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I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

metro.co.uk

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Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#191

Post by dspillett »

williamdclt wrote: post #159
philipwhiuk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple, they're run by European train operators to subsidise their national networks.

> to subsidise their national networks Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies

It is effectively true. Many European firms own chunks of the rail franchises in the UK and charge a shed load more than their local rail services are able to. Similar to the power franchises with the likes of EDF owning a large stake and charging a lot more here than they can get away with in France.

It isn't an EU thing, though it has at times been something Farage and his ilk have banged on about as if it is an EU thing, it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways (running them into the ground first as part of making the case for taking them away from the public purse (which it isn't as there are still significant subsidies involved)).

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#192

Post by pjc50 »

petercooper wrote: post #161
pera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10 pounds each way if I remember correctly... but at least you could bring your bike for free :p

Public transport in the UK is trapped in a vicious cycle. The system is poor, so people buy cars, which means fewer people use the system, which means less investment, which means the system gets even worse, so more people buy cars. Despite all its ills, driving is, for enough people, a more pleasant experience than tackling strikes, standing on a train for two hours, or being unable to travel at certain times at all…

The system is suffering from too many people rather than too few; it has a problem of chronic under- and mal-investment, of which the cancellation of HS2 is just one example.

The problem is that for whatever reason rail users ""don't count"" politically.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#193

Post by drcongo »

williamdclt wrote: post #159
philipwhiuk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple, they're run by European train operators to subsidise their national networks.

> to subsidise their national networks Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies

It's not an EU-bash, it's true. We sold off the railways to private companies, most of which are actually the nationalised rail operators of other countries.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#194

Post by martinald »

Daviey wrote: post #5

Compared to the UK where a standard-class rail season ticket for me to get to London (including underground), at £8,272 p/y.. but for that, I also have the luxury of either standing in an overcrowded carriage, or if I am super lucky I get to sit in a seat that smells of urine.

After spending a lot of time in Europe, the grass definitely isn't greener.

Trains in France are not vastly cheaper than the UK, but the service pattern is awful outside the very main routes. Often huge gaps in service for parts of the day and non-clockface timetabling. Seems to be very poor utilisation of rolling stock, with a lot of the stations having trains sitting for hours doing nothing (which should really be operated more intensely to give a better service pattern).

DB has horrendous reliability problems, basically the entire network gets something similar to TPE on time performance (the worst performing TOC in the UK). ICE/IC trains are also not particularly cheap for on the day travel.

Spain's high speed lines are excellent and very cheap. But outside that the network is incredibly limited and slow, so much so that buses will almost always beat the train in journey time.

Netherlands is good, affordable, frequent services and reliable. I think NL is the only country I've been to where the system is noticeably better than the UK across a lot of dimensions.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#195

Post by landgenoot »

Reminds me of the ads on the city buses in Berlin

> 60m^2, keine Küche, kein Bad - Für 60,66 EUR warm im Monat.

EN: 60 square meters, no kitchen, no bathroom - for just 60.66 EUR per month, utilities included.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/20182186004296102...

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#196

Post by pjc50 »

kkfx wrote: post #54

So he have nothing, no home, no more belongings that a suitcase and a laptop, the ideal SLAVE of the modern time, someone who exists until he can produce for someone else, who effectively own him, then can only die since he have no more option to live. And the article seems to be a spot for this kind of existence "hey, it's cheap"... I'm actually curious how many really have stopped a minute to imaging what does it m…

He's 16.

> someone who exists until he can produce for someone else, who effectively own him, then can only die since he have no more option to live.

Congratulations on spotting what "wage slavery" is only 150 years after Marx.

> really have stopped a minute to imaging what does it means be homeless and not owning anything. OF COURSE IT'S CHEAP

It's more often appallingly expensive, especially since many jurisdictions take it as a license to destroy your property.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#197

Post by kkfx »

robertlagrant wrote: post #115
kkfx wrote: post #54

So he have nothing, no home, no more belongings that a suitcase and a laptop, the ideal SLAVE of the modern time, someone who exists until he can produce for someone else, who effectively own him, then can only die since he have no more option to live. And the article seems to be a spot for this kind of existence "hey, it's cheap"... I'm actually curious how many really have stopped a minute to imaging what does it m…

> someone who exists until he can produce for someone else, who effectively own him You're falsely equating ownership with exchange. He can do stuff for people, who can do stuff for him. He can choose who to do things for, and who does things for him. That's the opposite of slavery.

Allow me to depict a small game: living on trains means needing trains with nigh services, what you do if your train is canceled? You pay with a credit card, what to do if a train is canceled for bad weather and you have no working internet connection? You work on a giant platform what you do if a day that platform, who store essentially your digital life since you just have a laptop, decide to ban you for some reasons and you can just write a message in a form to them and wait days? A small anecdote: due to a storm the mobile service where I live drop. I still have fiber working, and I WFH so no issues apparently. Well, no. I've needed to access my bank and I couldn't because to login I need an SMS OTP... I couldn't login on my mobile carrier WebUI where I can read SMS independently of the phone, because to login I need an OTP via SMS. I'm the customer or a slave of their services?

When you have alternatives there is no slavery, you can pick many options all the time, you have backup between them. When you depend on single entities you are their slave, no matter how "formally free" you are. Now I'm slave of my home to live in it, to continue this "strange journey", but the home is mine, I control it, I'm a citizen of a state with certain rights and laws and so on. I have then alternatives and backups. So the slavery from my home it's not much oppressive. I have three desktops at home, two homeservers and some spare parts, so if something breaks I can switch immediately not waiting for a spare part to come by the mail or a shopping mall to open to buy it ASAP. If I depend on a laptop I have no backup and if my data are all in someone else hand I depend on them, no backup. If I have no assets I own, I depend on my source of revenues CONSTANTLY meaning I have no backup to hunt for another job if I live paycheck to paycheck. That's slavery de facto, even if formally I'm free to go.

That's is.

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#198

Post by dspillett »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #88
pera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10 pounds each way if I remember correctly... but at least you could bring your bike for free :p

Because the government decided to stop subsidising the railways. Everywhere you see very cheap train fares it's because they are subsidised.

Nah, because of the awful way the privatisation is managed. Not that I think it should be privatised anyway, but really had to be it is hard to imagine it being setup in a way that benefits the passengers less.

The killer is that there are still significant subsidies involved, so we pay through the nose for bad service due to the way privatisation is arranged and also pay extra through indirect taxation too. In fact, even adjusted for inflation we pay more for the railways via taxation now than we did when they were a publicly funded industry. Funfunfun.

A quick reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financing_of_the_rail_industry...

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#199

Post by pacifika »

ciconia wrote: post #133

> Uch. TRAINS. They’re a necessary evil in many of our lives. Horrible big tin cans full of smelly people that never turn up on time and make you late for everything. The less time spent on them the better. At least for most of us in the UK, anyway. Not my first though when I think of trains, but I'm not in the UK.

Just a story device to contrast a positive experience

Re: I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train

#200

Post by pjc50 »

kristov wrote: post #62

Brave move, but I wonder how he keeps or makes new friendships and deeper relationships. Maybe this is fine for a while, but people need people (not just text in a chatroom), and I hope he has an exit strategy from this lifestyle, for this reason.

Travelling is an absolutely excellent way to meet people if you're at all open to it. "Deeper relationships" .. don't always last at that age. Often they get uprooted anyway at the transitions in and out of university. Which is probably the likely exit for this guy.
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