Rail Fares Going Up Again

[Hillary]

Commuters are held to ransom, particularly in London, as there's no other realistic method of getting to work.

Due to refusal to complete the original London motorway plans, this is sadly true. I would always prefer to drive anywhere else in the country, even if fares were a quarter what they are now.

It's more the parking than the journey to be honest. I used to drive through central London to get to work as I had somewhere to park in Notting Hill. It was a rather lovely drive - over Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, through St James's Park, past Buckingham Palace, Green Park, Hyde Park Corner, Park Lane, Hyde Park. It was like a tourist trail every morning and evening

[Jade Falcon]

It also didn't help that the massive Beeching cuts in the 60's literally slaughtered a lot of the network. Granted, there were a lot of unprofitable lines and stations, but it went too far with further cuts in the decades after that. One prime example is the line from Kilmarnock in Scotland to Glasgow. It used to be a double line, however it was singled up to just outside Glasgow before reverting to a double track. Scotrail found there was a demand for more services and kept increasing the number of services till they literally strained the single track. A dynamic passing loop was reinstalled for most of the way, and what do they do? They double the service and have overcrowded the now doubled line.

[PeZook]

Talking about "profitability" of rail very often glosses over the fact that for many people, railway connections are the only way to get to work, and the money you save on subsidizing such an "unprofitable" line is dwarfed by revenue you lose and expenses you incur when these people go on welfare because, get this, they can't get to work anymore!

[K. A. Pital]

Talking about "profitability" of rail very often glosses over the fact that for many people, railway connections are the only way to get to work, and the money you save on subsidizing such an "unprofitable" line is dwarfed by revenue you lose and expenses you incur when these people go on welfare because, get this, they can't get to work anymore!

See, you can't just transport people to work at a loss for the company. This means socialism. Only at a profit, the hardcore way. Sell them a car, making a profit. Sell them gas, making a profit. Rail? Environment? Loss? No way - if some loss is to be had, it needs to be privatized or rather, even directly personalized in the form of spending thousands for a car that you mostly use for travelling on congested highways. Why? Because this is profitable and therefore sustainable. Shush those who say unprofitable passenger transit could be subsidized through profits of the companies that receive the benefit from cheaper commuting - it's a heretic thought. What then, you envision the entire country running as a big corporation subsidizing its own departments?

I could've made a pretty good libertarian.

[madd0ct0r]

It also didn't help that the massive Beeching cuts in the 60's literally slaughtered a lot of the network. Granted, there were a lot of unprofitable lines and stations, but it went too far with further cuts in the decades after that. One prime example is the line from Kilmarnock in Scotland to Glasgow. It used to be a double line, however it was singled up to just outside Glasgow before reverting to a double track. Scotrail found there was a demand for more services and kept increasing the number of services till they literally strained the single track. A dynamic passing loop was reinstalled for most of the way, and what do they do? They double the service and have overcrowded the now doubled line.

In fairness, nobdy in the beeching era thought rail would ever become popualr again - witness the monstrosity of Birmingham New Street Station - one of the biggest in the UK and stuck in the basement of a low rent mall.

[Thanas]

Talking about "profitability" of rail very often glosses over the fact that for many people, railway connections are the only way to get to work, and the money you save on subsidizing such an "unprofitable" line is dwarfed by revenue you lose and expenses you incur when these people go on welfare because, get this, they can't get to work anymore!

See, you can't just transport people to work at a loss for the company. This means socialism. Only at a profit, the hardcore way. Sell them a car, making a profit. Sell them gas, making a profit. Rail? Environment? Loss? No way - if some loss is to be had, it needs to be privatized or rather, even directly personalized in the form of spending thousands for a car that you mostly use for travelling on congested highways. Why? Because this is profitable and therefore sustainable. Shush those who say unprofitable passenger transit could be subsidized through profits of the companies that receive the benefit from cheaper commuting - it's a heretic thought. What then, you envision the entire country running as a big corporation subsidizing its own departments?

I could've made a pretty good libertarian.

For a second I thought you were Starglider.

[Zaune]

It's a disturbingly good impression, actually.

[White Haven]

In some cultures, that qualifies as a mortal insult.

[energiewende]

Aportioning blame for the British railways is a Gordian Knot. It has recently become popular to blame privatisation, but usage has exploded under privatisation while Beeching and underinvestment in maintenance occured under British Rail. A bevy of other questionable decisions were also made by the late and apparently lamented BR, most castrophically its decision to design a new class of steam trains while the rest of the world was electrifying. Today the service seems expensive, yet trains are consistently packed at peak times. If it's such a bad deal, while do people seem so eager to take it? The result of fare reductions right now would be to force some kind of seat rationing lottery system simply due to over-demand, while the private system already seems to incentivize expanding supply as much as possible. The franchise holders don't seem to be simply pocketing all the money; FirstGroup which is a notorious franchise farmer only makes about a 2.5% profit for instance.

I would rather have vertically integrated lines, so that railways really compete with other transportation systems like motorways and aircraft rather than competing for the favour of bureaucrats. Other than that, I'm not sure what practically can be done to improve things. Travelling in the UK is mostly expensive because everything is a suburb of London, and there are only a limited number routes from where people can actually afford to live to this tiny point mass of where everyone seems to have to work.

[Zaune]

There's underinvestment in maintenance and there's letting trains fall off the fucking track and kill people. BR never let it get to that stage, even when we'd about bankrupted the country fighting the Second World War.

[energiewende]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ra ... itish_Rail

In the 10 years before privatization there are 76 fatalities due to rail accidents. In the 10 years after, there are 71. The highest fatality crash in the 10 years before privatization killed 35 people. The highest fatality crash in the 10 years after killed 31.

The second highest fatality rail accident in British history occured in 1952, under British Rail. The highest occured in 1915 during a brief period of wartime nationalization.

It's also worth noting that while the pre-privatization Clapham Junction crash (35 deaths) was in fact caused by poor maintenance, the only high fatality post-privatization crash at Ladbroke Grove (31 deaths) was caused by driver error. I would argue that belief that the private railways were more dangerous than nationalized railways is a result of selection bias. People who opposed privatization anyway reasoned that crashes occuring under privatization were a result of privitization, whereas crashes occuring under BR were just random accidents and not the fault of the institutional arrangements.

[Dartzap]

Having now used the damn things nearly every day for the last year, I have noticed some improvement, at least in my part of the world: The bastard Pacers have nearly all gone, more 'modern' stock has been brought in, and trains are now being reinforced in peak times, and delays wise, I have encountered a grand total of it happening twice, and that was when it was monsoon season late last year and the bridge to Waterloo became a pond feature.

London is always going to get the lions share of railway investment, as it is basically its own little country, ruled by Mad King Boris who seems to like them and buses. Rest of the country can lump it with the new electrification happening all over the place (even in Wales!) though they still wont go past Exeter with that due to the line at Dawlish about to fall into the sea any given time of the week.

Whilst there is a current fad going around calling for renationalisation, with the ECML being used as an example of it working, no ones ever really been able to prove that its the work of DOT whose made it one of the best in the country, or the work of the now defunct National Express franchise.

Leg room still doesn't exist on the bloody things, mind.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Today the service seems expensive, yet trains are consistently packed at peak times. If it's such a bad deal, while do people seem so eager to take it?

The trains are packed and people still buy tickets because, as PeZook pointed out, some of us have no bloody choice but to use the trains/i] Either because they are unable or unwilling to use a car. Anyone who has seen petrol prices (not to mention insurance if you are under 25) will understand that a car is not always the best option. Add the cost and difficulty of parking the thing and train travel, expensive as it is, becomes the only viable choice.

[Dartzap]

Today the service seems expensive, yet trains are consistently packed at peak times. If it's such a bad deal, while do people seem so eager to take it?

The trains are packed and people still buy tickets because, as PeZook pointed out, some of us have no bloody choice but to use the trains/i] Either because they are unable or unwilling to use a car. Anyone who has seen petrol prices (not to mention insurance if you are under 25) will understand that a car is not always the best option. Add the cost and difficulty of parking the thing and train travel, expensive as it is, becomes the only viable choice.

Yep, cost of public transport for me, going between Brixham and Exeter on a daily basis is, on a yearly basis, cheaper than a car by quite some distance. I can understand it if your in an area that's underprovided for, but around here where the buses and trains are frequent and run past midnight, the arguments a hard one to make. Its not like you get any more legroom

[energiewende]

If trains are cheaper than the alternative then what is the problem? The other choices being worse, or having a non-specific unwillingness to make another choice, is not the same as not having a choice. It's one thing to think that transport as a whole should be subsidised (but in that case why not cars and carparks?), but their superiority to other methods of transport doesn't constitute a strong case that the railways are badly run.

[Dartzap]

Your thinking of it as being a simple picture, though. The reason it works for me, and I feel its affordable is because I live out in the boonies where the overcrowding happens once or twice a day. If you head up to the home counties, where pretty much every train from 0700-0900 and 1700-1900 is jammed to the gunwales, its a different perspective. There are different problems on different routes.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If trains are cheaper than the alternative then what is the problem? The other choices being worse, or having a non-specific unwillingness to make another choice, is not the same as not having a choice.

The trains are cheaper than cars, the cost of which is already far above what it should be (compare petrol prices in the UK to the US and be ready for a spittake). It's a relative thing. Train travel is cheaper but not cheap. It's a choice between two expensive options and people choose the lesser evil.

Oh, and some of us don't have a choice. Those of us who do not have driving licences for whatever reason (in my case, poor eyesight).

[Simon_Jester]

The fundamental points of criticism might be:

-Profits are not being reinvested into the railways' capital plant, which results in the infrastructure not expanding to meet future demand, and with the existing infrastructure decaying. When a purely private organization does that it's not an issue. If you want your own personal factory to fall apart around your ears, that's your problem. But when the working public depends on your system working reliably, it leads to charges of mismanagement, and may have the government looking for a solution other than your continued ownership of the infrastructure.

-The way the privatization scheme works may remove incentives to compete, thus leaving the owners with no incentive to improve service or reliability, or to reduce fees. In that case, privatization is not performing as advertised, and there is less advantage (if any) in having the system be privatized at all.

-Destinations in certain areas are grossly underserved, because it would not be a profitable enterprise to run a route there. This is irrelevant if you don't care about towns dying on the vine, but it's a problem if you see "provide means of transportation so that rural tourist attractions can be commercially viable" as something the government should take responsibility for.

[energiewende]

The fundamental points of criticism might be:

-Profits are not being reinvested into the railways' capital plant, which results in the infrastructure not expanding to meet future demand, and with the existing infrastructure decaying. When a purely private organization does that it's not an issue. If you want your own personal factory to fall apart around your ears, that's your problem. But when the working public depends on your system working reliably, it leads to charges of mismanagement, and may have the government looking for a solution other than your continued ownership of the infrastructure.

Is that true? Like I said before the companies don't seem to be making much money, usage is dramatically up, accidents are at a historic low - I think this claims needs strong evidence to be believable.

-The way the privatization scheme works may remove incentives to compete, thus leaving the owners with no incentive to improve service or reliability, or to reduce fees. In that case, privatization is not performing as advertised, and there is less advantage (if any) in having the system be privatized at all.

I agree to some extent but remember that a railway is never really going to be competing with another parallel-running railway, it's competing with other modes of transport and there is a clear incentive to attract and carry more customers. The point of the franchise system is precisely to create a sort of internal faux-competition by letting bureaucrats kick out the franchise holders after a period of years and replace them with someone who is claiming to running the system better. The downside is that the management of the actual lines and the trains that run on them is split up which can reduce incentive for and make it harder to co-ordinate infrastructure investment.

-Destinations in certain areas are grossly underserved, because it would not be a profitable enterprise to run a route there. This is irrelevant if you don't care about towns dying on the vine, but it's a problem if you see "provide means of transportation so that rural tourist attractions can be commercially viable" as something the government should take responsibility for.

This involves value judgments. I won't make any profit as a fisherman in the Nevada Desert but that doesn't mean that the Nevada Desert is grossly underserved with fishermen. If you want to be part of the exciting, dynamic economy of well-paid modern jobs (or the rat race, if you prefer) you have to move to where those jobs are concentrated. High productivity requires high division of labour and that means a lot of people need to be living close enough to be interdependent.

[Zaune]

I'd be less concerned about rural tourist attractions than the need to enable people to travel from regions with reasonably-priced property -by UK standards- but no job openings to places with plenty of job openings but ridiculously high property prices. (For which read London, for the most part.)

[K. A. Pital]

Is rail usage really dramatically up? The number of trips, sure, but by passenger-kilometers travelled the figure seems to be nigh the same, no?

[energiewende]

Do you have the raw data for that? The extremely large scale seems to be obscuring a large proportionate increase.

[madd0ct0r]

It's from here: http://www.railway-technical.com/statistics.shtml

The numbers of trips is kind of key here for measuring overcrowding - it shows the shift to commuters over people's holidays and seasonal workers moving in and out of the cities.

[K. A. Pital]

Here's a better view, yep.

It has doubled over almost a decade. However, the jump in trip numbers has been much more dramatic and I'm seeking an explanation on how this could happen.

[Zaune]

Combination of ever-increasing petrol prices and greater public awareness of the environmental impact, probably.