Re: Advanced tickets & airline style singles.. the way to go?

Martin Underwood wrote:

I'd like to see much greater pressure brought to bear on the TOCs to lessen
the gap between advance and walk-on fares - preferably by seeling *all*
tickets at APEX rates, given that train travel is already (IMHO)
horrendously overpriced.


Taxpayers' rail subsidy is running at the same level as 1982 (% of GDP)
or 2.5x as high (cash adjusted for inflation), while even SOR tickets
cost less as a % of income than in the early 1980s (not sure about how
they're doing in terms of inflation only - anyone got stats?) Given
that the socially disadvantaged seldom use the railways, certainly for
peak-time IC journeys, I'm not sure you can argue for further subsidy
in order to reduce walk-on fares.

Cutting fares would only be justifiable if it either increased total
revenues (possible but unlikely - you'd need to replace 1x
person-on-SOR with more than 4x people-on-SVRs, assuming you're looking
to cut the peaktime walk-on fare to roughly SVR prices) or provided
massive benefits elsewhere (ie the resulting improvements in business
communications and falling levels of road congestion would need to have
an equal cash equivalent value to the additional subsidy provided).

There is a case for investing in the railways for the latter reason,
particularly around big cities where congestion is endemic. However,
even here the best use of government cash is to increase the
availability of seats rather than to make them even cheaper - as anyone
who uses LUL or ex-NSE trains in the peaks knows, the main problem is
that the trains are completely full, not than that they're empty
because they're too expensive...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org

.

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