Which brings up another question. With modern offices / ways of working now including part time, flexible working days, flexible working hours and home working, and occasionally late evening or even night / 24 hours working, how do you now define peak journey times?
If it’s defined as a time period, could that be classed as a form of discrimination?
If it’s defined as when a train is likely to be oversubscribed, it’s not working too well from what I can see.
Or is it really just leverage, a way for the railways to charge more because they can get away with it, as in the past, enough people (or more likely, their company) were willing to pay?
With the reduced number of passengers, should the railways even be trying to price people off the trains (this is after all the purpose of charging more for tickets on peak rate trains)?
Or should we be trying to encourage as many people to travel by train as possible. Especially as the fixed costs (by this I mean the cost that is the same whether one train a day runs or trains run every three minutes) of the railways becomes less, as a proportion per person as more people travel.
As an aid to this, if there was a totally flat rate per mile, with no discounts or peak rates, what would the price be per mile? Does the railway even know?
Similarly, with first class seats where most are empty, again, is it just about the railways taking advantage of people (or more likely, their company) being willing to pay more? I don’t think many standard rate passengers care if they can get a seat in standard class, but when standard class is crowded, and first class is nearly empty, it does make the railways look silly.
I’m not a regular bus or coach user, and the only time I use the tube in London is as part of another journey (via a through ticket). Do bus, coach, tube, metro or tram systems have a peak rate? Do any of them have a separate first class service?
I’m not necessarily saying that the railways should scrap peak tickets or first class, but the railways do need to carefully consider how they do business, and how they charge for their services. One of the major complaints from passengers and potential passengers is how confusing they find the ticket pricing.
The railways are both a public service, a transport system and a kind of business (although I would argue that you can in fact define ANYTHING that involves trading or money as a business which means every single person that gets paid money is a individual business).