IN a utopia, of course, it would be free at the point of use. Imagine it - cutting about the city gratis, Point A to Point B or even Point Z if you wanted to, for absolutely nothing.

A girl can dream, though free bus travel is very much but the stuff dreams are made on for now.

If we can't have the dream bus service in Greater Glasgow, maybe we can have, at least, a dreamy bus service.

Groups of local councillors, bus operators, campaign groups and passenger focus groups are all taking a hard squiz at what can be done to make bus travel an attractive option for the city and its surrounds.

One of the most-hailed developments is the coming introduction of "tap and cap", which will allow people to tap on and off services by different operators for one capped price. We're promised that by 2024 this will extend from the buses to rail and subway.

It's similar to the system that exists in London and Edinburgh and hundreds of cities around the world and should have been available years ago. But at least we're finally getting to it now.

Councillors promise an "affordable" bus fare cap - but affordable means very different things to different people.

There's a funny-because-it's-true sketch by the comedian Kevin Bridges where he talks about following the "onboard safety instructions" of evening bus travel, which include the edict that if someone starts kicking off at the driver you do not look. Eyes down, stare at the floor, go to your happy place.

In the sketch, the protagonist is kicking off because today the fare is £1.85 and yesterday it was £1.70. "I don't want to buy the f****** bus," the disgruntled passenger says, before punching the perspex barrier in an attempt to get at the driver.

I feel that on a deep and visceral level. Pre-pandemic I used to take the bus a couple of times a week and it was entirely dependent on the whim of the driver how much it would cost. Some counted Eglinton Toll as the cut off point before the fare increased from £1.70 to £2.40, others would let you go as far as the Victoria Road Lidl.

I was fortunate enough to be able to pay by card but if you were paying cash, and counting your money, you'd be gubbed.

It now seems to be £2.40 more often that not, which is a bonkers sum for a journey of less than one mile. Yes, I could walk it, and usually I'm on my bike, but on the rare occasions I'm dressed up or the weather is properly howling or I have heavy start to cart, I prefer to go on the bus.

I could walk, I could cycle, but what I could also do is drive and park for much, much cheaper than travelling by bus, which is a scenario we never want to be the case if we want to make public transport the default option.

Glasgow has ambitious targets for cutting the number of kilometres travelled by car by 2030. The attempt to meet this target suffers from the fact that nearly 30 per cent of vehicle journeys in the city are less than one kilometre. You want to ask why on earth people are taking their car on such short journeys and one of the answers is that a short hop by bus is ludicrously expensive.

There are certain people, who live in nice places and drive nice cars, who will need a great deal of persuasion to leave their vehicles behind and will need even more persuasion to swap car for bus on short journeys.

There is a horrible snobbery around bus travel. Can we blame Maggie Thatcher for this one? Her alleged "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure" comment casts a long shadow, in part because it's true.

There's nothing aspirational about buses. Boat and aeroplane travel are aspirational, travelling by train is respectable. But travelling by bus is seen as the poor man's cheap option.

Certainly it's not the cheaper option from where I am on Glasgow's south side – it's £1.90 return on the train and £2.50 for a single on the bus – but that's unusual.

Private public transport is really the very worst option

There is an inherent tension in providing a public service and being a profit-driven business.

Let's not get started on the extremely patchy

We'd be grateful for more than one bus an hour without a 2 hour gap at lunchtime. We have no buses going anywhere people want to go in the 3vening and no Sunday service going where people want to go. We live in Glasgow not out in the back of beyond.

The GlasGo Bus Alliance, led by Glasgow city region bus operators, recently carried out a survey of around 1000 passengers, which