THE late great Kay Mellor once said that you couldn’t get from one end of Leeds Market to the other without picking up a story.

The same could be said for travelling on a bus. All human life is there. The everyday triumphs and tragedies, the chatter, the banter, the rows, the young, the old and everyone in between.

I’ve been on buses all my life. I vaguely recall my mum putting me on one when I was little, for school, (hey, it was the Seventies) and the bus driver telling me where to get off. It was only a couple of stops but it seemed a huge, if slightly terrifying, adventure. From the age of 13, I got two buses to school and two home. When I started my first proper job, on a weekly newspaper, I couldn’t afford a car so every morning I took two buses, each one a half-hour journey, then two back again, often late in the evening after covering a meeting or event.

My weekly travel card took up a hefty chunk of my wage, as bus fares were costly. I still get buses now and then, and the fares are still costly. It’s a fiver for a return ticket to town - and recently I waited an hour, and the two scheduled buses didn’t even turn up.

I’ve travelled on buses and trams in other European countries for a fraction of the price they charge in the UK. I’ve long thought that if more people are to be encouraged to use buses, they have to be less expensive (and more reliable).

So the £2 bus fare cap introduced this month, as part of a Government-funded £60 million national scheme, is a welcome move.

Passengers on Yorkshire bus firm Transdev’s entire network can now travel for a £2 single fare, available anytime, as part of the Help for Household initiative, launched on January 2 and running until the end of March. It means that some fares could be up to 87per cent less - including the 84-mile journey from Leeds to Whitby, voted Britain’s Most Scenic Bus Route in a national poll of bus users.

For just £2 you can travel across moorland, through villages, along coastal roads, anywhere in Yorkshire, and into Lancashire and Greater Manchester. Transdev chief executive Alex Hornby said that while there has been a return to bus travel, post-pandemic, the cost of living crisis has had an impact, and he hopes hope this New Year promotion will attract passengers back on board.

I hope so too. It’s a significant saving for bus users, helping with travel costs for work, education, shopping and medical appointments. And it’s a cheap day out. You’d struggle to find a car park space for £2.

If enough passengers take up the promotion, hopefully it would lead to more permanent measures for subsidising bus travel. As Paul Tuohy, chief executive of Campaign for Better Transport, says: “Buses have great potential to cut traffic and carbon emissions, to connect communities and ease loneliness.”

Bus travel isn’t for everyone. I used to love taking my nephews on the top deck of a bus when they were little, but now they’re car mad. One of them recently sold his car for scrap and when I suggested he could get a bus to work, he recoiled in horror. “I can walk there faster than the bus. It goes round every street,” he said.

But that’s the beauty of buses - they go round the houses, serving communities that need them. They’re a lifeline, especially in rural places. Here’s hoping that this fare cap will go some way in supporting the long-term sustainability of bus networks, further down the road.