'Rail journeys up by a quarter in 5 years'

[DynamicSpirit]

I expect quite a few of these extra reservations are due to the fact that some of the advance fares are very cheap (as you automatically get a reservation with an advance ticket) although I can't be completely certain of this as it's also possible that people with walk-up tickets are for some reason choosing to make a reservation on a specific service when previously they would not have done.

That seems very likely to me. I would think you can be fairly certain that if regular travellers regularly find that almost all seats are taken, then many of those travellers, even when buying walk-on fares, will respond by reserving seats themselves.

(Example in reverse: I often travel from London to NW England, almost always on walk-on fares. A few years ago trains were usually packed out and as a result I always tried to reserve a seat if I could. Now that many Virgin services are 11 car and in my experience therefore have plenty of seats, I rarely bother. There's no point going to that extra hassle if I'm expecting to find a seat easily anyway).

 

[CockneySparrow]

...and yet I keep seeing comments that expensive tickets are pricing too many people off the railways...

Usually when they are increased in January lol, people come on here moaning even protesting outside stations, they then go to London in the car to work for a couple of weeks then realise that petrol has gone up more than the rail fare and the journey takes twice as long

So they are soon back on the train

 

[jrhilton]

There are a lot more ticket gates at stations than there were 5 years ago, and they tend to be in use for more hours of the day now. This means that the number of journeys that season ticket holders do is being tracked more precisely. Waterloo is a good example of this. This is hard to adjust for when working out the statistics.

Splitting of tickets has been going on almost since the start of privatisation now. I don't think that is the main driver myself. It does however make comparisons of pre and post privatisation difficult. A good example is a trip from Reading to Inverness via KingsX. In BR days that would be counted as one journey. Today it could be up to three (e.g. Reading to Paddington on First, KingsX to Edinburgh East Coast and Edinburgh to Inverness on Scott Rail or two if you go on the Highland Chieftain).

Do the numbers reconcile back to changes in station usage over the last five years I wonder.

 

[soil]

The irony is that the ticket prices increase at RPI + 1%.

How is RPI arrived at? Ah yes, by examining a basket of products. Which includes... rail fares. So, effectively, part of the reason fares go up is because fares went up...

Rail fares make up only 0.6% of the overall RPI figure. With fares rising at RPI (3.2%) plus 1%, the resultant impact on RPI is just 0.0025%.

 

[RichmondCommu]

Usually when they are increased in January lol, people come on here moaning even protesting outside stations, they then go to London in the car to work for a couple of weeks then realise that petrol has gone up more than the rail fare and the journey takes twice as long

So they are soon back on the train

If I could realistically avoid using the train to commute to work I would. However both the DfT and TOC know that I have no credible alternative which means that they can charge me the earth and treat me like cattle. I think the should really apply to the organisations that run the trains.

 

[455driver]

If I could realistically avoid using the train to commute to work I would. However both the DfT and TOC know that I have no credible alternative which means that they can charge me the earth and treat me like cattle. I think the should really apply to the organisations that run the trains.

So its the TOCs fault that everyone wants to travel at the same time is it?

If you dont want to catch the busiest trains either travel earlier or later, there is only so much the TOCs can do and sometimes its the passengers problem.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Splitting of tickets has been going on almost since the start of privatisation now. I don't think that is the main driver myself. It does however make comparisons of pre and post privatisation difficult. A good example is a trip from Reading to Inverness via KingsX. In BR days that would be counted as one journey. Today it could be up to three (e.g. Reading to Paddington on First, KingsX to Edinburgh East Coast and Edinburgh to Inverness on Scott Rail or two if you go on the Highland Chieftain).

Presumably that could in principle be accounted for by measuring passenger-miles instead of journeys. I don't know how well collated or easily available those stats are though?

 

[anme]

I understand thet there have been noises made about how the figures are collated, IE countinfg somebody who changes trains midway as 2 seperate journies instead of one.

This has come up before. The figures quoted for passenger journeys are consistent as they always count someone changing trains once as making two journeys (etc), both before and after privatisation. As pointed out by someone else, the figures for passenger km are also consistent with this increase.