How do they justify this? You can fly to Japan for that. This is surely damaging to our economy, when people are so deterred to move between cities in this country.
We've previously discussed this at length, but in summary:
Running a railway is hugely expensive. Some countries (the US) have very limited passenger railway services for this reason. Countries that have cheap rail fares don't know some magic formula for running a railway on the cheap, they just massively subsidise rail services. We have a much lower level of subsidy, partly out of Thatcherite free market principles but also for reasons of fairness. The rail network is mainly used by professionals with above-average incomes, because that's who it was designed to serve; subsidising the railways is in this respect highly regressive, particularly when compared to bus subsidies that mainly benefit the poorest.
The ludicrously high anytime fares are effectively a progressive subsidy. Business travellers who don't care about fares because they just stick it on expenses are subsidising everyone else, in the same way that business class air passengers subsidise the people sitting in economy. It doesn't seem fair, but it's much fairer than any plausible alternative funding model.
There's an economic case for higher investment and subsidy of intercity rail services, but it relies on a lot of assumptions that don't necessarily hold true, especially in the age of Zoom and Teams. There is a much stronger economic case for trams and light rail services, which (if competently delivered) can run with little or no subsidy and provide massive benefits in terms of reducing urban congestion and improving regional connectivity. HS2 was a really silly project in a lot of ways, but it's also just a very low priority compared to a tram network for Leeds or improvements to the notoriously shit east-west rail services.
>>465402 >It doesn't seem fair, but it's much fairer than any plausible alternative funding model.
.gs really has mastered the art of confidently-stated bollocks.
Isn't it a circular problem to say that rail networks only serve relatively well-paid professionals when other people have been priced out of the majority of tickets? What you're talking about is effectively like air travel but with the economy section lopped off.
The argument that we should be investing in trams and buses rather than rail also assumes that the two are mutually exclusive. They're not. Also, the UK does neither particularly well outside of London.
You make a vague allusion to the historical reasons why rail is cripplingly undersubsidised, but then fall back on the usual There Is No Alternative economic rhetoric. We can very clearly see other countries with cheaper rail systems, often with tax policies similar to the UK.
>Isn't it a circular problem to say that rail networks only serve relatively well-paid professionals when other people have been priced out of the majority of tickets?
As I said in my comment, the rail network is physically designed for the professional middle class. It's very good if you work in a city centre office and practically useless for most other people. The price of tickets is irrelevant if you need to travel to an industrial estate that's miles from a train station, if you're a care worker who visits a dozen houses a day or if you need to cart around half a tonne of tools and materials. This is self-evident to anyone who is actually working class and it's why people get so angry when bourgeois metropolitan types advocate for "sustainable transport policies" that only work for the middle class.
You might not like it, but the simple fact is that rail subsidies are inherently regressive.
Only if you have a cartoonishly limited idea of who the working class are and what they do. Nurses are generally working in a single ward in one hospital, people working in training and education usually do it from a particular building, people working in customer service (shops, call centres, cafes) do it from behind a single desk or counter.
We're also still talking about these things as though they're mutually exclusive, but there is no natural law that says trains can only connect to city centres and nothing else. I would like both functioning public transport and a rail system that doesn't charge people the equivalent to a month of food shopping to travel a couple of hundred miles. Tax in the UK is certainly steep enough to afford that.
>This is self-evident to anyone who is actually working class and it's why people get so angry when bourgeois metropolitan types advocate for "sustainable transport policies" that only work for the middle class.
Since we're well into using anecdotes, then, I've seen far more people angry with high train prices than I have with "sustainable transport policies". I myself used to work at a hospital that took a full hour and a half to reach by bus, and another time in an A-level college library that took an hour to reach by train (and the ticket prices were a rip-off for both).
I can only speculate that someone arrives at your position through a crushing lack of imagination and a blithe acceptance of economic "truths" that were dubious forty years ago.
>>465523 >there is no natural law that says trains can only connect to city centres and nothing else
Not him but, time. You can manage that with express services but then you're just creating capacity issues on the line at best and at worst causing diversions and changes.
It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to have the fancy trains run into the cities and then you'd have a reliable bus service bring the workers out to the provincial locales. This being better in terms of passenger time, infrastructure and you can probably throw in bikes at the station side if the weather is nice.
>there is no natural law that says trains can only connect to city centres and nothing else
The lines are where they are. Building new ones is outrageously expensive, as we've seen with the HS2 fiasco; it gets drastically more expensive if you're building urban commuter lines that mainly run through heavily populated areas, because the cost of compulsorily purchasing houses for demolition dwarfs the cost of the actual rail infrastructure. Only 2% of journeys in the UK are taken by rail; trains are a fringe concern because the majority of people don't use them.
People in the top 20% of earners take twice as many train journeys as average earners and four times as many train journeys as the lowest earners. For buses, this is reversed - the poorest take twice as many bus trips as average earners and four times more trips than high earners.
This stark demographic skew is reliably true everywhere in the world, even in countries where low earners receive free or heavily subsidised rail travel. If fares for low earners are the specific concern, we could very easily and cheaply institute a Low Income Railcard offering a large discount for people in receipt of Universal Credit or Working Tax Credits. Nobody ever proposes that, because the entire debate about rail is utterly dishonest.
Spending money on rail makes inequality worse. I challenge you to find a single economist or transport policy researcher who would say otherwise.
What about re-opening stations that have been shut down? Where I used to live would have had 5 minute trips either way to Leeds or Wakey if the station was still open, and they built a big new build estate (as well as the requisite chunk of social housing, so no, this wouldn't just affect middle class offcome'duns) right next to where the old station used to be. All the people who live there would have much better access and job prospects if they re-opened that.
>people in receipt of Universal Credit or Working Tax Credits
So not just normal working people then. The fuck is with this. Why do governmenty types (which you sound a lot like, so I'm just associating it with) always talk about working people and then follow it up with this caveat that exempts basically all actual low earning working people.
WYPTE have re-opened a number of stations in recent years. If you're talking about Beeston, then it's hard to make a case for re-opening, because it's so close to Cottingley and the planned White Rose station. It's even harder to make a case for Ardsley, because the immediate neighbourhood is too spread out and it's cut off from Middleton by the M62.
Building a small local railway station typically costs about £20 million - god only knows why, but that's what it costs - so it's quite difficult to justify unless there's clearly a lot of demand.
There's also the issue of network capacity. It's not much good building more stations if the trains on that line are already full during peak hours. You can make the trains longer, but that potentially requires expensive and disruptive platform upgrades to many stations along the route. You could run trains more frequently, but that obviously requires more rolling stock and drivers and could involve expensive upgrades to signalling and to platform capacity at terminus stations; you can't run extra trains to serve the people of Beeston if there's no platform available at precisely the right time at both Leeds and Wakefield.
It sounds like a shit excuse, but running a railway really is fiendishly complicated. Small changes in one part of the network have surprising knock-on consequences.
During peak hours, the rail network is full. The trains are full of people, the tracks are full of trains. Encouraging more people to use trains by cutting fares is politically futile, because it'll just mean even more complaints about overcrowding and delays.
A railway line is not like a road, you can't just squeeze a few extra vehicles at the expense of a bit of extra traffic - if you fill the diagram and drivers are chasing aspects, everything goes completely to shit and you get a cascade of delays, cancellations and trains stopped in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason.
Building additional capacity is immensely expensive. HS2 is going to cost at least £70bn and it'll actually reduce capacity between London and Manchester by 150 seats per hour because of how badly we've botched it.
Okay, you argue that we should invest in a proper European-style railway network, even if that'll cost a trillion quid. The trains in Europe aren't actually radically better than ours, but let's pretend that they are. Where does that project sit in the list of priorities considering that the NHS is collapsing, the prison estate is completely full, the courts have years-long backlogs, schools are literally falling apart due to dodgy concrete and the tax burden is the highest it has ever been in peacetime? Those network improvements might hypothetically deliver economic benefits in the long term if you squint at the numbers at just the right angle, but for how long are you willing to tolerate being poorer until that investment shows a return?
>>465549 Nah, you're right, they mostly benefit richer folk because the poors can't afford to use them, and we can't invest in them because that's mostly to the benefit of the rich people who use them. Definitely checks out.
>>465549 >The trains in Europe aren't actually radically better than ours
I know this isn't the centre of the point you're making, but what would do you mean when you say radically better? Switzerland, for example, is extremely well interconnected by trains and they run very reliably, and like in some other European countries you can pay a one off fee per year for unlimited transport even if buying a ticket on the day isn't exactly cheap. What improvement on those things would require their service to be radically better?
>>465589 Not them but I think Switzerland is always a bad comparison. As it is essentially just the world's largest micronation tax haven. That makes novel transport its hobby.
>>465590 Yes, I was a bit apprehensive about using it as a comparison, but did so since I know their railways quite well. I just wonder what he meant by radically better.
Short answer: Britain's passenger railway network performs above the EU average on most metrics. It has improved more since the 1990s than any other network. It is by far and away the safest large network and one of the most efficient; fares are relatively high, but subsidy is unusually low, so the total cost-effectiveness is good.
Switzerland is a wild (and wildly expensive) outlier, but we generally radically over-estimate the quality of foreign rail services. The grass is greener, everything tastes nicer on holiday etc.
The meme about German efficiency and punctuality certainly has a lot of truth to it. If you're attending a German home as a guest you're expected to arrange it in advance, and if you turn up 15 minutes early they seemingly won't know what to do with you. But it doesn't seem to apply to their railways. All the excuses you hear about here apply there even more. Long-distance inter-city services can routinely pick up multi-hour delays. If you're on a train between Berlin and Cologne or Hamburg and Munich, and you arrive within 3 hours of your scheduled time, you got off lightly.
The Swiss city of Basel is near a tripoint with Germany and France. As such, a lot of people travel to and from the city from those countries. There are French trains into the city on the line from the French border into the main SBB station. For historical reasons, the railway from Germany was part of the German system when it was built as the Baden State Railway, and so Basel Baden station remains. International trains from Germany run into Basel Baden station before running into the SBB station. Or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work. But these days it's rare that the DB international train makes it to the SBB station, because SBB controllers have been instructed not to allow the train through if it's delayed by more than a few minutes, because that will affect the capacity for SBB services. So, more often than not, DB's trains are turned around in the Baden station. The situation is apparently so bad and the issues so chronic that there have been complaints to the German government about it.
International services through Germany also run into the Netherlands, and there is apparently a very noticeable discrepancy in the punctuality figures between trains departing the Netherlands for Germany and those arriving from Germany. Then there are the routes in Poland electrified right up to the German border, in the expectation of being able to run electric trains internationally, but which are still diesel-powered because the Germans haven't got around to their part.
The Germans are possibly not the worst offenders here, but their position in Europe (as in their literal position, geographically) means that when the Germans fuck up, everyone else notices.
In France, on many routes the conventional inter-city services have been withdrawn entirely in favour of TGV services, which has meant many places disappearing from the long-distance network altogether and routes not aligned towards Paris having significant cuts. In Greece, much of the network was withdrawn during the financial crisis of a decade ago and hasn't been reinstated since, and on what little they have left they've suffered numerous incidents, including the rather notorious one with multiple fatalities. Hungary has suffered a series of fuck-ups and poor decision-making that have left them abandoning their improved inter-city services and instead pursuing "improved" inter-city services with coaches that look like they were assembled by a child building an Airfix model unsupervised.
As bad as our network is, everyone else has their problems somewhere, and we have at least managed several multi-year stretches without any incidents of multiple passenger fatalities. Before Carmont, I think you have to go all the way back to Hatfield. Grayrigg recorded a single fatality, and I think that was on a technicality of someone having died within 28 days that was arguably not directly caused by the crash.
