I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail. It's just that most of them manage it better than the UK.
The UK telecoms industry was privatised and has ended up with BT Openreach operating most of the wires, leased out with local loop unbundling (LLU) to a variety of broadband providers. It works OK although not brilliantly.
Not really, in some countries the railway and train operators is the same company, strongly controlled by the government and operating without big problems.
It's my understanding that the problems in the UK started when they stopped using that model.
In the UK the railway companies try to run profits on railway operation while the taxpayer subsidizes them and the surrounding land is owned by property developers who are making profits that are staggering.
The Conservative government is also doing stuff like donating 38 million pounds to govia thameslink in profit compensation for a strike they triggered.
It's taxpayers and passengers subsidizing property developers' and TOC profits, and the government/TOCs seems to be trying to get the TOC wage bills down so that TOCs and property developers can make even more.
The UK railway is still subsidised by the tax payer -- while some routes like Manchester-London make a profit, this profit is reinvested into loss making routes like the Welsh Valleys which help keep communities alive (the operating companies take about 3%, so a £100 ticket without a private company taking money would at cheapest be £97)
There is plenty of competition on the Glasgow-London route, including two Coach companies, Plane - multiple companies and routes, driving, two direct train companies (albeit with similar branding) and a third overnight.
The $240 peak time one way fare comes out at 58 cents per mile. It's valid on any train, just walk up and go.
For almost all trains it's actually $183 return, or 22 cents per mile - valid on any train other than the first arrival into London in the morning and the first couple out of London in the morning.
A train from Washington to New York will set you back $1.14 per mile, with less flexibility.
I wonder why that is.
(extremely high detail PDF on costs: http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/4933/toc-bench...)
That's competition, no?
Heathrow Express - Heathrow Connect - Bus to Hayes+Harlington then train - Picadilly line - Coach - Uber - Taxi
Only one of those options is for mugs, and it's not the Heathrow Express.
However from Glasgow you can also fly to Gatwick, or City if you want to avoid thiefrow.
However comparing the cost of a non-flexible ticket from Glasgow to London with a flexible train ticket is ingenuous at best.
Interestingly, I can take a 3.5-4hr train from Penang to Kuala Lumpur for $12, made by Siemens I believe, traveling faster than the Pendolino/Voyagers, and with a similar level of comfort (I do think the seats are bit narrower though), so in comparison I consider the UK crazy priced unless you get some off-peak deal (still not great).
I suspect if still subsidized then it's probably very inefficient, I dont know but I certainly dont feel good paying the train ticket prices in the UK even the off-peak saver.
Two stops in from where I get on the train fills up dramatically and there are often people standing.
The media has driven this culture of people believing in 'rip off Britain'. If people were commuting 100 miles a day for the cost of a cup of coffee they'd still say it was a rip off (although oddly it would be the commute, not the £4 latte)
UK railways have been chronically mismanaged for years. Better comparison would be against other European countries.
(anyone in the age range eligible for InterRail, I would highly recommend spending a month travelling the railways of Europe)
In the UK we have decided to go for lower taxes and lower subsidies. We do that while still subsidising lines that are good for the country but not profitable (old mining towns in south wales which would collapse if people couldn't commute to Cardiff etc, cornish rurual lines which attract tourism and offer transport for local residents who may not have 1 car per adult, etc). This means that on the profitable lines which would make commercial sense (say Manchester to London, or some London commuter lines) we have to charge more.
Remember commuter tickets are twice the price of business tickets - as they are paid after income tax (which varies from 33% to 60%). When I was offered a job based in the office, I wanted an extra £10k a year for the commute -- £2200 for the ticket, £3300 for the extra tax to pay for that ticket, and £5k for the time out of my day. They decided that I didn't actually need to be based in an office after all, and I go (to that one) about once every 3 months, which costs them £20 return (but would cost me £45).
This is offset by the massive discounts. A season ticket from Nuneaton to London, 206 miles a day, about 1 hour in each direction, is £9000 a year, for 230+ days of travel, or 47,000 miles. 19p per mile. If you're willing to take a little longer and travel on London Midland it's £6500 per year, 14p per mile.
On the other hand, a day trip from Nuneaton is £154 in peak time, £104 on the slower train. That's 74p per mile - 3.5 times the price of the commuter.
They could probably also do it by whacking the extremely wealthy landowners surrounding major train stations with an extra tax.
After all, if the train station made your land valuable, you should be paying for that. In Japan this helps pay for infrastructure. It's practically criminal that in the UK it does not.
There is a profit margin to be made on any savings, I'm sure that if Stagecoach or First or whoever could cut costs enough to make more money they would. We have very old infrastructure, laid down in the mid 19th centuries, and very crowded lines. Building a new line is a mammoth task, and expensive, as we've seen from HS2. Rail staff are hardly cheap too - a virgin trains driver earns £51k, top 10% of earnings in the country.
I've heard this before but I'm not sure I believe it. They have a pretty huge incentive to make it seem like they aren't making a lot of profit, and it is easy for them to do so (just like Hollywood accounting).
The trip is approximately 226 miles. With sufficient advance purchase, the Northeast Regional coach fare is $49 each way and the Acela is $168 each way. I have never seen an NER fare greater than $200 each way. How did you arrive at $1.14 per mile at all, let alone thinking it's typical?
I'm only going on what you said.
MTA.info says this ride is 247.50 for a 10 trip ticket, with a trip of 85 miles that would be 247.50 for 850 miles, or 30c/mile.
From what I can see when doing a like-for-like comparison between the UK and the northeast US, the US is surprisingly pricier than the UK.
Now to be fare the Salisbury weekly season is valid for 10 journeys (or even 40), but only over 7 days, where as the Poughkeepsie one is a carnet, you can do 3 days one week, 2 days the next, and that's better, but for the Monday-to-Friday person, I'd rather be paying the Salisbury-London fare than the Poughkeepsie-NYC fare. (I'd rather be going into NYC, just without the fare)
Metro North also sells a weekly pass for $166.75. Unlimited rides during a calendar week. The 10-ride ticket has two prices, for peak and off-peak. Peak-hour 10-ride is $247.50, as you said; off-peak is $157.25.
Very few people actually buy a weekly pass on Metro North; either you are commuting infrequently (eg, weekend commutes) in which case you want a 10-ride ticket, or you are commuting daily, in which case you want a monthly ticket. A monthly pass between Poughkeepsie and GCT is $521. If you commute 20 days per calendar month, your per-mile cost is $0.16 / mile.
(Metro North fare information here: http://web.mta.info/mnr/html/planning/faresMar2017/hhfares_m...)
For the train route I myself am familiar with, the line between New York and Poughkeepsie, two different train systems serve the route, Amtrak (the company that does the nation-wide train service in the United States) and Metro North, a commuter-rail line associated with New York's MTA, via their Hudson Line.
I started with the Amtrak costs because the New York <-> DC train is an Amtrak train; most daily commuters will be using the Metro North, as it is cheaper.
I've checked again for tomorrow morning, $295. Perhaps I'm using the site wrong: https://imgur.com/TnuOGt3
295/226 is $1.30 per mile.
I'm ignoring the slower trains, non flexibile, booking in advance etc, as that wasn't what was raised. There are slower options for London-Glasgow that are nowhere near the full price (for example £57 tomorrow morning if you go via Edinburgh - saving £130).
I've just checked my emails - last time I took this train (albeit from NY to Washington), in March 2013, it was $498 for 2 tickets - $249 each.
This is for a far less flexible ticket than I get in the UK. For my $240 I can travel London to Birmingham, have the day there, and then continue to Manchester, have a meal and stay in a hotel overnight, then get a train from Manchester to Glasgow the next morning.
Washington to New York is half the distance, and nearly twice the price, as London to Glasgow.
That price is far from typical for this service. The prices I quoted are what I just pulled off amtrak.com for a Friday NY-DC train on 12JAN18. A couple months ago I purchased a ticket from Fredericksburg (south of DC) to NY with only a few days in advance for only $130. Thee ten-trip option my sibling poster mentioned gives you the same flexibility you mention there. Please do not base your idea of the cost of rail travel in the NE US based on one very overpriced trip.
Edit:
Just saw your screenshot. That $295 is for the Acela (which is premium service). I just ran the same search, and midday trains are running about $152 for the NER and $168 for the Acela. The one you chose is literally the most expensive non-first class ticket you could book tomorrow.
I still don't see his $300 ticket, the only thing I can think of is that he's looking at a return ticket, but then that doubles the price on the Accela.
Under what circumstances do most people only have a choice of two.
I don't know about the rest of the UK but I don't think that is the case in Scotland - once you are any distance from a city or town the speeds can drop dramatically and that's not even in the Highlands or Islands. Certainly when we were looking at houses about a year ago there were quite upmarket new houses in Perthshire that had no broadband at all.
DSL is broadband. I've been using DSL for over 17 years (and, while away from home, using combinations of cable & satellite), and I watch plenty of TV & listen to plenty of music on it. It really does work great for me.
To be fair this might not be obvious, if you missed the context of the thread and unless you are familiar with "Southern Railways".
The problem with rails is the same with roads.
Yes, AnCaps/Libertarians/Voluntarists/goldbugs think that "yeah, if the State weren't meddling in the market, people would form a corporation to build a [toll] road/rail", but of course, the same network effects would lead to very fine roads between major population centers and abso-fucking-lutely nothing else, because why would anyone connect a mining town in Wyoming anywhere? The mining company will use big all-terrain vehicles on dirt roads and that's it. Maybe they'll lay a track for the coal itself.
And I'd even argue, that yes, even if rail operates at a net loss according to GAAP, that doesn't mean socially it is a negative. The same applies to broadband.
However, maybe ... maaaybe not everyone should live so far from each other, so infrastructure TCO and commute times and energy use (and GHG emissions) would be lower.
Street furniture and cables all over the pedestrian areas and cars and bikes everywhere else. Huge concrete overpasses, litter and pollution.
1: Rail maintenance dictate quality, but is shared between all competitors.
2: Rail is located on ground owned by the government. There is no practical or legal option to operate a private rail network.
3: Lack of distinguishable features to compete, high barrier to entry, and a limited number of companies create an environment thats prime for oligopolies. High price, low service.
In contrast to Internet service providers which:
1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network.
2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first.
3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP.
If by that you mean that it is not the only thing that matters, then yes. But if the backbone is bottlenecked then of course quality will suffer.
> 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first.
Is that actually the case? Getting a dedicated line between any two buildings tends to be no problem, so why would doing the same on a larger scale be a problem all of a sudden?
> 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP.
That's only really possible if the last mile can be leased from either the municipal or some other company (sort of like the government maintained track system). Otherwise the barrier is exactly this last mile, which is the most expensive part of the whole thing (which is also why a lot of small rural ISPs use wireless as last mile access instead of wired connections).
For shits and giggles I tried to figure out what the same ride costs like when you buy the ticket 30 minutes in advance. And there we come to 280£ each, which is completely ridiculous. It's not that good (2nd ist still ~90quid)
Now, don't get me started on Northern. Filthy, Expensive, Clueless and slathered with a heavy dose of disorganisation.
I think you can honestly say that privatizing trains in the UK was an experiment going horribly wrong.