Still loads of smoke. I want to see the fare prices. If they’re flexible and affordable then maybe I can move out of London!!
UK Rail services to come under unified state control
281–290 of 383 posts
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#282This is an interesting shift. When I lived in the UK, I was rather fond of how well public transport worked - in general, and trains specifically. In my native Belgium, on the other hand, it's all basically shit. While Belgium is slowly pushing for less state control in public transport (allegedly on account of EU competition rules), the UK is now changing direction. Can anyone summarize the background of this decisi…
Guess it depends on what you consider to be shit. Public transport in Belgium is incredibly widespread and affordable, and while trains are somewhat often delayed (but people love to kvetch and exaggerate all the time, https://punctuality.belgiantrain.be/nl/dashboard ) due to years of neglect of the infrastructure, at least you don't have to pay an arm and a leg as you would for e.g. a short trip between London and B…
Their way of calculating punctuality is pretty misleading. It takes into account the predicted arrival at the final destination, without taking into account where passengers actually go. Delays along the route are hidden that way, even though most passengers don't go from origin to terminus, i.e. hardly anyone travels from Liège to Ostend, but the start & end of that 2hour+ journey are what's used to compute delays.
If they were to count what percentage of passengers arrived on time, things would look radically different.
Adding to that: a 5 minute delay on a 2hr journey is fine, but a 5 minute delay on a 12 minute journey is awful.
As for cheap .. I wouldn't exactly call trains cheap in Belgium. Especially if you factor in how uncomfortable they are, how most stations have zero accessibility options, how frequently things go terribly wrong, and how nonexistently awful their customer support is.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fair price would be a £45 return ticket London to Manchester if I bought it at 9am tomorrow at the station. This would bring the UK rail prices more in line with most other European countries. £300 is gouging.
That's available and fine, as long as you leave Euston after 0845. 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
Average speed of 60 mph? Is this 18th centurely where rail competes with horse carriages?
You do realise that a country needs 21st century rail service to be competitive interbationally?
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're saying there's clearly plenty of competition when a flight from London to New York can be had for the price of a fairly normal rail ticket from London to Manchester? 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.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Rail is as expensive as a plane ticket that goes much further because the railways have far more limited capacity than the skies do. It's not related to competition or lack of it - those rails just cannot safely take more vehicles.
Lol, no, rail has 10x to 50x more capacity than skies do, a single train can carry thousands of passengers and China has invested in modern raileay because their airspace is clogged. Now they have more high-speed rail than the rest of the world conbined while plans for HS2 are older than I am and are still nowhere
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”. 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.
Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up w…
Same here, but newer trains no-one was really asking for, and tickets about three x what you were paying (about £290/month and no seats from my stop in, 25 minutes.) The line -- Thameslink -- got so bad the government took over paying the compenstation rebates for distrupted customer journeys while letting the operators continue to trouser all the fares in addition to something a 4 billion pound operating payment regardless of how badly they performed.
This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Great British Railways" -eyeroll-
Well they can't call it the United Kingdom Railways now the UK is falling apart.
Also, more precisely, it doesn't cover Northern Ireland, which is separate and has its own system linked to the Irish rail network.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.
Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.
When the government will take away your franchise in a few years - as just happened here - that is the only sane thing to do.
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.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#289Hurrah! 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…
> Even as a free market conservative
Interesting that even on hacker news some feel we lead with our political views. lol.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I think you could describe that as contested as well.
"that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.