Extortionate season tickets £££

[Magdalen Road]

Season tickets are a large down-payment but are actually often essentially "cheap" for the amount of travel they provide. If someone wants to write a story about expensive train fares it would be better to focus on the anytime prices for an out and back journey to work, or the discount inherent on the flexi-season.

Someone paying £6,000 a year for one year's unlimited travel pays once and forgets about it. Someone paying £70 each time they travel to work is making a different decision.

I can assure you I haven't forgotten about it! I have a spreadsheet of doom for this year to calculate whether it's worth the annual ticket including all additional non-commute travel, cumulative delays (800+ mins) and delay repay (not actually very much considering).

 

[miami]

This calculation is exactly the reason I get quite upset by people demanding minor branch lines to small towns be reopened

The obvious counterpoint being why should I, living on a minor branch line (well technically an intercity line between a capital city and the third largest city in the UK, but you wouldn't guess it) pay massive subsidies to a rail network which doesn't benefit me?

The taxes on my salary subsidise the commute of London stockbrokers on 3 times my salary. When I do travel by train I pay far more per mile than they do, and while the service is there, it's needlessly expensive, meaning more pressure on roads, more pressure on car parks

The arguments over paying in advance and interest free seem rather meaningless compared to the discounts. A £6164 Brighton to London ticket at 17p a mile, with a loan over the year at 6.5% to pay monthly, would cost £6400 (at 7%), putting the price upto maybe 18p a mile.

 

[Starmill]

The obvious counterpoint being why should I, living on a minor branch line (well technically an intercity line between a capital city and the third largest city in the UK, but you wouldn't guess it) pay massive subsidies to a rail network which doesn't benefit me?

The taxes on my salary subsidise the commute of London stockbrokers on 3 times my salary. When I do travel by train I pay far more per mile than they do, and while the service is there, it's needlessly expensive, meaning more pressure on roads, more pressure on car parks

The arguments over paying in advance and interest free seem rather meaningless compared to the discounts. A £6164 Brighton to London ticket at 17p a mile, with a loan over the year at 6.5% to pay monthly, would cost £6400 (at 7%), putting the price upto maybe 18p a mile.

I contribute via public funds for all sorts of extremely expensive items I'll never personally benefit from directly, such as multitudes of advanced cancer treatments, care and education plans for disabled children, and welfare for working age sickness. I still support those things being publicly funded though.