to resent well off 60+ people that get free unlimited bus travel

[SuzzieScotland]

I can't afford a car, so I walk, cycle or bus everywhere.

The bus costs almost a pound a mile so it is seen as a treat for me.

A yearly ticket is 1000 or if your a student you can buy a £12 bus I'd card every year and get a yearly ticket that costs 750. This seams far too expensive.

Yet I see many pensioners who run two cars using the bus to get into town or to the airport totally free despite being well off. I think their would be uproar if a 20 pound admin fee a year was applied to these bus passes. In London a year ticket is 3k but anyone over 60 gets unlimited tube and bus despite 100000s of them still in full time work.

Just seams like the young and poor are getting a very raw deal to win grey votes.

Bogeyface - Is that down to their local authority?

I believe you get bus passes if you have difficulty getting from one place to another walking, so being elderly or disabled qualifies you, but being a low income family doesn't?

Catching the bus is a lot more social than driving a car, all the people I see know each other and have a good chat, so even if a person is better off financially, the pass allows them to not be isolated. Plus I would imagine even being better off doesn't account for loss of confidence in eyesight or reaction times, some probably feel safer using the bus for most journeys and only using the car when it is necessary. Maybe having it allows them to have a few little luxuries they couldn't afford without one. I do think the elderly deserve plenty of support, my granny was fairly health and still needed to sit regularly when out and about as she got tired.

I haven't read the whole thread. My DH uses his bus pass a lot. He could easily afford to drive, but it's more environmentally friendly to use the bus wherever possible.

It's full fare here before 9.30 am, so not generally used by older people going to work.

I find the UK just bonkers about these things.

Make them pay, if they can. Why not? everyone should.

We collect benefits that I think are ludicrous to give to people at our income. We make too much to have CB make any real difference (we are just below the cutoff. but both us are near it). So the public pays people like us (which costs money) money that we really don't need. CB should really be there for those who can't afford basics, but clearly the cut off is way beyond that.

"Many old people could do with more exercise."

Funny that, given it's the younger generations who are getting larger and lazier......

A load of rubbish.

Young people are getting bigger, but not lazier as many study's have shown. Funny how older people find it perfectly acceptable to call the young lazy, but find it outrageous when the other is suggested.

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/10473122/Obesity-crisis-more-than-one-third-of-60-70-year-olds-now-dangerously-overweight.html

I'm well over bus pass receiving age. As it happens I have never applied for one and wouldn't know how.

But as an elderly mums netter, should I feel resentful that younger people get months of maternity leave and a right to go back to their jobs afterwards whereas I had to bring up our DCs and work full-time with no such privilege or time off?

I don't feel resentful. I think good luck to you.

Each generation has different privileges and difficulties.

This inter generational bun fighting really pisses me off.

Most sensible post so far!

Grimble.

Also hurrahing grimble

Grimble, you do have a point but living standards are falling a lot.

My parents are about your age, and my mum had the choice not to work and there were a good supply of jobs. Neither of these are true now, both parents have to work and good jobs are harder to come by.

The thing is that no one knows what life will be like when the OP is 60. Just like we had no idea what our lives would be like when we oldies were young. In fact when I was a teenager the life expectancy was prob 70, so there was no pondering about retirement as it didn't last long enough to worry about!!

My adult DCs lives have been a blissful walk in the park compared to mine. How many miles did I walk in the pitch dark on the way home from the local dances/work (family didn't own a car), how many hours did I work for a pittance which meant I couldn't afford a holiday, I didn't holiday until after I was married and on DH's better salary. Hardly anyone went to uni, so none of my siblings did, three went to college. Only lived with central heating after I left home at 19.

It is so blinkered to surmise that a life you have never lead or will lead is much easier than yours.
Stop whingeing and enjoy your youth, there's only once chance.

I didn't look at the rich landowner up the road and moan about how hard my life was to his, just got on with it.

Maggie I find that offensive that you call me whining for the widening ineqiluality between generations in the UK.

You can talk about anicdotals all you like, but the young of today have a far blecker outlook then the generation before them.

All I want like millions of youngsters in the country, is to buy my own property, be paid a wage I can live off, afford to have children and efford to travel in the local area. Affordability for all of thoes is the lowest it has been for over 50 years and there is no end in sight. People have been warning since the 70s that the baby boomers will cause these kind of problems due to the lack of funding for state pensions, it therefore looks like their estimation that the next two generations will end up paying for them as very likely.

But the country isn't richer than the 60s, the debt is racking up and up. Its never been so broke

Bollocks - the UK was a lot broker after both world wars that it is now.

My DCs are young, have mortgages, are thinking about starting families and can afford to travel. And so can their friends. Not all the young are living in poverty.

GDP compared to debt is riddled with problems. Like if the coubtry had a huge earthquake that caused lots of damage this would be great for increasing gdp.

Just because some people can afford a mortgage it doesn't mean all people are rich.

This is about society as a whole, not just about people you know.

I've got no problem with pensioners having free bus travel.

Hopefully i'll get there one day and enjoy the benefit.

Just because you think the elderly are rich enough to do without bus passes doesn't make it true. Most of them probably aren't.

Society as a whole includes the elderly but you seem to hate them. Very sad.

"The interesting thing though is that gross domestic product has i think roughly quadrupled since 1960 (adjusted for inflation). yet we by no means feel four times as rich."

but if you were magically transported to the 1960's, I am sure you would feel four times as poor.

No washing machine, no tumbledrier, no fitted carpets, possibly no TV, no house insulation, no double-glazing, no central heating, ice on the inside of your bedroom windows in winter, a summer holiday in Morecambe while you dreamt wistfully of Spain, quite likely no car, possibly not even a fridge, working a 44-hour week, hardly any clothes, pensioners living on poverty in darned clothes on the brink of starvation, a second-hand bike for the kids if they were lucky, going to the call-box on the corner if you had no phone.