You compare coaches and trains, and the flexibility coaches use. However, where I am I have the option of getting a train at almost any time of the day from 9am to 6pm to get to where I regularly need to travel, or until recently *ONE* bus/coach. I say "until recently", because a year or so ago they changed the timings so the arrival at Leeds is now 30 minutes after the connection has left, so I have to do the last leg with a 30-minute walk to the railway station and get a train anyway.
So her premise is this has to work, not, let's find out if it does make things better so we know the best way to go forward. Yeah, I think we can trust her analysis on this and other issues.
"But that seems fair - the people riding the train should be paying for riding the train, no? Why should people who do not ride the train subsidise those who do through general taxation?"
Just because someone wouldn’t pay £50 for a given train ticket doesn’t mean that shifting a journey from a car to the train doesn’t come with £50 worth of benefits, it’s just that they’re so spread out that they can’t be included in the ticket price. Some of the benefits are felt by people other than the passenger, so it wouldn’t be fair to put all the costs on the ticket buyer. The person travelling by railway gets to make a faster, more efficient journey, sure - but so do all the people still in cars, because the congestion is less bad. Everyone gets to get where they are going faster, millions of hours that would have been wasted in traffic jams are saved, and every business operates more efficiently. There’s less air pollution, and that means fewer people have to take sick days off of work, and every business operates more efficiently. People who took the train into work hang around for a drink afterwards instead of driving straight home, and the night-time economy flourishes. Because more people can move into and out of the centre, the city can grow larger, and with a bigger potential audience, the quality of cultural offerings improves: the opera house is fancier, the sports teams spend more money and win more competitions. The whole built-environment becomes a nicer place to be, and more people and companies want to move to the city and live and do business there. Property prices near stations rise as value is created by the mere existence of the station, whether the property owners travel by train or not. Economic activity increases all round.
These are benefits you can’t charge for individually. You can’t work them into the ticket price, or turn them into direct, chargeable revenue for the public transport authority. But they are real and important benefits, and ignoring them means getting your cost benefit analysis wrong and missing out on a proven and effective way improving everyone’s lives. What you have to do is notice that the government of the city, that taxes all the people and businesses there, gains revenue from all these benefits. The government gets more money from income tax and corporation tax and rates and land tax and so on, as people work more efficiently and spend less time commuting and property prices rise. The government gets more money when businesses relocate. The government has lower costs when pollution declines. So it’s entirely appropriate for the government to use some of these revenues and savings to subsidise the public transport network that causes them.
"The person travelling by railway gets to make a faster, more efficient journey, sure - but so do all the people still in cars, because the congestion is less bad. Everyone gets to get where they are going faster, millions of hours that would have been wasted in traffic jams are saved, and every business operates more efficiently. There’s less air pollution, and that means fewer people have to take sick days off of work, and every business operates more efficiently. "
The subsidies for rail don't go on packed commuter services to busy cities, though. You pack a load of people in from Reading to London, each paying the equivalent of £30 for a return, it covers the costs. Packed commuter services are where trains work. Massive costs of running the train, but you have the people using them. In fact, these services are profitable, and historically, the profits for them went on supporting parts of the network like Westbury to Chippenham where there are often 3 people in a carriage, each paying £8. The rise in government money for rail is that post-Covid there was a reduction in commuter demand and so the government is still keeping those barely used rural lines going, idiotically.
There's a rather beautiful thing, that making money from public transport aligns with where it is ecologically beneficial to do so, and where it reduces travel time because of congestion. The congestion from Bath to Bruton would be irrelevant if you stopped the train running. Hardly anyone rides it anyway. On the other hand, I take a coach or train to London because driving there is a pain. Heathrow Express runs without a subsidy. Why? Because it's a pain to get a car and then drive into London, even at the high price of it.
If you just stopped subsidising trains, you'd still have people taking trains into congested places because it would be faster or less stress. You'd see the end of Westbury to Chippenham, which would be a good thing as it's a waste of money and worse for the environment than a bus.
2) And the guy in the car is paying massive taxes, including carbon pricing, to internalize all of those externalities you complain of.
3) The guy not commuting at all is both lowering automobile congestion, air pollution, tire dust, etc AND reducing crowding on the train - when does he get his dosh?
A couple of things with this. Firstly, I don't believe that rail usage is really linked to privatisation or nationalisation. The bulk of rail use is/was about commuting and people put up with it being bad because there isn't an alternative. What changed there was an increase in people going to offices every day in city because of the rise in service industries. The flat/decline since 2013 is because we figured out how to do that remotely.
The other thing is that rail was never really privatised, more like outsourced. Huge fat agreements about what trains would be run, when, who would drive them, maximum fares, even down to whether they had a buffet car or not. And they run on rails and signals that were nationalised (Railtrack -> National Rail).
So it really makes little difference because what can be quite easily fixed with railways, what should be a priority is around all that freedom that businesses normally have to change things. To raise or lower prices, to cut things, to change the experience. Things like introducing airline-style pricing on off-peak. Removing the season ticket cap. Closing most of the ticket offices. Raise fares for crowded trains, cut them on almost empty ones. Charge more to reserve table seats (everyone wants them, so ration on price). Close Stonehouse station (Stroud is only 2 miles away). Close all the little lines in Wiltshire and Somerset that carry about as many people as a taxi most of the time. Buy trains from the best value supplier, rather than because it "creates British jobs".
And you're not going to get that with the MP for South Swindon in charge, because there's little motivation to do it. You need those greed pig capitalists like the coaches and airlines have doing all the marginal revolution things. Coach companies have been far more innovative than trains. They have airline-style pricing, they had online sales first, wifi first.
I agree with all but your first paragraph. Commuting to the office is not something that took off in the mid 1990s on a scale that can explain the graph of train ridership. At most there might have been a marginal effect from an economy with more service jobs but those jobs were not necessarily city based.
The date of "privatisation" and the sharp and prolonged upturn in the graph after decades of decline can be no coincidence. Given all the constraints imposed on the half hearted privatisation the only opportunity for the train operating companies to boost their revenues and profits was to boost the number of customers. And by investing in the quality of the service, through rolling stock and timetable, this was achieved in spades. I started my commuting career in the mid ‘80s in the era of British Rail; it was awful but markedly improved after privatisation. People have forgotten how truly awful the era of BR was.
if you extend that graph, you'll see that each era of govt control has resulted in a massive plunge in passengers
You compare coaches and trains, and the flexibility coaches use. However, where I am I have the option of getting a train at almost any time of the day from 9am to 6pm to get to where I regularly need to travel, or until recently *ONE* bus/coach. I say "until recently", because a year or so ago they changed the timings so the arrival at Leeds is now 30 minutes after the connection has left, so I have to do the last leg with a 30-minute walk to the railway station and get a train anyway.
So her premise is this has to work, not, let's find out if it does make things better so we know the best way to go forward. Yeah, I think we can trust her analysis on this and other issues.
"But that seems fair - the people riding the train should be paying for riding the train, no? Why should people who do not ride the train subsidise those who do through general taxation?"
Just because someone wouldn’t pay £50 for a given train ticket doesn’t mean that shifting a journey from a car to the train doesn’t come with £50 worth of benefits, it’s just that they’re so spread out that they can’t be included in the ticket price. Some of the benefits are felt by people other than the passenger, so it wouldn’t be fair to put all the costs on the ticket buyer. The person travelling by railway gets to make a faster, more efficient journey, sure - but so do all the people still in cars, because the congestion is less bad. Everyone gets to get where they are going faster, millions of hours that would have been wasted in traffic jams are saved, and every business operates more efficiently. There’s less air pollution, and that means fewer people have to take sick days off of work, and every business operates more efficiently. People who took the train into work hang around for a drink afterwards instead of driving straight home, and the night-time economy flourishes. Because more people can move into and out of the centre, the city can grow larger, and with a bigger potential audience, the quality of cultural offerings improves: the opera house is fancier, the sports teams spend more money and win more competitions. The whole built-environment becomes a nicer place to be, and more people and companies want to move to the city and live and do business there. Property prices near stations rise as value is created by the mere existence of the station, whether the property owners travel by train or not. Economic activity increases all round.
These are benefits you can’t charge for individually. You can’t work them into the ticket price, or turn them into direct, chargeable revenue for the public transport authority. But they are real and important benefits, and ignoring them means getting your cost benefit analysis wrong and missing out on a proven and effective way improving everyone’s lives. What you have to do is notice that the government of the city, that taxes all the people and businesses there, gains revenue from all these benefits. The government gets more money from income tax and corporation tax and rates and land tax and so on, as people work more efficiently and spend less time commuting and property prices rise. The government gets more money when businesses relocate. The government has lower costs when pollution declines. So it’s entirely appropriate for the government to use some of these revenues and savings to subsidise the public transport network that causes them.
(part of an answer that I wrote over here - https://www.quora.com/How-do-European-cities-make-public-transportation-profitable-when-it-loses-money-elsewhere/answer/Ben-Curthoys)
"The person travelling by railway gets to make a faster, more efficient journey, sure - but so do all the people still in cars, because the congestion is less bad. Everyone gets to get where they are going faster, millions of hours that would have been wasted in traffic jams are saved, and every business operates more efficiently. There’s less air pollution, and that means fewer people have to take sick days off of work, and every business operates more efficiently. "
The subsidies for rail don't go on packed commuter services to busy cities, though. You pack a load of people in from Reading to London, each paying the equivalent of £30 for a return, it covers the costs. Packed commuter services are where trains work. Massive costs of running the train, but you have the people using them. In fact, these services are profitable, and historically, the profits for them went on supporting parts of the network like Westbury to Chippenham where there are often 3 people in a carriage, each paying £8. The rise in government money for rail is that post-Covid there was a reduction in commuter demand and so the government is still keeping those barely used rural lines going, idiotically.
There's a rather beautiful thing, that making money from public transport aligns with where it is ecologically beneficial to do so, and where it reduces travel time because of congestion. The congestion from Bath to Bruton would be irrelevant if you stopped the train running. Hardly anyone rides it anyway. On the other hand, I take a coach or train to London because driving there is a pain. Heathrow Express runs without a subsidy. Why? Because it's a pain to get a car and then drive into London, even at the high price of it.
If you just stopped subsidising trains, you'd still have people taking trains into congested places because it would be faster or less stress. You'd see the end of Westbury to Chippenham, which would be a good thing as it's a waste of money and worse for the environment than a bus.
1) What Esteban said!
2) And the guy in the car is paying massive taxes, including carbon pricing, to internalize all of those externalities you complain of.
3) The guy not commuting at all is both lowering automobile congestion, air pollution, tire dust, etc AND reducing crowding on the train - when does he get his dosh?
If I drive to work, I'm helping to keep the trains from being crowded, so you should be paying me.
A couple of things with this. Firstly, I don't believe that rail usage is really linked to privatisation or nationalisation. The bulk of rail use is/was about commuting and people put up with it being bad because there isn't an alternative. What changed there was an increase in people going to offices every day in city because of the rise in service industries. The flat/decline since 2013 is because we figured out how to do that remotely.
The other thing is that rail was never really privatised, more like outsourced. Huge fat agreements about what trains would be run, when, who would drive them, maximum fares, even down to whether they had a buffet car or not. And they run on rails and signals that were nationalised (Railtrack -> National Rail).
So it really makes little difference because what can be quite easily fixed with railways, what should be a priority is around all that freedom that businesses normally have to change things. To raise or lower prices, to cut things, to change the experience. Things like introducing airline-style pricing on off-peak. Removing the season ticket cap. Closing most of the ticket offices. Raise fares for crowded trains, cut them on almost empty ones. Charge more to reserve table seats (everyone wants them, so ration on price). Close Stonehouse station (Stroud is only 2 miles away). Close all the little lines in Wiltshire and Somerset that carry about as many people as a taxi most of the time. Buy trains from the best value supplier, rather than because it "creates British jobs".
And you're not going to get that with the MP for South Swindon in charge, because there's little motivation to do it. You need those greed pig capitalists like the coaches and airlines have doing all the marginal revolution things. Coach companies have been far more innovative than trains. They have airline-style pricing, they had online sales first, wifi first.
I agree with all but your first paragraph. Commuting to the office is not something that took off in the mid 1990s on a scale that can explain the graph of train ridership. At most there might have been a marginal effect from an economy with more service jobs but those jobs were not necessarily city based.
The date of "privatisation" and the sharp and prolonged upturn in the graph after decades of decline can be no coincidence. Given all the constraints imposed on the half hearted privatisation the only opportunity for the train operating companies to boost their revenues and profits was to boost the number of customers. And by investing in the quality of the service, through rolling stock and timetable, this was achieved in spades. I started my commuting career in the mid ‘80s in the era of British Rail; it was awful but markedly improved after privatisation. People have forgotten how truly awful the era of BR was.