Only time I used HS1 there were very few passengers going between Stratford & London. Don't see many people using Intl but I suspect those I do see are going to/from Kent rather than to/from London.
Which will surely be people going from the East to Stratford. And a lot of those people have ridiculously huge wages, there isn't going to be such demand from such well-off people outside the peaks or at weekends, yet the prices are still daft.
Yes, but that wouldn't be covered by a (in-boundary) Travelcard. It's still poor, and not as well used as it should be from Kent, but when you look at travel between London St Pancras and Stratford, it must be a tiny percentage of the potential due to the ludicrous premium on that section of the journey.
I agree with this. The platforms at Stratford International (for the trains to London St Pancras) are empty during the Off-Peak. Why pay almost £6 for a 6-minute journey when the tube costs less than half that?
I suspect Stratford International is mostly used by reasonably well-off people in Kent who want to do some shopping at Westfield, or by commuters in Kent who are required to change at Stratford International for the DLR. I don't think the prices for these sorts of markets are
that bad - £32 for an Off-Peak return from Canterbury to Stratford (£21.10 with a Network Railcard), or £136.60 for a 7-day season (£27.32 a day) - little more than petrol and parking would cost.
It is interesting to note, though, that the above travellers are only required to pay
5p extra each way to travel to London St Pancras, which shows how overpriced the London St Pancras <> Stratford International tickets are.
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Surely participating in Oyster is optional? SET don't want to fill up their long-distance higher-speed trains with lots of very short-distance passengers.
HS1 can be quite full in the rush hours, although I've never seen it actually full & standing.
I am sure that a reasonable proportion of those using it are on longer-distance tickets where there is no premium, but there is also a significant tendency among business people (my colleagues included) to use it simply because they can.
SET were very clever, in charging it as a standard class premium, rather than as first class, as it therefore gets around many companies' travel policies which prevent the use of first class.
Arguably it is just a single (first, but with no drinks (payable or free!)) class train. And - amusingly - if SET had declared it as such, they would have avoided the train being half full of "freeloaders" (their perception, not mine!) with through-London standard class tickets.
It is a premium service that deserves a premium price, and it has benefited a lot of people, especially those living in Ashford, Canterbury, and nearby places.
However, it has done little to benefit those living along the North Kent Coast, whose HS1 journey times are nothing spectacular, and whose local services have slowed down dramatically. To make HS1 "First Class Only" with
ridiculously high fares would have caused outrage.
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The ludicrous premium is on the Gravesend (GRV)-London Terminals section - SDR not HS1 is £21.80, whilst SDR +HS1 is £29.40 - a premium of £7.60 which is ludicrously more than the premium from Faversham (FAV) which is far, far, further away from London (£48.30 vs £41.50 i.e. a premium of £6.80).
You can travel from Basingstoke to Waterloo for a similar price!