There are always other options, including ‘don’t make the journey’.
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High fares - The issue that won't go away
- Thread starter yorksrob
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There are always other options, including ‘don’t make the journey’.
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modernrail
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Until we have transparency on loadings across the day it is really hard to work any of this out as far as intercity goes.
The introduction of the super expensive Anytime fares caused shifts in behaviour with people avoiding the peak more than they would have before.
For instance, the first trains after the peak became extremely crowded.
Demand probably held up for a period on flows into London as online alternatives didn’t really exist and companies sucked up the new very high fares.
Now people routinely avoid the peak as they have had 20+ years of learning not to bother. Companies now also avoid the peak and so everyone tries to get on to the off peak, or doesn’t travel by rail.
So we have concentrated demand in the off peak.
That had led to silly responses like LNER’s so called simpler fares, which is the most disingenuous term I have ever seen used on the railway.
What we really need to know is what is the available capacity across the day at the current fare structure, and how much of that capacity is being priced at what price.
If our idea is to cart around fresh air in the peaks, let half the off peak capacity go at low prices and then charge the rest of it at near Anytime fares, that would be ridiculous.
But it is impossible to have the debate without data, data that should be available to taxpayers and passengers, as key stakeholders in the railway.
I think this is the main benefit of trains. They provide far better service than buses -- buses tend to stop before work finishes. I can get a train from Birmingham to my "nearby" station as late as 2230, but the last bus from the station to the local town is 1820, meaning the 1650 from Birmingham.
There have always* been "anytime" fares.
The gist is correct though. The original idea of peak/offpeak fares is to encourage people to travel at less busy times. Yet on long distance trains out of London especially it works the other way. Certainly pre-covid the 1840 from Euston was always empty and the 1900 struggled to get everyone on board.
Today long distance peak fares are more about increasing revenue (thus reducing subsidy requirements) by market segregation. Better to have people willing to spend £200 more to travel an hour earlier spend it, than to charge them a reduced fare. The overcrowding further incentivises paying more (first class, peak fares, etc)
The problem the railway has is that in many cases the alternative is to drive, or fly. Sometimes they learn this, hence some TOCs offer far more reasonable fares for families - at least those tocs with competition (mainly into London. The WMT off peak family travelcard for example), but often they have a "you have no alternative" attitude.
styles
Member
I say this quite often including on these forums but I don't generally find trains too expensive; the problem for casual travellers is that in order to get a reasonable price there's often a bunch of hoops to jump through, or knowledge which many consumers just don't have.
Taking the family example, depending on ages etc they might benefit from any of a Friends and Family Railcard, Two Together Railcard, 16-25/26-30 Railcards, not to mention Disabled Persons/Forces/etc. Then you've got GroupSave, TOC-specific group or family discounts. Then you've got the West Midlands Day Ranger, or the Heart of England Rover. That's before even looking at split ticketing. Or indeed the fact that you can combined e.g. a Two Together Railcard with a West Midlands Day Ranger ticket and whatever else.
I'm all for special offers and whatnot but it's just a confusing mess for a lot of people. I've got family members who recently spent over a couple of hundred pounds going to London when they could've done it with the same number of changes, 20 minutes longer, for 70 quid. That difference could've been spent on a show in the West End and a decent slap up meal for them all. But all they did was the obvious thing of going to the Transport for Wales website (they live in Wales), doing a search, and buying a ticket which got them there on time.
modernrail
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Quite, pity the poor UK rail passenger who thinks the right way to buy a train ticket is to buy a train ticket.
Into London is where there often isn't an alternative, and the TOCs know it. For journeys not involving London, the market is those with no other option or the train offers some sort of advantage over other modes (speed, lack of parking at the destination etc.) Any query or complaint to a TOC seems to be met with a "sorry, but hard luck" response now. At least Delay Repay still exists and is fairly generous.
When people complain about this, the solution to this is removing or making things harder to get a "better than average" ticket. The average person will spend £350 on a return from Manchester to London rather than £45 / 56 return, not to save the hour, but because they know no better.
We've seen what "simplification" means. It means higher fares and less flexibility for those that do the simplest form of research.
modernrail
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I wouldn’t say the research is simple. I am relatively ninja like at it but still have a few more years of my degree to go.
Split fares etc are bit daft really. I agree it is what we do and what we must do but it is all a bit ridiculous and only possible because of improved IT. It is not very grown up though. A grown up railway wouldn’t be playing so many games and forcing everybody else into playing games.
I totally agree that the powers that be can’t be trusted to use simplification to do what it says on the tin though. It feels like we have a lot of privatisation era game playing mentality type people in the system, unsurprisingly considering the system that was established and how it was run. They probably don’t adapt easily to a different mentality.
According to this academic publication:
Rail Travel for the Many or the Few? | Inequality in Transport
58% of the population used the train some time over the year, with half of those (29%) using it regularly (five times a week or more). It also says that a further 15% use it 2-4 times a week, with a further 14% monthly.
This doesn't appear to be available in the Government statistics (sadly as this would be quite a useful metric) however if it's correct that around 58% of the population use rail at least once a month, that's a substantial population, and this is from 2013, so the proportions may have gone up.
To put that into context, about 17% of the population were eligible for the winter fuel payment before recent changes and we all know how political that can get.
Perhaps rail passengers are the sleeping lion that is yet to roar ! (Or maybe a conspiracy of silence between the main political parties).
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Fair point - the average 19 year old is likely to struggle even more with rail fares.
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Or it might be a distress purchase as they have no viable alternative.
Don't get me wrong - there are some very good value fares available out there. The problem is, it's too patchy and too many passengers have to jump through too many hoops to find them. This gives the overall impression that rail fares are poor value for passengers (as opposed to motor transport for example, where even though there are undulations in fuel prices, there aren't the sort of fluctuations where the same journey might be £40 one week and £100 the next due to a lack of advanced fares).
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I agree with this.
It's all very well having this and that offer for this and that person, but if the underlying fares structure is too expensive, the whole system will seem poor value.
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That stat must be wrong, or at least subject to a strong bias. If 29% of the GB population (approx 66m, so 19m) used the railway 5 times a week or more, that would be 5 billion passengers a year, and that’s assuming none used it more than 5 times a week, and before you add in the 29% of the population who use it less frequently.
As we have about 1.5bn passengers a year, the numbers are somewhat overstated by a factor of at least 4.
SWT_USER
Member
50% cuts on some SWR inner routes over the past few years.. no sign of those services returning bar a couple of peak extras.
Perhaps they've missed out a line in the executive summary, i.e the 29% relates to something else.
I've seen the 58% figure previously though.
They are coming back.
SWT_USER
Member
Is there a date for that? Not seen anything
bcarmicle
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Actually you were correct, it’s 50% of the 58% so that does make 29% of the population overall.
Haywain
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Second guessing @Bald Rick's caginess but the next timetable changes should be in December 2025 and May 2026, so probably one of those.
December 25 is written. The process for May 26 has started. It wont be either of those. But there is a SWR recast in the offing. Date tbc.
SWT_USER
Member
Not really coming back then for the foreseeable... Some unspecified date in the future at least 18 months away...
Given the speed at which they were cut from the timetable it's taking a hell of a long time to bring them back.
Perhaps rail just isn't sustainable then. If even with £10b a year subsidy if it's still expensive for the tiny minority of trips using it then perhaps other solutions are needed.
Of course it's wrong. NTS0313 tells us that just 5% of the country use the railway 3 times a week or more in 2023, a number broadly stable for the previous 20 years. That's less than cycling.
13% use a local bus at least 3 times a week. 67% use a car at least 3 times a week.
24% use rail at least monthly. A further 34% use it once or twice a year.
Sadly it doesn't say the region those trips are in, but it seems likely that people using rail once or twice a year are far more likely to be using it to get to/from London than using it for a 6 mile hop down a branch line. Off peak trains to London are generally very cheap from most railheads.
If we use reasonable inferences (>3 trips a week = 200 trips a year, once or twice a week = 75 trips a year, etc), then
About 60% of trips are made by 5% of the population, 90% of trips are made by 13% of the population, and 98% are made by 25% of the population.
Any subsidies to rail falls massively on that 13%.
Now there's an argument that some increase in targetted subsidies -- increasing cross country capacity for example (we all know how terrible XC are) is justified, perhaps at the expense of the massive subsidies used to provide so much peak time capacity on commuter lines.
Currently the cheapest walk up fare for a trip from Birmingham to Exeter is £125.50 return, or 37p per mile.
A trip from Birmingham to London is £40.00 return, or 17p per mile. Less than half the price per mile and comparable with driving.
Stoke to Birmingham - 12p/mile, Stoke to York 31p/mile.
Speed also comes into it. Lincoln to London and Lincoln to Shrewsbury is about the same cost of 26p/mile, but to London it's twice the speed of driving, to Shrewsbury its far slower than driving.
That’s basically the slice of people for whom the cost of rail fares can reliably be considered a significant political priority. 5%. And mostly on medium to higher incomes. (Amusing to see an “academic study” think that nearly a third of the population use the train even more than that!)
Pretty much everyone else, when it comes down to it, has rail a long way down the list of their priorities for easing the cost of living. And to be honest, if you were paying a lot less for your housing, utilities, childcare and the rest, rail fares become a lot more tolerable.
Even the bus, as you say, is a higher political priority. Mostly because people in more precarious financial situations pay the bus fare, and that’s partly why there’s been a cap on bus fares and not on rail fares.
Unlikely, given that rail is likely to be proportionally much more well represented for medium distance and longer journeys for which rail is suited.
So that's 63% who use rail at least a couple of times a year. And of those who use it more sparingly, their couple of times a year are far more likely to be substantial journeys where alternatives are undesirable, and so more vital to them.
That £40 Birmingham to London is lovely if you're there, but not particularly representative.
Taking your example, perhaps if off-peak walk on fares could have a base line cap of 17p per mile, that would create a more equitable, simplified system more accessable to the public as a whole.
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There are also a reasonable chunk of people like myself, who aren't poor, but for whom the cost of running a car (on top of housing costs etc) is onerous, therefore rail becomes more important.
I wonder if the couple quoted in the article don't run a car, hence why the cost of rail is so important to them.
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But it's not. 80% of trips are by people who are travelling at least once a week - mostly more than once a week.
Of all rail trips, 40% are on Thameslink, Overground, Elizabeth Line. London commuters. Another 17% on South Eastern and South Western, and while South Western techincally goes to places like Exeter and Weymouth, the vast majority of its network is the London commuter belt.
Overall 70% of journeys are London and South East operators, less than 10% are on Long distance operators. The average length of train trip is just 23 miles. 73% of journeys are on TOCs with an average journey distance of under 20 miles.
The vast majority of journeys are those commuting short distances into London. The vast majority of people using a train on any given day are London commuters.
One way of using a subsidy I think I could support would be to give everyone a non-transferable voucher twice a year for 50% off a train ticket. It might even work out to be revenue positive.
It would either cost nothing (if it wasn't used - half the country don't use it), but not be shovelling taxpayers money into the tiny minority. It would significantly reduce the amount of money the 30% of the "once or twice a year" have to pay, but not make any real impact on the tiny minority that use the vast majority of railway journeys.
A blanket £5 off every journey or 5p off every km would cost far more and benefit a tiny number.
I'd also throw in free parking at a station too, given how few people live near a station.
The vast majority of those doing short commutes into London will be paying peak fares anyway.
Put it this way - if you're only using the train a couple of times a year, you're likely to either have a car for local trips or do everyday activities within walking distance. Why would these people suddenly do a random local trip by rail when they clearly have another established way of doing these activities. This is much likely to be a substantial trip.
Also, in a national railway system, why should Birmingham - London passengers get 17p per mile, but Birmingham - Exeter get shafted with 37p ? This is what is referred to in the press as a postcode lottery. If, as a Nation, we're coughing up subsidy for a passenger network, a cap per mile seems like a reasonable way to ensure that passengers have equitable access to it.
Majority, maybe. But not the vast majority. There is a LOT of off peak traffic.
redreni
Established Member
Only if you assume only the person making the journey benefits from the journey being made, or from it being made by train instead of car, which is not generally the case.
If they're travelling to do work, for example, somebody benefits because the work is done. If they're travelling by train instead of car, people travelling by car benefit from reduced congestion and there is a saving of the externalised costs of pollution, noise, turning tyres into microplastc dust that gets washed into our waterways and ultimately our oceans, and so on, that would accrue if they went by car.
Those regular off peak travellers in the South East will have access to the Network Railcard, so there seems to be even more political imperative to get rid of extortionate off-peak fares such as the 37p per mile quoted above.
45% of journeys are on offpeak tickets, 32% peak, 13% season, 8% Advance.
So about the same between offpeak and peak+season.
Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
Be careful what you wish for. It is clear that there is no appetite in the country at large for significant increases in rail subsidies. As such a change to fares along those lines would have to be broadly revenue neutral. There would be winners and losers. And some of the losers would be rural lines that are already vulnerable to further cuts. Such a policy could easily result in closures being part of the price to be paid. Is it worth it?
Do not kid yourself that railways are a big issue to many people. Health, education, defence, law and order all consistently rank higher than public transport in most people's priorities. And that's before you consider more topical issues like cost of living spikes or immigration. Yes strategic long-term thinking is a necessity in progressive transport policy. But we're unlikely to see very much of that in the UK.
Nottingham59
Established Member
They will be on season tickets or travelcards.