Photo by Tony Austin
And once again, the rail industry is getting a good kicking from all and sundry.
ATOC, the Association of Train Operating Companies, announced today the fare rises that will be implemented in January. My twitter timeline immediately filled up with people screaming in horror at Scotrail and other companies.
The thing is, we do this to ourselves. We announce the same fare increase multiple times a year, so that people are under the impression that fares are continually rising. The fares go up every January, usually by RPI+1%. Then last budget the government announced that for the next few years, fares would increase by RPI+3% (except Scotrail, who would stick to the +1% arrangement). So everyone had a good moan about fare rises.
Then in July every year, ATOC announces any fare rises being implemented in August. These are usually few and far between, but they give the newspapers another chance to kick the industry. Come November, the chancellor announced that actually he's going back to the +1%. And then just before Christmas, every year, the industry announces what those fare increases will be. In January, the newspapers have another easy story about "commuter misery" on the day of the fare rise.
So that's 5 headlines a year about the same fare increase, giving the impression that train fares are continually rising. They're not.
But there's an easy way out of this: petrol equivalent. The idea is simple: you charge the equivalent of what the journey would cost you if you were driving in a car. Obviously the oil price is volatile so you'd have to peg it somehow (maybe a maximum fare, or the average miles per gallon of a family car). The public would know why they're being charged that amount for their journey, and the newspapers would lay off the industry. They can hardly moan about the cost of a train ticket when the cost of filling the car with petrol is the same, can they?
Alternatively, charge by the mile. All journeys would be charged the same amount per mile, so everyone knows what they should be paying depending on how far they're going. 25p per mile would see a Glasgow to Edinburgh fare at £10, while Edinburgh to London would be £82.50.
The fare structure needs a good shake-up, to make it fairer for all.
1 comments:
The problem with that 25p per mile fare is that it'd raise prices. At the moment I pay £116 for a return between Glasgow and London (including inexplicable booking fees).
My solution would be to properly tax air travel, and to massively, sadistically tax internal flights within the mainland UK. The money raised could go towards subsidising rail fares.
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