Okay, now do something about how insanely expensive train tickets are. This is a good step forwards, but I feel way more people rely on the train to travel than busses.
You could be more appreciative than “okay, now do another great thing”. I agree like but when people do sit things we fuck em up, we should give propers props for good deeds.
Train tickets are priced, among other things, to manage demand and prevent overcrowding. Increasing capacity is a long-term and high-cost process (see HS2) and the government doesn’t have that sort of time or money.
HS2 is clearly just a deliberate money pit at this point, there’s no other reason a relatively short line like that could out cost the entire EU wide rail refurbishment project by a factor of almost 2.
Train tickets are priced to maximise profits for shareholders. For a lot of tickets there’s a maximum amount they’re allowed to raise them by each year, and you better believe they do exactly that.
They’re slowly being renationalised when their contracts run out, which is a start.
A good benchmark for pricing should be “two people taking a train should cost about the same as it would to drive in a car”. It’s nowhere near that. For most long UK journeys it’s cheaper to fly to another European country and fly back to the destination than it is to take a train.
The railways were effectively nationalised in 2020. Since then they have been run as management contracts - with the franchisee being paid a flat rate by the DfT per train, and the DfT keeping the ticket revenue. Indeed, Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, the largest franchise, had been a management contract as early as 2015.
The average profit margin was around 2% of face value, while around 60% went to network renewal. Under franchising, DfT set the price of 40% of tickets. The remainder, set by franchisees, were often cheaper advance offers.
Yay!
Be better if it was free though.
Free would definitely be better, but requires solving other problems in lockstep. E.g. homeless people using the busses as a place to exist/stay warm. It disrupts the bus as a function.
A small (deliberately) token fee gets the best compromise. It’s akin to charging 10p for a plastic bag. For most people 10p isn’t enough to be problematic, in the grand scheme of things. It does massively reduce frivolous usage.
I would prefer pushing it down to £1 return, or even lower, but £2/trip is still better than the current option.
Oh, and just to clarify I also definitely believe we should be using taxes to give homeless etc somewhere better to exist. The busses/trains/underground are not the place for that to happen.
The thing is that ticket machines, staff whose job it is to check tickets, all other infrastructure that exists in order to enforce fares, also all cost money… so at a certain point it becomes absurd to have very low fares because if it’s free, you can get rid of all that infrastructure. I don’t know enough about public transport in the UK to know how the calculation works there.
That’s fair. However, a lot of it is already in place and is quite automated. E.g. on busses they have a contactless card reader. Many have already moved to a fixed ride fee too. Basically you just tap as you walk past the driver, who already has to be there.
The London underground has intermittent enforcement. A lot of the time the honour system is all there is. You just swipe your oyster card or bank card at the read point next to the entrance. They do random checks just to keep people honest.
Even if you expand things, the cost of the tech is low enough to almost be a rounding error.
The goal is to limit completely frivolous usage saturating capacity or otherwise forcing the target riders off completely.
Anecdotally, LA works pretty well as a case study on this particular matter: https://youtu.be/vTS897tcu6Q
Small steps :)
I could see it being justified as a progressive measure to increase capacity. Lower the prices , increase demand and get more people on the bus paying fares that you can use to expand service to meet the new demand. Once the infrastructure is built to handle the increased demand then you can make it free.
Vs. if you make it free right away demand spikes with no resources to increase capacity.
You could make that point but I wouldn’t give Burnham that much benefit of the doubt. He may be better than starmer but he’s not so progressive.
There has been research done into this, showing that free stuff can exhaust a resource like this much faster. E.g. cheap tickets could get drivers out of their cars, but not the people who’d walk two blocks. Plenty of countries with free public transport that seem to work just fine, but you might end up happier with cheap public transports rather than entirely free buses. Not having to deal with tickets would be really nice though, for everyone involved.
Link it
The entire municipality of Fredericia has free busses and literally none of the problems everyone keeps describing has happened.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11116-016-9695-5.pdf
My opinions on this subject are nuanced. While I think free fares are definitely the ideal assuming unlimited resources, they are probably not the best intervention you can do for improving the overall transit posture of a given city. Infrastructure investments are almost always going to be a better bet.
Why do you have to assume unlimited resources? That is frankly a very dumb approach to this topic. Social mobility pays for itself. It is a net-positive for a city to allow residents to move freely and easily, even if the bus, when nothing else is accounted for, does cost fuel. Busses, trams and trains are infrastructure investments.
I think you might be misunderstanding. My point is that resources are not unlimited, and hence prioritizing infrastructure investments - meaning a more comprehensive transit network with better headways - is preferable to fully removing user fees.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. Removing at-use fees enables social mobility that strengthens the economy far beyond what the fees would ever dare charge for the service. You can make it free and improve its service. Those are not mutually exclusive. This is entirely a political barrier, and any rational society that believes in the future would just make the damn bus free, because there are no downsides and a lot of upsides.
Right, I live in a town where the only public transit are buses which are totally free, it’s excellent and nobody is “exhausting the resources” or whatever.
There are hundreds of studies on exactly this topic in disciplines from economics to public health. They are most common on the topic of universal healthcare and ensuring timely access.
The consensus has always been that charging a nominal fee (e.g. £5) drastically reduced unnecessary usage and increases access across the population. Policy proposals generally recommend for a set number of free appointments per year for the subset of the population below an income threshold.
Just search for it.
Buses, and this might shock you, aren’t as sensitive to waste as other systems. If you need to get from point a to point b and using the bus is faster than, say, walking, then it wasn’t a wasted trip. And if it wasn’t shorter, the person who wasted their time is the one punished for wasting their time.
So, no, vague unlisted studies about other systems isn’t relevant here.
It’s directly relevant and buses are just as susceptible to waste and scarcity of capacity as any other system.
Sorry reality doesn’t agree with your internally constructed and parasocially reinforced narrative.
Maybe people would believe you more if you actually posted something that actually backs up your claim rather than repeating the same “the facts are on my side” claim and resorting to ad hominems 🤷
Reality doesn’t agree with your assertion that £5 is a nominal fee for a bus ride.
£5 is not a “nominal fee” if you take multiple buses a week to get to multiple places, transport over a month could add up to hundreds of pounds
A nominal fee would be like 5 pence
Bullshit. I lived in countries with both fully free healthcare and with a small fee, and if anything the system works better in the countries where it’s free.
Cool, data and scholarship disagree with you. But, I’m sure that we’ve all been enlightened by your layman’s opinion on a well-studied topic.
Cool, data and scholarship disagree with you.
None of which you cite.
Are the data and scholarships in the room with us now?
I’ve read 16 independantly verified deep studies across multiple economic states that proved conclusively that buses being free increased the productivity of a populace, reduced time taken off, and directly increased lifespans of the participants. I had a link to these studies somewhere… hold on…
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Have have absolutely no conception of reality whatsoever if you consider £5 a nominal fee. None whatsoever. Of course you don’t understand buses. You don’t use them. At all.
Noooo! Now by cycling to work I am only saving £20 a week rather than £30 a week!
Enjoy the guy as long as he lasts.
Is this guy also going to tax the rich? That would be a game changer. #TaxWealthNotWork !twnw@fedia.io
Unfortunately he’s paying for it by scrapping £500m of foreign aid aimed at climate change mitigation.
This might do a lot of good towards climate change mitigation, I get it it sucks for whoever was receiving the foreign aid but it’s not an entirely bad thing.
I wonder if a study can be conducted of where we could invest having the best impact for the world, but also we have to consider governments are naturally (and should be) incentivized to invest in their own communities.
Anyways, it’s a difficult position to just be against or for this proposal, there’s an argument to be made about social justice and how the global south will bare the worst consequences for climate change while having contributed the least to it.
Do you have a link? Because that turns this minor win into a distraction tactic. I knew this guy was gonna be more centralist than we need but I thought he’d at least fake it for a couple of quarters.
Sounds like it won’t be long before he’s booted too if this is true.
This action to ease the cost of living is being funded by savings from reprioritising the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s budget, including by switching funding for international climate from grants to loans.
Thank you so much! I’d like to know more of the details on what reprioritizing means in this context, I’m not certain a dollar off of fares is equivalent to some meaningful green energy projects but at least according to this article they’re simply moving from grants to loans which on its surface isn’t the worst thing. I think grants make more projects possible regardless of their economic feasibility, while loans are potentially more self-sufficient and reoccurring.
I’d also have liked to see a push for more trains, trams, and street cars. Buses seem to me to be the worst of public transit options. But I’m happy they’re getting more long term funding. Roads are a plight but if it helps the UK people value public transit more that’s a good thing in my book.
The sorts of countries involved can’t necessarily afford the loans. This is going to have a big negative impact in the developing world.
Ya, that’s the sort of underhand cruelty that I expect from a centralist party. I can understand the desire for countries to put most of their money to local projects, but I have no doubt this was a small portion. These sorts of projects have high returns on several important metrics, not even accounting for the impact the western world has had on the southern countries we pillaged.
Burnham has promised a lot, but Britain is broke. Every wonderous policy is going to have to come from cuts. He’s signalled a massive investment in defence, and that’s going to hit welfare hard.
“… (Has) To come from cuts” is not how I would put it. Britain could tax the ultra-wealthy out of existence and remove housing as an investment vehicle and they’d be able to leave welfare intact. Every dollar taken out of the quality of living of the average citizen is a choice to give that dollar to the rich. Conservative governments shouldn’t be allowed to do this and people need to be educated on what wealth inequality means for the average Joe.
#TaxWealthNotWork
This is where chicago is at about. little over 2 bucks a ride. Its a pretty good compromise between having it cost something but for it to be not to much and low enough that its a great option cost wise. I honestly don’t get why so many people don’t use it but then again many do. im talking the metro to.
1.1 million people use Chicago transit every day. I don’t think a lack of ridership is the issue. It’s all the space that’s been given entirely over to cars (looking at you, Lake Shore Drive, monument to pestilence that you are)
Im not really pointing out an issue. Honestly LSD would be hard to get rid of but I could see it taken away from cars. Would be a great cooridoor and line park. Would like to see the whole downtown area bounded by the lake, the river, and congress made car free. Just ambulances, busses, and shipping trucks allowed. LSD would need to have exits and cross streets removed in that case. No getting off in that area. If I had one thing it would be that.
I’m confused, why does the measure cost money to the government? Is the government going to pay the remainder?
I’m confused, did you think busses are free to operate?
Ofc not, see other reply
Very likely, when you cap the price of something you have to pay the difference, since the public transport is run by private company. Even if it’s government owned company, they still have to pay people that run the company so it will still cost the government if the fare is lower than the cost of running the bus service.
If it was were public I’d understand that.
But if it’s private, you’re basically increasing demand on the service by artificially lowering the price, without addressing potential overcharges… I guess it’s still OK because you reduce traffic and end up saving elsewhere, and you can bargain the price collectively. Still I would prefer that bargaining to happen before the measure is put in place and you start giving away public money to a private company
That’s very much the point. There’s more to the cost/benefit ratio than just ticket price and the provider’s profit margins. There’s also the cost to the public of people not using buses: road congestion, which adds to everyone’s commute times; the productivity impact of those longer commutes; the need for parking spaces when cars are used; the cost of that parking; the opportunity cost of those parking lots not being used for something else more socially valuable such as housing; the externalities such as additional noise, pollution and fatal accidents; the reduced disposable income that results from more costly (at point of use) options.
Most bus routes are already subsidised, as demand is often low in a rural area. Maybe there’s enough demand for a couple of services per day, but that’s inconvenient. Subsidies mandate minumum service levels, but don’t cover the full operating costs, so fares are necessary.
£2 per journey is not usually enough to cover costs, so the remainder is paid as another subsidy.
There’s also a vicious cycle where, especially on rural routes, buses are infrequent, which creates a deterrent to using them at all, which in turn depresses ridership. You’re not likely to make a bus trip into town to do some shopping if you can’t get back home for eight hours, and you’re not going to commute to work by bus if the only bus arrives at the needed destination three hours before you start work.
Hopefully the increase in popularity will reduce per-person costs and at that point the government can do collective bargaining.
Thanks for the replies
