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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

#201

Post by landgenoot »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #169
ithkuil wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he didn't pay for hey, he paid for it! They gave him an unlimited ticket in exchange for euros. You're free to say that the train company shouldn't have created an unlimited ticket but it's unfair to paint a person who uses what he legally bought as a thief.

Read the comment again - he pays for one seat, he sleeps across 3 or 4.

You are not paying for the seat, but for the journey.

Go ahead and try to get a refund when you don't have a seat on a crowded train.

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

#202

Post by badpun »

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…

UK's number of cars per capita is not much different from countries in Europe which have much better services, though.

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

#203

Post by dspillett »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #173
petercooper wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More people use trains than in the 1990s.

More people have cars too though. Working on gut here rather than having checked any figures, but I'd wager that the proportion of rail journeys compared to car/bus journeys, for any given distance long/med/short, has fallen.

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

#204

Post by martinald »

Milner08 wrote: post #142
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.

British trains are mostly a profit making enterprise for other European nations, rather than an actual public transport network for the people who need it. (Their are exceptions to this and not all train companies are linked to other countries state owned railways, but many are. They get cheap travel and we get scammed)

This is just totally incorrect. Total rail subsidy in the UK is £11bn/yr. Ticket sales are another ~£8bn/yr Total TOC profits are £100m/yr. Rolling stock operating companies take maybe £200m/yr in profit but it varies.

So TOC/ROSOC profits 'take out' 1.5% of the money in the system. Saying they are 'mostly' a profit making enterprise is completely ridiculous.

Also, while the UK has privatised TOCs, Germany and other countries are also opening regional/long distance rail routes to franchising of sorts. National Express (a British company) operates a surprising amount of routes (and growing) in North Rhine-Westphalia (and probably other regions) for example. It's not just a one way thing.

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

#205

Post by kkfx »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #102
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…

The opposite? Isn’t the person who needs to maintain a home and have lots of possessions more of a slave?

Slavery is the absence of choices. Yes, owning a home means being slave of that to keep the home up, but you control it, it's an asset you depend on and you have full control on it. You typically live in a State with a certain level of stability established laws to protect private properties and so on. Meaning you have choices and backups.

Now try to imaging you works on YT, your revenues came form Alphabet for the video you publish. You produce them with a laptop in a rented office and on the go. Well, you have non backups, YT have your videos and your audience. A ban and you have no choice but to restart nearly from the ground, no insurances, laws, asset under your control and so on. Then you are a slave of YT.

I've choose to live the big city for the mountains, so I'm slave of a car to move. But I have three cars, of different brands, two moderns connected so potentially risky "not fully mine", one classic, so risky only in mechanical terms. Having choices I'm slave of "a car" but not on one in particular, so I'm free. I have desktops and homeservers, WFH if one break my data are locally available and locally usable on another, no slavery to wait for a new system get delivered of the nearest shopping mall to open to buy one in person. I have fiber and mobile with a good enough 4G/dummy 5G (700MHz, in France, it's both 4G and 5G) and no data cap issues. I'm evaluating if buying a Starlink base service might be a wise choice, so I'm not slave of a specific ISP to work/live BUT for instance to access my bank I'm slave of my mobile carrier, due to the mandatory OTP via SMS, no banks here allow classic RSA OTP or using a smart card or something else not connected anymore. That's a BIG slavery even if 99% of the time works issueless.

The difference between slavery and freedom it's not the mere presence of a choice but both choice and backups that allow you to choose without dramas. In freedom terms I can even took my life, but that's not a wise choice without drama, if I work on YT as described above I can formally change tomorrow but if it's my sole source of income it's not a choice without drama and so on.

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

#206

Post by sotix »

And here I am spending $700 to take the Amtrak with a sleeper room one-way as a mini vacation! I admire his adventurous spirit. I’m a bit nervous to travel by myself. Particularly once I arrive in SF where I don’t know anyone, but I’ll figure it out as I go. My plan is to put the phone and laptop away for a few days and enjoy reading the Lord of the Rings while viewing some beautiful places and capturing them on film.

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

#207

Post by mytailorisrich »

dspillett wrote: post #198
mytailorisrich wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The subsidies go mostly to the infrastructure and currently that number is high because it includes the cost of the shambolic HS2. Indeed, Network Rail is still a state-owned company. But the majority of the expenses (trains, staff, etc) are borne by the operators and paid for by the fares.

I agree that the way privatisation has worked is poor, though.

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

#208

Post by DrNosferatu »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #125
troupo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder more how he keeps his clothes and underwear clean :)

He could also rent a couple of stash places with clothes and stuff like a movie undercover agent :)

That would be his family’s places?

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

#209

Post by kkfx »

dmos62 wrote: post #70
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…

Is a home and belongings enough to emancipate a slave?

No, but you have to define slavery and freedom. My definition of freedom is "being able to do something at my will" PLUS "without dramas".

If I own a home I can't relocate as easy as if I rent, of course, that's a slavery. BUT the home it's under my control and I can sell it. I have insurances if something goes wrong, and I can choose between many of them, the home is inside a State, I can't have the same home in multiple States but the State is formally a Democracy (not much in reality, but that's another broad topic) and it's stable enough, so I can sell the home and change state before being trapped in a harsh dictatorship. On contrary if I live on trains I have not much choice if a train get canceled let's say because of a storm and that's happen while I'm in a mountain area only with bank cards and no connection and no hotel nearby. As a simple example.

We are all a bit free and a bit slave, the point how much freedom we have and how dramatic is exercise it or not.

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