Guru

You wait all year for a story about buses, then two come along at the same time!

Hot on the exhaust pipe of last week's blog posting about bus drivers threatening strike action over a lack of toliet facilities, Guru hears news of an innovative employee benefits scheme offering... tax-free bus travel.

Now, this may not fill employees with as much excitement as, say, a company car, mobile phone and laptop, but a perk is a perk - right?

An eager and rather 'worthy' press release announces:

Incentive and motivation firm Motivcom is introducing tax-free bus travel through its Greentravel2work scheme. The new initiative allows staff and employers to benefit from significant savings on travel, as well as show commitment to more environmentally-friendly travel.

Through the Greentravel2work scheme, employees are given the option to choose an annual bus pass and pay for it monthly through their salary by deduction from their pay. This payment, which is exempt from income tax, will offer savings of up to 41% for employees and up to 12.8% on National Insurance (NI) for employers.

Many local authorities, major public and private sector employers have already confirmed interest and are working with Motivcom to develop schemes for their staff. Nottingham City Council is pioneering the launch of the scheme for its 12,800 employees.

This is a major new initiative for which there is already enormous demand. Everyone wins – the employee, the employer, bus operators and the environment.

But does everyone really win? The bus operators win, for sure. The environment is a less obvious winner, as quarter-full buses belch out their particulate-dense emissions, stopping every two minutes to hold up the traffic and slow down average journey times (meaning everyone's engines are running for longer).

And then there's the image problem. Personally, Guru rather subscribes to the Margaret Thatcher school of public transport philosophy. In 1986, the Iron Lady famously (or was it apocryphally?) said: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." (Margaret Thatcher, 1986)

As usual, she was right.

Guru would rather take a London rickshaw than a London bus - and that's saying something. The typical bus experience usually brings one into contact with one or more of the following undesirable groups: squabbling schoolkids; grumbling pensioners; ipod noise polluters; back-pack wearing terrorists; adult Harry Potter readers; numerous Vicky Pollards and their discipline-free children; gangster wannabes; and people who have lost their driving licences.

So here's a warning to all those comp & ben specialists out there. If someone offers Guru a bus pass in lieu of salary - even if it is tax free - they will subsequently have to remove it from deep within an intimate bodily orifice.