Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work.
Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.
It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.
More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried.
Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.
It's buses or coaches only now, I'm not surprised everyone drives here
This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.
My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
A Bristol to London season ticket is £1300 per month for ~120 miles each way. Bargain!
This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.
Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!
People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high.
If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.
I think it's positively evil for society that someone on minimum wage can't visit family or relations because they can't afford the fare.
That hurts everyone.
Because that is the reality for the majority of rail travel. Off-peak is an afterthought.
If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.
I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week.
Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24 London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158
I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge.
Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.
And given that many of the private franchises took the names of prenationalization companies, it's hardly unprecedented.
Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.
Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.