The franchise agreements were effectively terminated in March 2020 when the government bailed out operators due to Covid.
By July, the ONS announced that rail operators were now considered part of the public sector for statistics purposes, signalling that they had effectively been nationalised:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/news/theonsclassifiestrainoperat...
In September 2020 the government announced that franchises would be not return:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/uk-covid-19...
What’s new with this announcement is that the functions of several organisations (Network Rail, ATOC/National Rail, etc) will be merged together into a single new entity.
Capacity is physically constrained, especially on an ancient network like the UK's.
Timetable slots are scarce and have to be centrally coordinated and managed.
There is no sparkly market magic that will make these constraints disappear and somehow give customers more choice about where to go, when, and with whom. And there is no chance whatsoever that operators can compete on price.
The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.
The idea that competition for passengers will somehow make profitability possible is a dilettante-level view that has no insight into how the industry actually operates.
We've already had decades of this kind of thinking, and the result has been mediocre services, vastly increased direct subsidies, and ballooning fares.
They can't.
> The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.
Hear hear!
I'm not sure if you realise you're agreeing with me, but yes, exactly, I agree with you, that was my (intended) point too; I wrote:
> bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.
Note the '(impossible)' - I mean that in the sense that I'm generally pro 'leave it to the free market', but that that only makes sense where you can have effective competition, which as you say, you can't with national (especially physical, electricity for example is fungible and so abstracted that it mostly works being privatised on the consumer/payments end at least) infrastructure like train lines!
In some hypothetical land where there's multiple lines, multiple services by different operators at the same time competing on service and price, great, I'm all for that, let them compete, don't nationalise it, let people vote with their feet and wallets. But we live in the real world; they can't.
To an extent, this does exist on some routes. Both LNER and Grand Central operate trains up the East Coast Main Line, for example. Then there are destinations served by multiple routes, like Cambridge, Oxford, and Bedford, where each route has its own operator.
Competition is impractical for most journeys, though.
- Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first).
- Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-... for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations.
- The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions?
- https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up.
In conclusion, I'd say that because Japan gets everything adjacent to rail policy so absolutely well done, and the rail network was already functioning so way, it continues to succeed not because but despite privatization.
2) we can do much better with planning, however I’m not sure Japanese planning is the answer, when I lived there I thought most of the accommodation was horrendous. Europeans wouldn’t accept it.
3) is JR Rail etc. private? It seemed too cheap!
4) how is rail profitable in Japan, but not profitable in the UK. It’s cheaper there and far far better!
1) Mountains actually helping is my own pet theory, I should disclaim. Japan does seem to have wild swings in density, while England seems to have people/towns strewn about everywhere and London feels kinda sprawly at certain scales. That said UK obviously has cities / regional clustering at the scale of HSR.
Someone should do a proper (fourier?) analysis of sprawl at different different scales and how that effects rail at different scales and until then my theory is just idle speculation, and in any event I don't think Britain can or should blame it's geography when other flat parts of Europe do better, and the Anglosphere clearly sucks at rail on the whole.
2) So Europe is kinda of anti-modern avoiding dense downtowns / CBDs, America is downright evil with it's single family homes, but weirdly still has tall towers people curse driving too. East Asia is largely "correct" in having dense workplaces and living places, which you want if your goal is both less car trips and classic max GDP growth.
I don't think the UK should be like Japan in al respects, but London is emphatically way to evenly low-rise, housing is not cheap enough I hear, and all those rich people LARPing landed gentry commuting 3 hours from their quaint South England rural hamlet is a sure sign something weird's afoot.
If they get rid of the green belt because no one wants to build taller, I will be sad.
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group the story is maybe more muddled than I thought, or maybe that's just the terminology for historical reasons.
4) Well, that I think goes back to the unique economics of rail. I think good rail becomes profitable, but profitable bad rail doesn't become good or isn't even possible!
Not all Japanese live in city with great train/public transport network. Most people outside Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, is heavily depends on their car. (Remember there are 8 practical car manufacturers in the land). Just referencing Tokyo would be good.
Their traditional approach to life, higher degree of respect for authority, and job-for-life structures, make the Japanese case fairly unique and difficult to replicate.
No, but there are usually National Express or other coach services available on many routes. For longer routes like London - Manchester you can also fly.
You can also drive yourself - peak time fares are so high that if there is more than one of you travelling it's often cheaper to do this even if you have to rent the car. You can also pay a taxi firm to drive you, which again will often be cheaper than peak fares for more than one person.
There are still limits on how much competitiveness that brings to the market (Operators have very little control over delays) but it would encourage the operators to compare in terms of on train service (and potentially ticket prices as well).
Yes, you could. There is an East Coast Mainline and West Coast Mainline and they competed loads over the London-Edinburgh route.
But I think in this age of high-speed trains, overhead electrification and 4+ wide tracks, railways are well and truly a natural monopoly.
But natural monopoly is not about can't have competition, it's about being thoroughly uneconomical to have competition.
I've done that route dozens of times in the past. I think it's stretching things to say they are in competition though. For Glasgow it was 40 minutes faster to go up the West coast (if you don't mind the smell of the toilets on the Pendolino) and similarly the East Coast was faster for Edinburgh because it avoided going all the way out to Carluke and back. Of course that missing out the majority of people using those trains were using it starting at an intermediate station, making any competition slightly moot.
You're probably right, but I don't think they'll succeed. Everyone and their dog can see that TFL has worked well compared to the rest of the country.
I don't particularly like our government, but I don't doubt their commitment to populism. This looks like a vote winner to me so I'd put low odds on a u-turn here.
I don't doubt this government's commitment to populist rhetoric and the appearance of grand, sweeping changes either. It's a formula that wins them a lot of votes, especially against an opposition that is confused as to what it stands for.
Sure, you have a few delays but it's eons better than what I had in my country. I never understood why people were complaining about trains in the UK.
Italy added a private offering some time ago, which I personally never tried, but my friends back home always praise them for working - unlike Trenitalia.
It's sad the government imposed lockdown killed another industry - but I certainly won't rejoice for this nationalisation.
Yes, it was shite a decade ago. But all my journeys by train in Italy have been great in the last five years.
My sample size is certainly limited though. About two to three long distance journeys by train/year in that country. But still. A decade ago there were always delays and serious hiccups. No more.
Trains were clean and on time. Mind you, this is long distance. I.e. Milano–Firenze.
I guess the private company, Italo, may be responsible indirectly for this as they generated pressure to up their ante on Trenitalia?
Your mileage with short distance train travel in Italy may differ. I do not have enough experience to hold an opinion there.
In any case, it's much better than in my home country, Germany. Everything is a joke here when it comes to long distance rail travel. Punctuality, service, offering, price, ergonomics (planning, ticket purchase, app).
I travel long distance every two weeks, I feel the pain every time. Literally every 2nd time the train is late by at least 20mins.
Best experience in Europe for train travel to me seems to be France btw.
With Italo, I could buy tickets well in advance using PayPal, all in English. A lot nicer than some monopolies using some local credit card processing gateways with missing translations and connections.
All over the EU, the biggest issues I've had with train service always seem to be strike related.
Where are you planning on parking when you get there though?
I'd rather pay quadruple for a ticket to London, than drive into London and then try to park a car. I can't imagine driving into a city - seems insane.
I am originally from the outskirts of Glasgow and now live on the outskirts of London. For my partner and I to get to my parents house by train takes about the same time (assuming all 4 changes go according to plan), costs 6x as much and is far less flexible than driving. We tend to stop at a cheap hotel midway so we can set off after I finish work.
But often the reverse is true - if your meeting isn't in the middle of London, it's much easier to drive directly to the place than get there by changing trains. This applies even more if your destination is a smaller place.
The pricing, timetables and services were basically all centrally controlled. The train operators put in requests to change them, then the government (or Network Rail or whoever they delegated the power to) would approve/deny them. Since they're sharing access to the underlying infrastructure, they can't do what they want.
Additionally, there are many trains that are unprofitable but the operators are required by law to run them for public interest reasons. When they designed the franchising system, they tried to "balance" each franchise so it had roughly the same number of profitable and unprofitable routes.
The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd. Then on top of that, because decision making and control was distributed amongst 40 or so different corporate entities, trying to make a change to the ticketing system was damn near impossible.
If anything, this new concession-like system will likely be more competitive, even if the government is acting as an intermediary.
As was the idea that this was even possible.
It was never set up to impose market discipline on the rail providers. It was set up to be a profitable investment. So Richard Branson could (as he put it), print money.
Under the rail franchise agreement during the bid process, the terms might mandate that journeys from A to B cost £10, and that journeys from B to C cost £5. There might be no obligation to price travel from A to D via B & C at a particular cost, so a rail operator might make that more expensive.
It’s silly from the consumer perspective, but it makes sense for the rail operators to do this in order to maximise profits.
In real terms the main reason is to protect commuters and capacity - as a theoretical made-up example during the bid process they might be aware that lots of people travel from Milton Keynes to London so the council wants to put a cap on increases for that route. They might also still have lots of capacity on the route from Banbury to Milton Keynes on a morning, so that is priced much lower than Banbury to London. So if you go Banbury -> Milton Keynes you might get a “discount” for not a lot of people using the line, and travelling from Milton Keynes -> London you get the rate that’s protected for commuters, but if you go between Banbury and London then part of the route is already at capacity and there is less discount on the rate.
There's no negotiations between the companies here, though they could ask the regulator (the ORR) to intervene if they believed the algorithm gave unfair results.
EDIT: Also I wouldn't call UK trains reliable. I see a lot of stations having a fleet of coaches ready or sometimes in use because the trains are out of service. That's very poor.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190912051032/https://www.stand...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225224745/https://metro.co....
The ownership structure doesn't matter. The UK has lots of publicly-owned and privately-owned transport systems that work well. The problem has been management. This is unlikely to change that.
I live somewhere in the UK that already has publicly-owned rail. Not as bad as the South-East, but it is still bad. I have no real idea how...but they manage it. EDIT: it actually hasn't transitioned yet...so we will see.
Please, do let us swap trenitalia for southern rail. I'm not such a fan of forking over 1/3 of a median wage for season ticket on a train that is delayed every other day.
If you're going from most major cities to London you get a newish train, on a fastish route. If you're going between major hubs you're probably going to have a nice experience.
But the local trains, the short trip commuter trains, can be very old and very very busy. People pay huge amounts of money to be crammed into old, slow, smelly, trains and there's not enough seating so they have to stand.
The carriage supply operates on a "trickle down" model. The new trains get used for London and those routes. The trains that are replaced by the new trains get sent to the South East and South West, who send their old trains to the Midlands, who send their old trains to the North, who send their old trains to Wales. Some of the carriages are really rough.
I've had to commute by rail since 2014, I now have to head out half an hour earlier than at the start, purely to account for consistent 5-10 minute delays.
Atleast once a month the train is packed beyond standing room.
Several times I've had to say fuck it and use the slower, further away tram to have any hope of reaching the office.
And if your train is cancelled (dozen plus times a year) station staff are fucking useless and annoyed you interrupted their chinwag to ask how to get home.
I know that many lines run at deficit so they have to compensate with the ones that don't, but they recently launched AVLO as a low-cost service in response for OUIGO and private competitors coming to Spain, so there was probably ways to make it cheaper...
If that's the problem, then do not try to use polish railways. You can still find non-modernized EN57 from 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_class_EN57
Long distance trains can be no better tho...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/973...
I think the privatisation could work if multiple companies could bid for a given journey / timetable slice, rather than having entire routes for themselves with no realistic way of removing them if the service goes bad.
If I want to travel from Birmingham to London I have a choice of 3 different train companies, as well as a coach company and driving (either hiring a car with or without driver, or using my own car). That's tons of competition, and it shows given the choice.
Great, now talk about literally any other line in Britain
London-Edinburgh (West coast vs east coast. West Coast is slower but cheaper)
Bristol-Manchester (XC via Birmingham vs ATW via Hereford - I usually take the slower cheaper Wales train as I prefer the route and the seating)
Manchester-Norwich (via Sheffield-Peterborough, Via London, Via Leeds-Doncaster)
London-Reading (GWML from Paddington vs South West from Waterloo)
Exeter-London (Paddington via Westbury on GWR vs Waterloo via Salisbury on SWT)
Manchester-Warrington (ATW via Newton, EMT via Birchwood)
London-Hastings (via Tunbridge Wells or via Haywards Heath)
And different competitors on the same track
Milton Keynes - London (West Coast, London Midland, Southern)
York - Newcastle (TPE, LNER, XC)
Manchester-Glasgow (Northern+WestCoast, TPE)
Stoke-Manchester (Northern vs XC vs West Coast)
That said, the WCML is extremely well run relative to the horrow shows in S and SE England.
If you live along the WCML (think Bucks, Coventry, etc), you have two providers: Avanti (formerly Virgin) and London Northwestern/West Midland (formerly Midland). You actually have Southern as well, but they are... not a credible provider.
HS2, if it's ever done, will further reduce pressure on the WCML and increase resilience.
But on the other hand, go up North and there used to be trains which are modified bus bodies[1]. Are those still there? So yes, absolutely, the rail network does need to improve across the country.
That means either higher tax to subsidise it, or it means higher prices on profitable parts of the network to cross-subsidise it
Turn up to any mainline station during peak hours and you can observe this for yourself (also non-peak hours in many cases). Trains which require reservation have scarcely any standing room.
Other countries would be quick to complain if you don't get the seat that you paid for.
When are you talking about? There was a lot of investment in the (laughably named) Thameslink 2000 program, which was put in place to dig the route out of the mess that the nationalised rail network had left it in by the 90s, it started in 2009 and is still undergoing improvements
When was it?
You suffered from the political decision that the government made to get rid of guards. No company would take it as a franchise because they knew the fight with the union would impact both profits and users, so they got GTR to operate it under a management basis.
This is now what is happening to every other TOC.
Southern is the reality of modern railway nationalisation, a little better than BR perhaps.
> The government says the new system should look more like Transport for London, with multiple operators under one brand, offering greater accountability when things go wrong.
If it introduces more accountability, it's basically doing it's job. Multiyear contracts do not mean no accountability. I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with little to no recourse.
This is not the nationalisation and price freezes promised by Corbyn.
Perhaps i'm being naive, govt is not exactly my forte, though it feels reasonable to suggest accountability is implicit to consolidation here... currently they seem to get contracted to essentially go and manage themselves and their lines; whereas multiple operators under one government management structure of some kind at least has potential for accountability without relying on the operators goodwill (which seems to be as absent as the free market forces).
In my experience, the UK rail system has been running fantastically since Covid began! I don't think I can remember even a single delayed train since March 2020 and certainly no overcrowded ones. So it seems like the real problem with the trains was always the passengers ;)
It might be "one line", but the number of trains, carriages, staff and general stress on the infrastructure is based on the number of people using it - if not managed well, or resources are stretched to thin to squeeze profits, it's not the passengers fault. COVID simply created a sudden and unusual surplus of resources for them.
"Flexible season tickets" is also a really welcome one, especially if people go to WFH/office hybrid set-up.
In France for instance, SNCF runs the non-TGV railway with inefficency and carelessness on a "it's our railway and we decide how you can use it" basis, and the regional governments are chomping at the bit to be able to award the contracts for subsided services to someone other than the state monopoly.
The real question here isn't who owns X, it's will the government invest in X...
128k deaths thanks to an overloaded, underfunded system and Boris Johnson's own nurse rage-quits and the conservatives are still gaining electoral ground. It's bizarre.
Interesting that even on hacker news some feel we lead with our political views. lol.
But I sincerely applaud your less cynical outlook and wish I shared the same view.
This is objectively not true otherwise no-one would every privatise the railway. Although the answer is not agreed, my own experience of working on the public-owned railway in the UK in the 1990s was that public-sector organisations have virtually no incentive to be clever or efficient, at best they are indifferent, at worst they are job-creation systems that cost billions to the tax payer.
The theory is that private companies have a reason to make things more efficient, which is to maximize profit, reducing costs and being overall cheaper to the tax payer.
Of course, this brings it own dangers in terms of service reduction due to unprofitable services but it would be simplistic to think that somehow the tax payer should subsidise those who actually use the trains. Ultimately, they should cost what they cost to run and if that is too much, then they need to change.
I would also say that the services and overall quality are much higher on the privatised railway.
Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.
The tender approach for time limited monopoly was just terrible though and had no good incentives at all, and so I'm not really sure a government monopoly will be much worse.
And if you're just hoping to replace party A entirely with party C, FPTP is one of the better systems as long as you're not in a country where election laws are set up to ensure that the Democrats and the Republicans are going to win almost every election. But that's a question of candidacy laws and incumbent rights; changing the voting system in the US won't suddenly cause other parties to get elected.
Anyway, the fact that party A fucked it up and party B is fucking it up doesn't mean party A lacks incentives to improve it tomorrow. Perhaps they fucked it up because their leader was incompetent, and now that there's been a change in leadership they will be motivated to improve.
Finland has generally had 3 major parties ducking it out usually around 15-25% for each. 1995 was last time single party got over 30% of seats. Depends a bit on time which exact ones they were.
English wikipedia doesn't have the historic list, but Finnish does https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduskunta#Kansanedustajat_puol... Divide by 2 to get the % (there are 200 members)
The only system that doesn't have voting negatives to me is one with a population of less than 10 where I'm sole dictator. Any population more than that and someone will get mad at me and kill me. Republics with some form of voting are the best option I know of for large populations of people who aren't "mind numbed robots" with no ideas of their own, and there is room to tweak the voting system. However they are still terrible for getting good results.
Incentives on the other is electability (or ideology, perhaps rare), which at least has the possibility of meaning doing a good job.
Well, if I'm a company using rail for freight or a worker depending on the rail to get to work, it already is a massive improvement if I can at least rely on the train being where it should be at the announced time. Improving the schedule for faster travel or shorter intervals is another thing, but predictability alone makes my life easier.
In the Swiss case on time is critical because they want people to depend on their next train being there when they get there. They assume most people will get off one train and get on another (or a bus) so they all meet in the same place at the same time. Early does nothing for anyone unless the bus/train they are meeting is early and leaves early. This is one good way to run a system. The other is run so many trains/buses that whenever you arrive there is another waiting for you that will leave as soon as you can get on. This second way to run a system is much faster and better for everyone - but the costs are significantly higher though and so nobody can afford to run a large system that way. (large cities often can run this way and should where they can). Note that system is the key word here. If you only have one train the considerations are different.
Thankfully I don't have to take the train very often - especially these days lol
Perhaps also because it's still working.
A few people in one town having to wait an extra 20 minutes ensures hundreds of thousands have a predictably on-time system.
In general though, I'm so used to the trains being on time, I start tutting if it's even a minute late
Meanwhile, I've arrived in NYC fourteen hours late on Amtrak.
On the polish site which tracks punctuality of trains, you can often see train delayed for some time, which decreases delay by every stop, eventually ending with smaller delay or on time.
This looks like an attempt to present a kind of Potemkin nationalisation to mollify the anger of people with £1k+ season tickets and cement their hold on voters drawn away from Starmer in the last election (who meekly dumped rail nationalisation as a policy).
This measure might be too little to really matter but the fact is that when you don't have an market(and for passenger rail you kind of don't) outsourcing operations to for-profit organisations provide nothing but a venue to funnel cash out of the system to private shareholders.
When there is an functioning market that is not tied to an government backed/guaranteed service it does make sense to subcontract work to private enterprise, but unless the government contracts represent a relatively minor portion of the subcontractors revenue and the subcontractor don't have more then say 20% market share, there is no functioning market, so all you end up with is an mercantilist structure of public risk and private profits if you still insist on pushing the task to private enterprise.
Shareholders aren't stupid enough to invest in something long term unless their investment will have a return. Companies invest when there is a long term profit from the investment that makes it worth it. With governments all over the world having a history of nationalizing railroads, there is no rail investment that can be made with a time-frame beyond 7 years - and rail is up front expensive enough you need a lot more than a 7 year time frame on most investments.
Most of the railroads in the US were funded by 150 year bonds. (your history class talked about the government giving railroads 10 miles of land on each side of the track - but that was only a few routes in the west that got that, most rail in the east the railroads had to buy the land at market price). I assume most of the rest of the world was similar.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess you've never used the for-profit rail services of the UK then.
(I know this is quite snarky, but to elaborate, there is no incentive for the TOCs, because a operating a stretch of railway line doesn't have any competition. You don't need to be efficient or give good service because customers do not have an alternative choice of train they can use.)
It all moves in cycles, I could well imagine the same situation happening again in 20 years.
Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Efficiency leads to profits and thus dividends. The government cares more about politics than efficiency. Look the the problems southern have had because the government insisted on getting rid of guards - they effectively nationalised southern (GTR) years ago because they refused to let the private sector run it how they wanted.
Compare with chiltern who converted the Chiltern line from a service about to shut down under the government in the 80s to a leading toc massively increasing service and options
Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!
The free market certainly provides benefits, but there needs to be some meaningful recourse to removing your custom while the provider depends on it. Otherwise, it's simply not a free market at all, no matter the circumstances that surrounded the bidding process.
But that was never the reason why railway operations and railway track exploration and maintenance was split, was it?
The whole point of splitting railway operations from track exploration was to ensure that any railway operator in Europe is free to explore any connection that they wish, provided they pay for the track usage and that the track has free capacity.
That's the whole point.
This separation from track exploration and railway operations has been a collosal success in Europe, with multiple private and even public companies stepping up to serve international corridors even with high-speed railway services.
Same with crewe-Manchester, Birmingham-london, Edinburgh-london etc.
Quite happy with the competition and no government interference.
Those £50 tickets are about market segmentation - separating the customers who have time flexibility or are willing to suffer from those who don't or aren't.
P.S. I just looked up an equivalent London-New York economy flight (flexible flight leaving this evening and returning tomorrow), and it's £2,481.02
I looked at London-NY - if I put it off one week I can easily cross 1/3 of the world for less than the price of a day trip to Manchester tomorrow.
If I look at Manchester-London in a weeks time with a non-flexible ticket it costs £45 return (actually for £45 it's pretty flexible - you are just limited to one firms trains, a bit like that BA fare, and can't travel in the morning rush hour)
https://i.imgur.com/CNCzmKu.png
That's less than 9p per mile. What do you think a fair price would be?
This would bring the UK rail prices more in line with most other European countries.
£300 is gouging.
You can take the 08:46, arriving in Manchester at 12:13 - an average speed of about 60mph.
The £300 is an option that few choose, because that journey gives them major benefits. The money raised from that is plowed back into the railway and used to subsidise services to Harrogate, Holyhead and Hungerford
You do realise that a country needs 21st century rail service to be competitive interbationally?
Otherwise we would bring back bloodletting, leeches and snakeoil salesmen to get more choice in cancer treatment.
This parody for 'competition' has given us most expensive fares in Europe and soviet-block quality of rail service.
It's a new disease, 'neoliberalism of the brain' that maintains 'free market' even at the cost of organ failure
The British, in no exaggeration, get taxed to death. You get horrible value for your tax dollar. I am saying this as an American who lives in Croatia, who pays quite a bit in taxes. However, I prefer to pay Croatian taxes (in addition to my US taxes) as a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen, just for a stable, relaxed society.
There is a very high baseline level of stress and anxiety living in America. It’s not worth living there again. Seriously, Croatians have a great lifestyle, with perhaps the best lifestyle in all of Europe. Also, if you die of coronavirus in America, it is nothing more than a statistic to both the government and the American population, which is not only unbelievably disgusting, but downright sadistic.
You are the first person I heard who likes paying Croatian taxes. Do you follow the national news? There's always a steady stream of corruption news, especially recently.
It's ironic you post this in a thread about rail. Croatia has a truly horrible rail system. It's universally mocked as useless.
Regarding COVID, I would have agreed with you that Croatia did great last year in March, but from late summer 2020, it's been catastrophic. And Croatia depends on tourism, so there's a big incentive to get things to normal levels so tourists come. We could have been better than Portugal now.
Also re COVID, have you witnessed the vaccination campaign? Have you seen how many politicians and their friends got vaccinated ahead of the elderly, despite guidelines saying vaccines should be given according to age? The rector of Zagreb university got a vaccine before my grandma. How is that not sadistic?
Croatia has some great pros, such as a relaxed lifestyle, but you're really stretching it with calling it a rolemodel society and good value for taxes
Of course Croatia is no role model society. Corruption is always widespread.
However, we still do have it very good. That is a point that is very frequently understated in Croatia.
> the next time someone says (or you read) "Britain has the highest rail fares in Europe", you'll know this is only 15% of the story. The other 85% is that we have similar or even cheaper fares, too. The big picture is that Britain has the most commercially aggressive fares in Europe, with the highest fares designed to get maximum revenue from business travel, and some of the lowest fares designed to get more revenue by filling more seats.
For walk up fares, Edinburgh to Montrose is 100 miles each way, an "off peak" return (so any time after 0930) is £34 if you limit yourself to LNER trains or 17p/mile, or £41 return for a choice of LNER or Scotrail trains. If you want to travel before 0930 on whatever train turns up next, it's £48.60 or 24p/mile.
What price do you think you should be paying? In 2019 Scotrail carried 1.8 billion passenger miles got £482.8m subsidy - a 27p per mile subsidy. The company made a £11m loss too.
How much should the tax payer subsidise your Edinburgh-Montrose journey? 35p/mile/ 45p/mile?
> For travel today, bought at the station, immediate departure, outside the peaks...
And
> If travelling today in the business peak hours...
It acknowledges that finance bros travelling from Manchester to London for a 9AM meeting and traveling back on the 1630 will pay more. That doesn't affect most people
The summary makes it quite clear.
The big picture is that Britain has the most commercially aggressive fares in Europe, with the highest fares designed to get maximum revenue from business travel, and some of the lowest fares designed to get more revenue by filling more seats.
Basically a tax on last minute business travelers to subsidise leisure travelers and commuters.
I know British rail travel is more expensive, it’s the (to me) unpredictable ticket pricing that I would like to decrypt
Advanced fares exist to encourage people to travel by train who wouldn't normally. They are released on trains that are generally more lightly to get more revenue from perishable stock. Same as supermarkets selling lunch food near expiry date cheaply in the evening - they don't want to do it earlier in the day (and canibalise their lunch trade), but doing it at 4pm means they get extra money without revenue abstraction.
I'm not a fan of advanced fares though, I don't tend to plan, and I hate the stress of missing the train, so I look for hacks to get better flexible fares.
A Manchester-London "standard fare" has increase from £50 in 1995 (£100 today) to £160, however competition and sties like trainsplit mean you can buy a walk up return fare for £45 -- less than a quarter of the old cost after inflation, and only about 20 minutes longer than the old time.
There's more "hacks" to be had too. I used to travel from Wilmslow to London on a semi-regular basis (every few months, getting the 0811 fast train, and returning about 6pm. It cost about £120 return, because I bought a super off peak ticket from Edinburgh, which was valid on any train arriving into Euston that was on the route. Break of journey is well worthwhile - I travelled from Crewe to London a fair bit on a Chirk-Tunbridge Wells return, which allowed break of journey in both directions and was valid on so called "peak" trains from Crewe to London. Splitting tickets can work, especially on very overcrowded trains like the cross country services. Don't buy a pricey ticket from Exeter to Leeds, instead buy a combination of tickets for your journey and save a fortune.
All this means if you are willing to put in time or effort you can travel far more cheaply. The goal of the "rail delivery group" over the last few years has been to remove these "hacks", so everyone has to pay the full price.
Other options to reduce fares would be
1) Getting rid of the unions (rail staff have a strong contract meaning driver salaries have increased about 5.5% a year since privitisation -- same as the "standard" fare on the Manchester-London ticket)
2) Reducing staff (DOO where the driver has to press the "door open" button instead of the guard. This led to massive industrial action on both Northern and Southern)
3) Increasing train speeds (A London-Manchester return takes about 5 hours for staff, costing 5x3 salaries for the driver, guard, and buffet. Replace with HS2 and it drops to 2.5 hour round trip, halving staffing costs - and train leasing costs - and the HS2 trains are twice the size so there's twice as many seats so no need to price people off "overcrowded peak trains")
4) Increasing taxpayer subsidy. Given that the majority of rail travellers are of an above average income, and especially on the really expensive lines
The left have painted a picture of Richard Branson having stolen trillions of pounds over the years, but the profit margins are really very small. It might account for £5 on that £160 ticket, but that's not going to make people happy. I'd rather have the option to learn how to get cheaper tickets (typically typing in "trainsplit.com"). Sadly the narrative (see many posts on this thread) is that "privitisation means high fares and poor service". The evidence is that is nowhere near the whole story. Well respected rail journalist Mark Smith does a good balanced report comparing fares in europe and UK, and the reply comes "load of rubbish guvnor, check the prices now". I check the prices now, post screenshots which back up Mark Smith's points, and it's just a downvote with no reply.
I thought HN was a rational place, but it seems not when it comes to the UK railway.
£17.60 on the 12:05 departure on Jun 16th on trainsplit with one change - 10p/mile.
And on the well-advertised and more expensive trainline on Jun 17th
£31.50 on the 12:37 direct. £43.50 first class .
The 11:22 SNCF Paris-Dijon on the same date is €31, or £27. The 12:22 is €40 (£35). One way.
https://highpaycentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/High_Pa...
Compare somewhere like Lesparre (population about 5,000 and 40 miles from Beudeux), which has about 10 trains a day taking 90 minutes.
With Cononley (25 miles out of Leeds) with 4 trains in each direction the next hour.
There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.
You don't travel with X from A to B because you think X is great value for money and provides a really top notch service; you do it because you need to get from A to B and X happens to be the operator.
However.. I'm pessimistic... I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand', and argue they need this that and the other in order to differentiate themselves and effectively compete...