Yes this is the problem. Using the train is often a non-option. What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket and often take longer if you are not going between major cities. It’s even worse if there are multiple people. I would love to commute on the train (use your time more effectively, lower CO2, less stress) but it’s just too costly as it is.

> What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket

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.

If visiting a city centre location then trains are great. If you need to get to a place near a city then trains are the worst, at least airports tend to be outside of the city near the arterial routes.

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.

One trick to driving into London is finding a parking space at a station outside town and continuing on TfL services. E.g. if you are coming from the M40 park at Hillingdon Station.

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.

It's very strange. In the UK you often pay a fortune to sit on a nearly empty train. This doesn't even seem like pricing optimized for profit, let alone general carbon reduction across all modes of transport.

Because it isn't.

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.

>The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd.

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.

And it's often cheaper to buy 2/3 separate tickets, for stops along the way of a long journey, than just simply buying straight from A to B.

This is to profit-maximise.

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.

Thanks for the explanation. I had the wrong idea that it could be due to, for example, if A->B belonged to a different provider than B->C, providers not reaching an agreement on what % to take each, for the journey from A->C - hence increasing the overall cost for covering demands from both.

No problem! You are right that it’s silly though, you shouldn’t have to split your ticket to get the lowest cost.

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.

No, there's long been a centralised system to attribute the costs to different companies (IIRC, the system is ultimately the descendant of what the British Rail regions and later sectors used to split fare revenue between them).

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.

I drive to work because it's cheaper to pay for car insurance, road tax and diesel fuel than it is to purchase a season train ticket, not to mention it takes less time to get to work and the commute itself is more comfortable. UK trains are not a sane alternative to driving. Until the Gov steps in and fixes that only people who absolutely much use trains will continue to do so. With ever so popular and becoming the norm remote working, the train service companies are in for a big surprise.

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.

They couldn't agree more. [1][2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190912051032/https://www.stand...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225224745/https://metro.co....

Prices fell with privatization (and efficiency went up).

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.