Student transport - opinion piece

As a regular public transport user in both Manchester and Sheffield, it is interesting to see the differences of the services offered to students in the two similar size cities.
Manchester provides a very regular bus service in the student areas, with weekly passes costing only £2 for students and frequent buses on Sundays too.
In my opinion the students in Manchester are clearly catered for better than in Sheffield, even though Sheffield also has a large student popularity.
In Sheffield a return fair from the town centre to one of the student areas is at least £1.60 with no student concessions, almost the same amount as a weekly pass for students in Manchester! Sheffield also doesn’t have many bus services on Sundays - in fact hardly any despite being the fourth largest city in England - it is clearly not that advanced!
Another positive aspect of Manchester’s bus service is that it provides free journeys to all pensioners and disabled people after 9.30am - in Sheffield, there aren’t many buses with disabled access let alone ones that provide free journeys!
Manchester definitely wins in the sense of the better provision of public transport and its services, in comparison to Sheffield, which needs to cater for students and the general public better. However, a reason for these differences could be due to the difference in some of the bus companies used in both cities. To improve this, more positive similarities in all northern major cities, in terms of the number of hours that buses run on a Sunday, and standard prices and the amount of discount for students in certain student areas would certainly be advantageous!

Author: Shamela Ghafoor

Manchester iJourno group