.20 for a full day’s travel.
Currently, a single ticket bought using the existing Pop 19-21 card can cost up to £2.30 and the daily cap is £3.40. The changes, which were signed off by members of the North East Joint Transport Committee (JTC) last week, will come only a matter of weeks after the cost of some adult paper tickets on the Metro were hiked by as much as 13.9%.
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Gateshead councillor John McElroy said the move was “another indication that we are serious about getting more people onto public transport”. South Tyneside’s Paul Dean told Nexus bosses at the JTC’s Tyne and Wear sub-committee: “I think it is an absolutely great idea and I hope you are targeting the colleagues and universities with the publicity because they [students] are the ones who will use this most.”
The “simplified” prices for young people will mean that the existing Pop 19-21 card will be scrapped and the Pop Blue smartcard expanded to all young people aged 16 to 21. However, current Pop 19-21 holders will not need to change their smartcards.
The Junior Blue smartcard for under-16s, on which single tickets are already charged at £1 with a £1.70 daily cap, will remain at its current rates. The changes proposed on Metro will be mirrored on Shields Ferry and bus services operated by Nexus, with the offer being introduced to coincide with plans for cheaper bus fares that are also due to be rolled out across the North East.
At the beginning of April, Nexus imposed a series of fare rises on some of its tickets that have been blamed on spiralling electricity costs to keep the Metro network running.
Meanwhile, the company in charge of maintaining its trains has been ordered to improve after a raft of reliability problems lately. The JTC was told last week that Stadler had been served formal notice that it must make more carriages available for service.
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