Patrick Crozier

Every year (or near enough as makes no difference) the government allows the rail companies to increase those fares that they, the government, control.  Result? Instant outrage.  “Why should we pay more when the trains are so overcrowded/unreliable/expensive etc...” Sometimes there are feeble attempts to justify these rises along the lines of “Oh they are needed to pay for longer trains, taller trains, newer trains, more trains, faster trains etc.”

If you want to see the absurdity of this situation you need only compare this state of affairs with that state of affairs at Tescos.  There’s none of this outrage when Tescos puts up the price of, say, a tin of peaches and no attempts to justify it on the grounds of “Oh we need to raise prices in order to fund the new store at Banbury.” No, there’s just the acceptance that if Tesco is putting up the price of something it is either because it costs them more to buy or because they want to prevent empty shelves.  The store at Banbury will be expected to pay for itself.

Actually, you don’t even have to look as far afield as Tescos - simply look at those times and places when fares have been free.  There was none of this outrage in the past when fares (for the most part¹) unregulated.  Mind you in those days fares for the most part were coming down and conditions improving².

You don’t even have to delve into the history books.  Currently, first class, most inter-city fares and freight rates are completely unregulated and there are few complaints.

The simple fact is that none of this outrage would exist if we had a true free market, with private rail companies having absolute freedom to charge whatever they liked.

So, why don’t we just return to that system as quickly as possible?

Vested interests.  Or the man on the 0822 problem.  He’s the guy who needs the 0822 to get to work but if fares went up dramatically (as they probably would if they were free) he would either have to lose his job or move home.  Clearly he wouldn’t be very happy and would resist any dramatic move to a proper free market.  And I can’t say I’d blame him.  The point I’d make is that when you fix a problem it often involves pain but do you blame the person trying to fix it or the person who got you into that problem in the first place?

Notes

1.  100 years ago regulation such as it was extended only to what were known as Parliamentary Trains and Workmen’s Fares.

2.  See the story of Midland’s abolition of Second Class.  Also here

Rob Fisher

At Richmond station there are no automated machines for topping up Oyster pre-pay, so one has to queue behind people making unfathomably lengthy and complicated transactions.  Said I to the ticket clerk, “are there any plans to install Oyster machines?”

“That’s up to the London Underground People,” said he.  “They would have to pay for those machines.  We are South West Trains; it is nothing to do with us.”

Protested I, “But I am a Southwest Trains customer.  Care you not for my convenience and the marginal benefits of such that might encourage others like me to favour your interchange over other routes?  Could not some agreement be made to the satisfaction of all?”

Alas, it was nothing to do with him.  He was a mere employee of South West Trains.

Rob Fisher

Overheard on a train yesterday:

Passenger:  Can I have a ticket from North Sheen to Reading please?
Guard:  This train doesn’t stop at North Sheen.
P:  Oh, I changed at Richmond.
G:  Why didn’t you buy a ticket at Richmond?
P:  There wasn’t enough time to make the change, I’d have missed my train.  And there was no-one selling tickets at North Sheen.
G:  It’s your responsibility to buy a ticket before you get on the train.

And with that the passenger was made to sign a slip of paper and got booted off at the next station.  I don’t know the rights and wrongs of the situation.  It seems a little harsh to me but perhaps the guard knew that North Sheen is well staffed.  On the other hand the passenger didn’t look like one of the ticket dodging kids I frequently see who hide in the toilet.

But all this is just another user interface problem.  No-one would put up with software that threw away half an hour’s work because they didn’t have time to click the right button when they first loaded it up.  Being thrown off a train half an hour into a journey because you didn’t have time to buy a ticket, or there was no-one there to sell it, is a similar problem.  Being too late to buy a ticket but not wanting to miss the train is a dilemma I’ve faced.  Another is forgetting to extend my return ticket and, having hunted the train for a guard who won’t sell me an extension, choosing between breaking my journey half way to buy one or risking getting in trouble at the end.

The solution is a better user interface.  Oyster pre-pay is better than paper tickets, although not without its own UI problems.  The best idea I’ve heard of is buying tickets by text message.  This has the advantage of working wherever you are, so no queuing and no missing trains.  Happier customers and less aggravated guards will result.

Patrick Crozier

The idea was that I would get up early, travel up to Putney1, take some photos and report back on the sardine-like conditions on London’s trains in the rush hour.

So what went wrong?

The sardines didn’t show.  What I actually saw were scenes like this:

And this:

So, everything’s hunky-dory, then?  Proof positive that overcrowding can be solved without your plan of punting the fares into the stratosphere.

Well, hold your horses.  While things were a lot less crowded it could have been because it was a Friday.  More to the point, it did occur to me that almost no one on board could be described as comfortable.  If you were standing the chances were you would be doing so in a rather contorted position and if you were sitting… well, the seats are too narrow, there’s no legroom, they’re far too upright (Tornado position3) and if you’ve got a window seat your legs’ll be crushed by what appears to be metal trunking placed there for that sole purpose.

Frankly, I think I’d rather take my chances with the Tokyo rush hour.

You’re kidding me!  Don’t they have people pushers?

Apparently they do, not that I have ever seen them.  And I’ve my own memories.  But last time I went things were much more civilised.

The point about this, is that although everyone’s standing - they have to be the seats are locked out of use - they’ve all got a grab handle and can stand upright.  Plus there at least four doors per carriage2 so they’ll be able to get out easily.

The thing is I suspect that British seats are so bad with knock-on effects to those standing because of incentives written into the franchise agreement between government and TOC.

Suspect?

Well, these thing are subject to commercial confidentiality.

How convenient.

Indeed.

Footnotes

1. I chose Putney because in the days when I did commute, this was by far the worst stop with long waits as people shoved themselves aboard.

2. In some cases there are six.

3. So named due to the amazing similarity between the position they force the passenger to adopt and the position a Tornado pilot adopts immediately prior to ejecting.

Update.  People pusher link fixed.

Patrick Crozier

I see Which? have yet again been conducting a survey:

Millions of rail passengers are paying nearly 60 per cent more than they should to travel because of bad booking advice, a consumer watchdog claimed…

Half the calls resulted in too high fares being quoted, adding £1,263.60 to the cost of journeys which should - if the cheapest ticket had been offered - cost £2,174.

To which I don’t think I am going to say anything different from what I said a few years ago.  With the possible exception that, if anything, things seem to have improved.  To sum up: ticketing is difficult.

Patrick Crozier

The Disgruntled Commuter finds out how easy it is to dodge the fare - so long as you are hard enough:

The ticket guys had a good go at stopping him - after he’d blown off the first one, the second ran after him and had a second try but they didn’t seem either willing or able to actually lay hands on him. I’m guessing that unless the police are there too they can’t actually physically detain someone.

Well, as the Pub Philosopher points out if as a rail employee you try to intervene the chances are that you will be the one in trouble.  (Hat-tip: Laban)

Patrick Crozier

Oh come on this is straight forward enough.  It’s insurance against train cancellations in India, isn’t it?  Not quite:

“My favourite ticketing system was in Mumbai, India,” Kim enthuses. “No one actually buys a ticket, but you can buy ‘ticket insurance’ from private entrepreneurs who work at the entrance of the station.  The ‘ticket insurance’ is about half the price of a regular rail ticket.  It gives you a guarantee that, in the extraordinary event that you are booked by a railways inspector for taking a free ride, your fine will be paid.  A relative was once booked and the ticket insurer paid the fine exactly as promised.”

From the Sydney Morning Herald (Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution)

Patrick Crozier

I saw this in the Guardian’s account of the Cross Country announcement in which the franchise has been stripped from Virgin and awarded to Arriva (via Tim Hall):

The ticket hike will help pay for 40 more carriages and 3,000 more seats on the new Cross Country service…

Is there any other business that’s run on these lines?  Did Tescos charge more for tinned peaches in order to pay for their self-service checkouts?  Of course not.  Any decent well-run company is charging top whack anyway.  And any investment should be able to pay for itself.

Of course, neither of these things apply to the rail industry where fare control with its concomitants of losses and subsidy mean that all sorts of perfectly sensible investments cannot be made without someone - whether the passenger or taxpayer - being made to feel a loser.

The answer is to abolish fare control.

"Rail firms 'overcharge passengers'". So, some group sets out with the deliberate intention of catching out the train operators by asking for ticket-price quotes for journeys where a gazillion routes and fare combinations apply and - what do you know? - they succeed - although not to quite the same extent as they did last time this was tried.

Strange that in the days when Britain's rail network was much closer to a free market, the fare system was much simpler. Could it be that state-imposed fare control and franchising just might have added to the confusion?

Patrick Crozier

I see that the government is set to spend £1bn on 1,000 extra “carriages” to ease overcrowding.  Groan. 

Groan, because, if the last train splurge is anything to go by the new trains will be either unreliable, inappropriate, expensive or late - or all four.

And groan, because that’s going to be something like a £1,000 subsidy that people who don’t use trains will have to pay each London-bound commuter.  Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

Overcrowding is caused by fare control.  The answer is to abolish fare control.

“Carriages"?
It’s a complicated explanation but railwaymen rarely talk about carriages these days, preferring to refer to multiple-units.

Update 16/03/07.  Tim Hall has further thoughts.

Brian Micklethwait

Yesterday I watched a trainspotting documentary TV show fronted by trainspotting fanatic Pete Waterman, in the house of a friend who owned the DVD.  Waterman made his money producing pop songs but he apparently likes to spend it, some of it, buying up and restoring classic steam locomotives.

Anyway, in part two of this four part series, which covered the pre-WW2 pre-nationalisation period, Waterman said something interesting, which I did not know.  He said that Britain’s four great pre-nationalisation railway companies, LMS, LNER, the Great Western and the Southern, were obliged to become “common carriers” of freight.  Whoever wanted to use trains to send freight could do it, at a price determined by the government, however inconvenient and hence unprofitable it might be for the train company.  Nor were the train companies allowed to charge less than the government-ordained and publicly announced price for freight.  No wonder freight on the roads took off, if you will pardon the use of a transport metaphor to describe transport.  All they had to do was (a) undercut the railways by a few quid for convenient jobs that they wanted, and (b) just refuse to do all the inconvenient stuff, which the railways then had to do.  No wonder the railways went into decline, and were unable, after the war, to resist nationalisation.

“They were forbidden”, said Waterman, “to be entrepreneurial.”

Is that true.  Or is Pete Waterman just a rich and rabid trainspotter, who believes what he wants to believe?

Brian Micklethwait

London Mayor Ken Livingstone is demanding that the rail companies make more use of Oyster Cards.  Meanwhile, Rob Fisher complains about Oyster idiocy:

Tube travel was supposed to be free on New Year’s Eve, something to do with NatWest sponsoring tube travel. On the way home the gates were open but I touched my Oyster card anyway because we are constantly told to ”always touch in and touch out” on posters and in P.A. announcements. I didn’t want to find a closed gate and have to pay the £4. When I got to my destination the gate announced that there was not enough credit on my card. What? Not enough credit to pay for a free fare? I was tired and no-one was around to help, so I walked through the open gate.

When I checked a few days later, it turned out I had been charged for an incomplete journey on that New Year’s Eve. £4 for a free journey seems a lot. When I challenged it at the counter, I was told that I could only be refunded £3. So that’s £1 for a free journey. I am sure that NatWest would not be happy at their money being stolen by TfL in this way.

TfL means Transport for London, by the way.

To me the real rip-off here is that you only get refunded the mere cash that you lost, or in this case not even all of that, rather than all the cash you lost plus ten quid minimum for all the bullshit involved in getting the cash back.

Rob also links to an article about what programmers can learn from the good and the disturbingly numerous bad things about the Oyster system.

Patrick Crozier

Today rail fares have gone up.  This is good news for taxpayers as the railways will require less subsidy and good news for passengers as their trains will be less crowded.

This has prompted renewed calls for the abolition of all fare controls.  Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog said: “The abolition of fare control would improve time-keeping, reduce overcrowding, allow rail companies to stand on their own two feet and look into investing in more capacity, more seating and all sorts of new services no one’s even thought of yet.”

Fares rises 'will price people off trains'. Yes, it's the annual fare rise.

Some thoughts:

• They're probably right but only in the short run. In the long run things would be a lot better if we abolished fare control and allowed fares to rise.
  
• This is not a passenger group it is a state-appointed Quango and one that keeps changing its name - I can just about remember when it was known as the Rail Users' Consultative Committee.
  
• Isn't it funny how while car and and plane costs (minus taxes) keep coming down rail costs stay more or less the same?