201–210 of 383 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Removing the incentive to make profit does not create incentives to improve efficiency and service. The government has no such incentives.
Yes, they do, campaigning on a program of better services and then not delivering anything is very much against career politicians' interests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL Switzerland (i.e. extremely punctual society) actually does this with their rail system. There is a time buffer in the rail schedule for each of the stops. If a train is running late, and is /expected/ to be late, according to the estimated time of arrival, the train adjusts its speed, going faster, to arrive at the originally planned scheduled time. Failures on the rail system are of course rare.
If they're way late, they'll skip stops too, so they don't ruin the schedule for the whole network for the day. 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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where on that wikipedia link you cited does it say it was a crime and corrupt?
Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested. Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies. https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-co...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government already had to care about that. They were losing votes to promises of nationalisation under Corbyn in 2017. 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).
But they could do nothing about it because of the arms length principle, putting things under government control shortens the chain of responsibility. 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 sha…
I love taking the train places, for me when I’m going on holiday the journey is part of it, I find rail travel to be low stress and relaxing. The trip from St Pancras to Amsterdam (4hours) was very calm.
I hope that one outcome of this change is that other people rediscover leisure travel by rail.
That said the anorak in me will miss all the different liveries for each of the companies
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did privitise the risk too. After the failure of the east coast franchise recently, the government bailled out virgin, but that's not the fault of the system. 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 choic…
I lived on a Southern line and alternative was Thameslink with uncomfortable trains (crammed seats, no tables for coffee or anything - at least they were running mostly empty as nobody wanted such discomfort). Trains always late, I almost lost my job because of that. I had to get a car and drive 100 miles each day because train journeys were not sustainable. Has anything happened to Southern? I doubt.
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
Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: 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. 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 p…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.seat61.com/uk-europe-train-fares-comparison.html > 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 trav…
I'm sorry but this article is bullshit. Go and actually check the train prices (because I did) now. Book Sheffield to London 1 month in advance, comes out to £70 odd return (nearly 4x more than article states) with a first class upgrade for an extra £70....Paris to Leon 1 month in advance? £20 odd return with another £20 first class. Idk if something has changed but you can't quote this article anymore. Train prices…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but this article is bullshit. Go and actually check the train prices (because I did) now. Book Sheffield to London 1 month in advance, comes out to £70 odd return (nearly 4x more than article states) with a first class upgrade for an extra £70....Paris to Leon 1 month in advance? £20 odd return with another £20 first class. Idk if something has changed but you can't quote this article anymore. Train prices…
Seconded, this article is quite misleading. The UK fares always seemed quite unpredictable to me when I used them, with variances similar to those you see when booking flight tickets. Maybe the fares have an extra component based on demand? If I look for second-class tickets from Edinburgh to Montrose (which I went on semi-regularly) @ scotrail.co.uk on 1st June I see prices that fluctuate from £9.30 to £24.60. Maybe…
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also this is less nationalised than ScotRail, which will actually be state run: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-564...
Can they still do that, now that the ScotRail franchise is (presumably) no more?