…and pay an often significant premium for the privilege.
Most people travel on Advances for a good reason. Their expectations are in line with what @Bald Rick outlines, and they don’t want or need anything more than that.
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High fares - The issue that won't go away
- Thread starter yorksrob
- Start date
Most people travel on Advances for a good reason. Their expectations are in line with what @Bald Rick outlines, and they don’t want or need anything more than that.
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RailUK Forums
Some people could argue that deal has actually made the situation worse in the long term. CrossCountry and Northern for example have faced rather a lot of working to rule in the immediate aftermath of the pay award. An enormous increase in spending has brought it would appear no improvement in the availability of train crew in certain parts of the country.
Has chucking all that money at the problem helped get productivity agreements out of the ongoing negotiations? It certainly doesn't seem to have.
redreni
Established Member
If there's a desire to move to a booked train only system (which I don't support), advances need to be (a) renamed and (b) regulated. By which I mean the prices and the quotas.
If GBR doesn't want flexible fares as a de facto cap on advance fares, it must not be allowed to move to a complete free for all of a system. The price gouging that would follow from that would ultimately erode and undercut the railway's customer base.
This only happens because we waste vast sums of money on the railway while we've starved the bus industry of subsidy though.
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I think you mean people who already buy advance tickets like advance tickets.
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I expect you'd get an utter look of disbelief if you mentioned to the man on the Clapham omnibus that rail needs any sort of subsidy. They see the high ticket prices and think the system is awash with cash, with fat cat executives, foreign owners and yes, train drivers, all bathing in gold. People don't understand how expensive a railway is to run.
It's the only thing vaguely affordable for Intercity travel. Try travelling with a family, then it's only getting the lowest tier of Advance tickets that's affordable.
Fuel duty freeze and pro-motoring policies are a rare example of the Government enacting the will of the people. People, in general, prefer to drive. Public transport is for central London and when there's no other option. You'll find quite a few who take the bus or train once a year - when their car is in for a MOT. Maybe a second time if they do a London trip. That being said, there aren't many people who are firmly anti-rail, they often believe they're priced out.
But used far far more. Almost everyone outside of major cities use a car.
From NTS2023
> Outside London, residents in England relied on cars for commuting, with 70% of commuting trips made by car by residents from urban areas outside London, and this increased to 81% by residents in rural areas (excluding London).
That compares with 5% of the country for rail. Rail is a rich persons plaything, with most people who use Rail using it more like an aircraft for a couple of trips a year, rather than using it like a bus or car.
Not as inefficient as paying people to drive £1m vehicles around carrying 3 people from somewhere they don't want to be to somewhere they don't want to go at the time they don't want to travel. I saw a picture earlier of a train trundling along north Wales, next to the road. It uses about the same amount of land as a road, yet carries maybe 50 people an hour in each direction.
Near to nobody uses rail regularly despite the massive subsidies. Sure on arterial routes into cities people use heavy rail, but even then I wonder what the passenger capacity would be if the Watford DC lines were replaced with electric buses running even just one per minute between Euston and Watford. A road with 1 vehicle per minute in each direction is basically empty. Now sure the buses need somewhere to go, but that's where you put a "crossbus" system in place. Even a small bus with 30 seats would mean 1800 people in each direction, and those buses could then split to 15 different directions out of Watford while still providing a 4bph service from 15 different villages into London, 60bph from Watford through to London and via "crossbus" then out of a corridor to the south landing in 15 different locations near Leatherhead or whatever.
"Working class" people include those with massive passive incomes as they own multiple properties, it doesn't include people who pay far higher tax rates on the work they do (thanks to national insurance), whose income comes from working. It's a meaningless statement.
The underlying fact is that only 5% of the country regularly use rail, and the vast majority of those are commuting to high paid jobs/careers in London. Not to say that shouldn't be provided for (those of us on decent salaries get little back), but it needs to be acknowledged.
It would be quite something if Crawley had an hourly train only and no trains on Sundays.
As I said, ask a differently worded question and you can get a different answer.
Plenty of people make family trips at higher prices than the lowest Advance tier - which is a good job as on many trains/routes tickets priced at the lowest tier level hardly ever go on sale.
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Yes but you need to also say “these nice-to-have but little-used functions will mean the ticket costs maybe twice as much”.
That’s like asking someone if they’d like to buy a VW Polo or a Land Rover Defender but not telling them they’ll pay a lot more for the second car which has features they don’t really need.
Advance tickets are popular and not because everyone on them is loathing their sacrifice of route interavailability, time flexibility or refunds. They’re buying it because it’s the cheapest option and they expect long distance travel to fix one’s travel plans. All the passenger research clearly shows this and even ten years ago when I worked customer-facing, it was vastly more common for punters to believe their off peak ticket limited them to the time on the reservation than for them to think their Advance ticket gave them flexibility.
Why?
If nobody uses those functions then why are advanced so much cheaper than off peak? It doesn't cost the railway any more to transport Mr X on an advanced ticket on the 1800 compared with an off peak ticket on the 1800
Why not set the off peak tickets to the same price the advanced tickets are?
Some people do use those functions. Where did I say “nobody” used them?
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It's not unfair that those functions should cost a little more. Unfortunately LNER think they should cost a LOT more on top of fares that are already expensive.
You don't "need" to do that - the whole point of my post was that questions can be phrased to get the answers the people who commission the research/survey want.
The result of decades of government policy at the behest of the oil lobby.
You'll find the roads pretty empty at 4am too. Give it an hour or two and you will struggle to find a train that dead.
A 3.5m road lane can shift around 2,000 people per hour under normal circumstances. The same amount of land could be used to move 60,000 people by train. Then there's the issue of land devoted to parking.
Did you do a headcount on the train you saw a picture of? I'm interested as to how you've decided that there are just 50 passengers per hour using the line.
Interesting and (mostly) informed debate. Thank you everyone. It's given me a lot of food for thought.
I wonder if the passenger behaviour would change if the TOCs made public and clear the allocation of each Advance fare on each train.
I wonder if the passenger behaviour would change if the TOCs made public and clear the allocation of each Advance fare on each train.
Some people think of the terms working class and financial class as people whose resources necessary for life (housing, food, clothing, etc) come mainly from their own labour or mainly from their assets respectively. In this case the term working class would include everyone from those whose income is effectively zero right up to those who are paying income tax at the additional rate, but who lack meaningful assets. I agree it doesn't really help much to use these terms in the modern day without defining something further. A large majority of people who have their own income are getting it from their labour, not their financial assets.
The reason for the difference originally was that it's possible to push people to travel at otherwise quite unpopular times of day. For example very early on Friday or Saturday morning, before 0800, usually sees about the same capacity as Monday - Thursday, but demand is very low. It's completely impractical to cut the timetable at these times because the same train sets on Friday and Saturday just a few hours later are heavily loaded. Of course, we moved away from the original BR idea of just load smoothing a very, very long time ago. We are using them mainly for elasticity reasons nowadays.
I have to say, I'm ecstatically happy with the value for money of my cheap day return from Exeter to Barnstaple, which I work out to be roughly 16p per mile (and you get the gorgeous Devon scenery to boot).
By comparison, my off peak return from Exeter to Bristol (no CDR) worked out at over 25p per mile and felt extortionate.
I do think that the public should have a right to expect basic value for money for their rail journeys. I'm warming to the idea of an off peak per mile fare cap. This would be more effective at protecting a wider range of passengers than the current hotch-potch of privatisation era fares regulation, which seems to benefit commuters more.
This would enable a basic level of value across the country whilst still allowing the rail provider the freedom to provide cheaper offers if it's commercially beneficial.
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I'm not convinced that rail fares aren't in the mainstream. The regular rounds of fare increases do tend to make the news headlines.
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Because they know they'll likely be fleeced otherwise.
You shouldn't assume that AP are in line with what the travelling public wants or needs, just because there is no affordable alternative.
WMT shows that where there is an affordable alternative, people flock to it.
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Buses will always pootle along, stopping a lot and getting stuck in traffic, however much you spend on them. It's the nature of the beast.
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The working class also includes a huge chunk of people who aren't poor, but are still price sensitive.
Just because rail isn't currently very practical for the poorest of the poor, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of rail as public transport to the bulk of the working class and their budgets.
If you haven't done so, take a trip by rail away from the London commuter routes and see the wide range of people using them. This is as true of the Coastway routes on the South Coast as it is for the North of England. Where fares are attractive, working class people will use them.
By comparison, my off peak return from Exeter to Bristol (no CDR) worked out at over 25p per mile and felt extortionate.
I do think that the public should have a right to expect basic value for money for their rail journeys. I'm warming to the idea of an off peak per mile fare cap. This would be more effective at protecting a wider range of passengers than the current hotch-potch of privatisation era fares regulation, which seems to benefit commuters more.
This would enable a basic level of value across the country whilst still allowing the rail provider the freedom to provide cheaper offers if it's commercially beneficial.
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I'm not convinced that rail fares aren't in the mainstream. The regular rounds of fare increases do tend to make the news headlines.
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Because they know they'll likely be fleeced otherwise.
You shouldn't assume that AP are in line with what the travelling public wants or needs, just because there is no affordable alternative.
WMT shows that where there is an affordable alternative, people flock to it.
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Buses will always pootle along, stopping a lot and getting stuck in traffic, however much you spend on them. It's the nature of the beast.
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The working class also includes a huge chunk of people who aren't poor, but are still price sensitive.
Just because rail isn't currently very practical for the poorest of the poor, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of rail as public transport to the bulk of the working class and their budgets.
If you haven't done so, take a trip by rail away from the London commuter routes and see the wide range of people using them. This is as true of the Coastway routes on the South Coast as it is for the North of England. Where fares are attractive, working class people will use them.
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It’s not an assumption, it’s based on actual front line experience dealing with customers and understanding what their preconceptions are. People buy Advance tickets because they are cheaper, not necessarily because *they can’t afford* the alternative (and in some cases they can’t really afford an advance!) - and because they don’t actually require the additional functionality of a walk up ticket.
What sort of tickets do you think most people on the Crewe and Birmingham WMT trains (which compete with Avanti) are using?
This flexibility costs the railway far too much, so we have to push everyone onto advance purchase.....
Yet most passengers don't even know they can travel at a different time from their reservation.......
Industry cakeism, just so that they can go on charging extortionate fares.
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Yes, I agree with this. There's nothing wrong with flexibility costing a bit more, however the industry has been given carte blanche to exploit this for too long.
Most places that currently don't get a train service today, and don't have a new one that's been committed to by the government (such as East West Rail) will never get one. That's just life, no matter which shade of government wins. So the choice is between improving the bus service for those places, or doing nothing and accepting that nearly everyone will simply drive.
It is a sad situation - if only I'd been around to campaign against the rot.
You're quite right. Those places need bus regulation and the fares cap - money well spent.
But at the same time, we do still have this marvelous rail network that links the majority of largish towns and gets people around pretty quickly. It's worth spending money to ensure that a large proportion of the public can afford to use this as well.
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You seem to be saying that most people want an affordable fare - which is what I agree with.
Why must people always be forced to advanced fares to get value for money ?
Ideally people should be able to pay a bit more for more flexibility according to their needs, rather than being forced on to AP because there's no reasonably priced alternative.
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Why do you think people are being “forced” onto it? Most long distance passengers do not require the things that walk up tickets offer.
If that's the case, why not offer them the choice of more flexibility for a bit more money ?
If as you say, most people will freely choose AP anyway, why is the industry so afraid of offering affordable, flexible fares ?
Because those fares act as a cap on Advance tickets.
Which is precisely why we need them (and regulation) to ensure that the railway remains affordable for a majority of people, and not "a rich man's toy" (to quote a former transport secretary).
Yes that’s the utility of walk up fares really, they act as a cap on the fixed advance fares which make up the majority of long distance fares sold. That’s why it’s important to keep them, not because we like to imagine people are being “forced” off them by paying less for tickets which don’t have bells and whistles they don’t, in any case, require. Most customers if confronted with an Advance for £67 and an Off Peak for £70 choose the advance. This has been the case for a very long time. That’s why you get these Advance tiers so close to the Off Peak price.
Truth be told, its a bit of both.
We absolutely need that cap (I still think a cap on pence per mile for off peak fares would be a more equitable, nationwide way of achieving this).
But as someone who buys plenty of advanced purchase fares, I still think its important to have an affordable flexible choice. There are times when we don't know when we're coming back.
What would the cap be?
If you used something like Reading to Paddington it would be so high as to be relatively meaningless across the rest of the country.
On the other hand, if the cap was based on the excellent value fares in the West Country then they’d be ‘too cheap’ on a route like Reading to London and there’d be too much revenue loss.
There isn’t an easy solution…