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Chiming in here. These are all perfectly valid points. What I do think you're missing though is the fact that most passenger who experience overcrowding or chaos as a result of no guaranteed seats, are not being presented the question "would you rather have a low-flexibility, high-cost railway, that's a bit more comfortable or one where most people can actually travel if they want to, it just may be very busy at times?"
It is rare that people are presented with the question but the standard response to complaints about overcrowding was that:
- allocation of rolling stock was outwith our control and
- it isn't possible to oversell a train because of flexible walk up tickets (and then give the explanation you do about flexibility)
This often went down like a lead balloon - not always, I grant, but often! In reality, governing the railway by asking passengers what they'd like doesnt get you very far. If you'd listened to passengers you'd never have got London Overground, with its staffless and toiletless trains. Sometimes you just have to execute.
Revealed preferences are much more interesting, and what drives repeat, high value business is having a predictable, reliable and comfortable journey. Passengers choose to travel more when those things happen and they are willing to spend more money. There is a lot of business currently been turned away by the railway simply because a lot of people find long distance rail travel an obscene and soul crushing experience.
The questions that are presented are a lot more simplistic at that, and all fail to mention that a move towards a more 'comfortable' railway requires either an increase in investment, or pricing even more people off the trains. Certainly if I asked the people sitting on the floor of the morning peak King's Lynn - King's Cross train, "what would you do to fix this" they'd say "add more carriages", because that's an actually sensible solution. Pricing people off to make it nicer for others is an extreme version of robbing Peter to pay Paul, where in this case Peter is on a modest income while Paul can afford to take a high-demand train service post-price hike. I think the priorities are just in the wrong place.
I agree with this wholeheartedly but we are working in an environment where there simply is no capacity increase on the horizon for many routes. That is partly a political choice of course!
In the KLN-KGX example, a lot of morning peak trains are already over double the cost of the off-peak fare for lots of people - having to pay the anytime fare + railcards not being valid that early, results in around a 60% price rise. If you want to eliminate overcrowding on this service, you'd likely have to do another 60% price rise. For those paying £60 for a peak time train ticket that's also overcrowded, the current system feels unfair. What's even less fair though, is charging £80-100 with everyone else switching to driving.
FWIW I'm not bothered much about price signals or comp res on commuter services, my major interest here is how we protect the passenger experience on intercity routes.
Just reading Rail 1065 (page 8) and in what's perhaps not exactly a "Surprise Surprise" Cilla moment, Lord Hendy has been quoted as saying the that the trial has been deemed a success and that he "expects GBR's long-distance ticketing option to be similar".
He is also quoted as saying a few lines later:
"I'm amazed by the relatively low seat occupation of some of the advanced services out of Euston, and that's because fares are so high".
If Lord Hendy thinks that removing acceptable value off-peak fares will alleviate the problem of fares being too high, I'll have what he's smoking.
I'm reading Rail 1066 p7, where Peter Hendy says the LNER fares system fills all its trains, "while the peak services into and out of Euston are largely empty, at least in First and Premium classes, simply because the premium fares still relate to pre-Covid travel".
He also contrasts Avanti's decision to trim the timetable over the summer, while "other operators" (he must mean LNER) can vary fares and fill every train.
Avanti will have no interest in resetting its fares system with little more than a year to run on its contract, but it does point to how DfT want long-distance fares to work under GBR.
I don't think GBR will have complete control of its fares structure, with DfT/Treasury continuing to be able to veto anything that increases overall rail subsidy.
All this means Andy Burnham's first statements on rail policy are eagerly awaited, but he has retained the Starmer DfT ministerial team.
I'm reading Rail 1066 p7, where Peter Hendy says the LNER fares system fills all its trains, "while the peak services into and out of Euston are largely empty, at least in First and Premium classes, simply because the premium fares still relate to pre-Covid travel".
He also contrasts Avanti's decision to trim the timetable over the summer, while "other operators" (he must mean LNER) can vary fares and fill every train.
Avanti will have no interest in resetting its fares system with little more than a year to run on its contract, but it does point to how DfT want long-distance fares to work under GBR.
I don't think GBR will have complete control of its fares structure, with DfT/Treasury continuing to be able to veto anything that increases overall rail subsidy.
All this means Andy Burnham's first statements on rail policy are eagerly awaited, but he has retained the Starmer DfT ministerial team.
Based on these comments, and the discussion in this thread, I'm wondering whether the best compromise would just be to make 1st class mandatory reservation, use the Eurostar pricing model (A few bargains alongside mostly demand-based pricing), while keeping 2nd as it is. Implementation would obviously be nearly impossible (especially on routes where it's sometimes declassified) but it would more or less make both the high-fare paying comfortable travellers happy and keep the 'railway as a way of getting from A to B' travellers on the actual trains.
Other than that, actually creating capacity is of course what should be done, but there isn't much political motivation for that at the moment. That's mostly because we managed to successfully market the biggest capacity enhancement project the network has seen in a long time as something most people now see as a £100bil way of getting a 20-30 minute time saving. Maybe when it opens, and the north WCML still faces capacity issues, those making decisions may realise that we should finish the uncancelled sections, though if the entire country will have 'Simpler Fares' by then, they'll likely just raise West Coast intercity fares instead.
Regarding compulsory reservations, absolutely some people will rant and rave at train companies for the "walk up" nature of the railway at busy times, however those people are a very vocal minority.
The majority, when given the choice, will remain on a busy train instead of stepping back to a quieter train or taking a longer route, and put up with the crowding.
It's interesting that some people are so keen to say that other people should be prevented from joining their train, and get an alternative train, but they are not prepared to take up the opportunity to take a later train themselves.
A sensible company will push back on this; the fact that some of those unreasonable people won't accept a rational explanation is not a justifiable excuse to make the UK railway network become a "book ahead only" railway.
As for comparisons with the continent, if such comparisons are going to be made, we absolutely should not aspire to become like Spain, France or Italy, with their compulsory reservations, compulsory splitting, and other drawbacks, and instead should see far more sensible countries such as Switzerland as the ones to aspire to.
Just reading Rail 1065 (page 8) and in what's perhaps not exactly a "Surprise Surprise" Cilla moment, Lord Hendy has been quoted as saying the that the trial has been deemed a success and that he "expects GBR's long-distance ticketing option to be similar".
Yes, it was always obvious that the 'powers that be' were going to look for ways to interpret the data into concluding the trial is a "success", even though the overwhelming evidence is that it's not a success for passengers.
It's just nonsense; he doesn't understand rail fares in the way that the experts on this forum do, and doesn't realise that he is going to easily be called out on forum's such as this. Most of the public would probably believe what he says, or at least not really understand why it's wrong, even if they have a feeling it is.
The rationale for removing the Off Peak fares isn't to decrease fares; that's just made--up nonsense designed to be believed by people who don't understand what the truth is.
The real aim is to increase the cost of travel at "busy" - but traditionally "off peak" - times, such as during the "shoulder peak" and when major events or sporting fixtures are taking place, e.g. ensuring sky high fares from Newcastle to London, when Newcastle United are hosting a London-based club.
The idea that miserable passenger journeys are a useful political tool and you wish to normalise that as a method by which change happens is not for me!
If it were up to me we'd be well on the way to be building an entirely new network for our core intercity services leaving the existing intercity network largely free for high frequency regional and regional express-type services.
The trade-offs inherent in having to accommodate different use cases within the constraints of the existing network will be with us for a long time, however, whether the government sees sense on the need to invest or not. I'm open to solutions if they're fair and reasonable and don't automatically assume the longer distance passenger is top trumps just because they pay higher fares (per journey if not by distance). I don't believe, on flows like Stevenage to Kings Cross or Coventry to Birmingham, you can afford to leave the spare capacity (seated or standing) of the intercity services on the table. If you fill up the stoppers at Stevenage, people will find they can't get on further south or they are subjected to really unpleasant levels of overcrowding.
Booking in advance puts me off train travel. When I was on holiday in Seville, Spain, I fancied a day out in Cordoba 90 miles away. When I looked into buying a ticket I soon realised that the trains to Cordoba were compulsory reservation only plus allow time for airport style security. Booking seemed complicated with more than one operator covering the route. After spending ages researching I lost the will to live so I did not bother to go. Leisure travel sometimes depends on the weather, how I feel on the day and if I have to do half a days investigative journalism to buy a train ticket for a day out its just hassle to me so I get in the car and go or not bother to go at all.
The same Pendolino that takes passengers from Wigan to Warrington will - a mere hour later - call at Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry.
How do you explain to a passenger that they can freely board that same teal- vinyled Pendolino at Wigan, but must obtain a reservation if boarding at Wolverhampton?
Lucky you for being able to commit to a particular time well in advance. I've spent the last couple of months more or less weekly commuting between North Wales and Hampshire. Sometimes my outward journey has been made at fairly short notice. My return journey will depend upon what time work finishes. Some weekends I might be invited to stay with family in Somerset, so not using my return ticket to the north until a week later than usual.
If I got a call now, asking me to come down to the office tomorrow morning (not an impossibility, I've have a few such calls over the last couple of months), there aren't any Advances on offer. But I've found that an Off-Peak Return serves me very well. It provides me with the freedom to board any train I choose, so long as I don't arrive in London before 10AM (an Anytime would of course be even more flexible but they're extortionate).
It also means that because it doesn't take me 50 minutes to get from Waterloo to Euston, I can often step my journey forward by half an hour and board the xx:33 Manchester train to Crewe rather than wait for the official connection.
You know what, I've never had to stand. Until at least I join a TfW sardine special at Crewe or Chester.
An LNER-style fares overhaul would be a royal pain in the backside for me. A Scotrail-style liberalisation would however be great. Especially if the "via Banbury" option were replaced by an Any Permitted fare, preferably at the "via London" price.
There is a lot of business currently been turned away by the railway simply because a lot of people find long distance rail travel an obscene and soul crushing experience.
You know who does have control over unit provision at XC? Peter Hendy.
XC is a real problem (and I can see how working in their complaints department has coloured your view). The overcrowding is absolutely chronic. Speculative threads in this forum get filled with all manner of half-baked suggestions of how to stop people using XC services on short hops. These are generally unworkable and unenforceable.
The answer for XC that everyone studiously ignores - despite it having been painted in large letters onto the side of an elephant which for some reason is just standing here in the room - is to provide enough coaches. Four coach DMUs were always a silly idea for an "intercity" service.
I'm reading Rail 1066 p7, where Peter Hendy says the LNER fares system fills all its trains, "while the peak services into and out of Euston are largely empty, at least in First and Premium classes, simply because the premium fares still relate to pre-Covid travel".
He also contrasts Avanti's decision to trim the timetable over the summer, while "other operators" (he must mean LNER) can vary fares and fill every train.
Avanti will have no interest in resetting its fares system with little more than a year to run on its contract, but it does point to how DfT want long-distance fares to work under GBR.
I don't think GBR will have complete control of its fares structure, with DfT/Treasury continuing to be able to veto anything that increases overall rail subsidy.
All this means Andy Burnham's first statements on rail policy are eagerly awaited, but he has retained the Starmer DfT ministerial team.
I think people are misunderstanding. I don't propose making trains "compulsory reservation" but rather problem flows. And this can be done either in a "hard" way (you need an actual reservation) or by "soft" way of restriction (not valid on GBR Intercity and no alternative like Any Permitted). We are all talking about a non-problem flow here; a better one would be MK to Euston for example.
(I do pay extra for first class, and always travel on Advances.)
Nobody here is suggesting standard class passengers subsidise anyone else's journey, or that my suggestion will result in "empty trains", that is something you've invented to get cross at.
There's no selfish motivation here, but rather a lot of experience in managing the fallout from severely overcrowded flows like COV-WVH and EUS-MKC. Those are certainly areas the railway needs to look at, dispassionately, and with a view to improving the comfort of the ordinary passenger in standard class who is currently paying a great deal of money in many cases for a poor journey.
Managing reservations or removing flows from passengers *who do have alternatives* is neither rocket science nor some sort of big conspiracy. My view, which will be difficult to change, is that long distance passengers generally prefer to have a predictable, reliable, and comfortable journey. Passengers routinely report the highest satisfaction when these metrics are met and will be more inclined to consider the train in future.
"I like the current system where I can cram onto a train and stand" is not a mainstream view among most "normie" passengers - many of whom actually believe and expect their intercity trips to be "not oversold". The able bodied male adult passenger accounts for less than 50% of the railway's long distance business. You would be interested to read the viewpoints of elderly, disabled, and female passengers who generally have a different viewpoint to "I will accept standing as long as I can cram on". Many times I have read complaints from people who complained of being sold the ticket in the first place!
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Another premise invented for someone to get mad at in this thread.
And yet given the choice, passengers will choose a service like LNWR with reasonably priced walk-on fares, over having to plan everything in advance.
I've been on those trains and they can be very busy, therefore ordinary passengers clearly wouldn't want to sacrifice the ability to buy a cheapish fare at short notice to preserve "comfort".
Services out of Euston to many destinations are sufficiently frequent that a tube or bus model of just turn up and take the next one works better than the airline one of book in advance.
Moderator note - split from: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/intelligence-led-stop-with-all-your-information-and-cctv.297631/ Eurostar/TGV was £200+ one-way (which was led by the TGV price from Paris). I ended up flying. Don't forget, though, that air travel is also heavily subsidised...
The same Pendolino that takes passengers from Wigan to Warrington will - a mere hour later - call at Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry.
How do you explain to a passenger that they can freely board that same teal- vinyled Pendolino at Wigan, but must obtain a reservation if boarding at Wolverhampton?
You simply do it by flow, as we do with TOC specific fares.
Remove interavailable tickets from problem flows (Birmingham to Coventry as one example) and then everyone travelling it has a "GBR WEST MIDLANDS ONLY" ticket.
How do you explain to someone that there's an Avanti Only fare from Milton Keynes to London but not from Birmingham New Street on the same train? The answer is you don't, because nobody asks the question.
XC is a real problem (and I can see how working in their complaints department has coloured your view). The overcrowding is absolutely chronic. Speculative threads in this forum get filled with all manner of half-baked suggestions of how to stop people using XC services on short hops. These are generally unworkable and unenforceable.
The answer for XC that everyone studiously ignores - despite it having been painted in large letters onto the side of an elephant which for some reason is just standing here in the room - is to provide enough coaches. Four coach DMUs were always a silly idea for an "intercity" service.
More capacity is *not coming* for various reasons, some of which are political. It is wrong for others to suggest - as they have done - that if passengers are rammed in daily that will provide some sort of political impetus to deliver extra capacity. It has not come even after 25 years.
It is not coming and that is not how change happens on the railway. And *that* is what people are studiously ignoring here. Given the choice I would four track everything and give XC 9 car trains than be arguing the toss about how to stop 200 people boarding at Coventry. But it ain't happening.
Moderator note - split from: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/intelligence-led-stop-with-all-your-information-and-cctv.297631/ Eurostar/TGV was £200+ one-way (which was led by the TGV price from Paris). I ended up flying. Don't forget, though, that air travel is also heavily subsidised...
I'd have to go to the time and trouble of obtaining one. And indeed I did when I needed to bring my bike back with me, the time spent obtaining a bike reservation meant not getting the earlier xx:33 train and instead waiting for the xx:02. My journey from Euston to Crewe should be no more complicated than the journey from Hampshire to Waterloo was. I have a period return in my hand, I board the train, I sit in a seat. I don't need to do any thinking "What time will I finish work on Friday, should I book the 17:02, or the 18:02 or 19:02 from Euston?", I can just finish work when I finish it, board a train to Waterloo, cross to Euston and board the first departure waiting. If that means that I've caught the 17:33 rather than having to wait for the 18:02 then I've just shortened my journey by half an hour. I can do that because I've got the freedom to move between trains at will. I had no issue finding a seat because Avanti leaves at least one coach on every train unreserved. I just go to Coach C. If compulsory reservations were in place on the other hand, I may have struggled to obtain one on a heavily-booked service and been denied boarding despite seats going empty because a booked passenger didn't show up.
So under your compulsory reservation utopia, I've either got to book a reservation for the official connection and wait for it, or take my chances and book the short connection in the knowledge that I risk being stranded if I miss it and there's an event on and all other trains are "sold out".
You simply do it by flow, as we do with TOC specific fares.
Remove interavailable tickets from problem flows (Birmingham to Coventry as one example) and then everyone travelling it has a "GBR WEST MIDLANDS ONLY" ticket.
How do you explain to someone that there's an Avanti Only fare from Milton Keynes to London but not from Birmingham New Street on the same train? The answer is you don't, because nobody asks the question.
You significantly overestimate how clued up the general public are on the minutiae of railway branding. Do you think that TOC-specific restrictions are well-understood by the British public? Good luck to the TM trying to enforce that during the peak. I spent far too many years of my life in their shoes having to enforce whatever daft idea various TOCs' Pricing Managers had come up with that week. It just causes aggro.
"This ticket is for Northern trains only"
"But we're in the North, aren't we?"
"They're the blue and white trains"
"Like the one we came in on?"
"Yes"
"Well I didn't know that"
"It was printed upon your ticket"
"This is an Avanti ticket"
"What's Avanti?"
"It used to be Virgin" [literally years after the franchise changed]
The public at large think that a train to Anytown is a train to Anytown. They barely recognise the branding.
Let's pretend for a minute that we were talking about hazard controls. The hazard identified is overcrowded trains. The controls you could use are
1. Eliminate the hazard
2. Substitute the hazard
3. Engineering controls
4. Administrative controls
5. PPE
Which translated into practice is:
1. Close down travel. Would be very effective at eliminating overcrowding, but rather throws the baby out with the bathwater.
2. Run buses. TfW often hires standby coaches in to mop up the overspill. Bit of a sticking plaster, people won't voluntarily take them, they wait until they physically can't get on the train. Alternatively you build a new, high-speed railway that means that the long-distance passengers won't be passing through Coventry at all. 2039 opening is it now?
3. Ticket barriers programmed to reject anyone trying to board the wrong train. Not practical at many stations.
4. Print "WMR only" on tickets. Administrative controls (rules and signs) are the second to last resort in risk management for a reason - human nature isn't very good at following them, whether though incompetence or malice.
5. Provide passengers with foam suits so that they don't make physical contact with their neighbour.
FGW/GWR use administrative controls (in the form of pick-up/set-down only restrictions on certain trains) to keep Reading commuters from crowding out its longer distance services. There are legendary tales on here of the occasions where the commuters just ignored the restrictions - and the signs showing that the first stop would be Newbury or Swindon - and crowded them out anyway. FGW/GWR therefore on at least one occasion had to step up to a more effective level of control and eliminate the Reading stop entirely, resulting in said commuters (who didn't pay attention to the announcements because they're free-thinking humans, not obedient robots) being overcarried.
Based on these comments, and the discussion in this thread, I'm wondering whether the best compromise would just be to make 1st class mandatory reservation, use the Eurostar pricing model (A few bargains alongside mostly demand-based pricing), while keeping 2nd as it is. Implementation would obviously be nearly impossible (especially on routes where it's sometimes declassified) but it would more or less make both the high-fare paying comfortable travellers happy and keep the 'railway as a way of getting from A to B' travellers on the actual trains.
I doubt many people travel first class long distance on full fat fully flex tickets but the ones that do are such a cash cow they need to be kept.
I don't have a fully formed idea of how this would work but the for brain storming purposes let me propose something and have the holes in it shot down - for those long distance services which also provide the only sensible ways of doing local journies (Durham to Newcastle or much of Cross Country for example) perhaps you could introduce a three class system. First class as it is now, standard with genuinely compulsory reservation, standard. That's what LNER tries to do anyway by messing around with the reservation system but a) it should be properly formalised b) as the quid pro quo you can't just have one coach as unreserved standard - it would have to be a fair amount of the train. You may be able to run slightly longer trains as well since you wouldn't have to get all the reserved coaches in so many platforms (am not sure how much this is constrained by other infrastructure though)
How do you envision dividing these categories up, and in what quantities?
For example take the Pendolino, which has 2 formations, one with 2 more carriages than the other which effectively must be unreserved unless you can promise consistency in length for the full length of the booking window.
If you want to have any unreserved seating you have to also unreserve some space on a 9 car, which is then unreserved on an 11 car too.
This is the current situation with 48 unreserved seats on a 9 car and 194 on an 11 car.
I don't see it ever being reasonable to prevent people standing (sure, it would be great if there were enough seats for everyone, and there will never be any cancellations, but that isn't happening).
And people when given the choice won't always sit in their reserved seat - I did such yesterday, arriving at Crewe to see my Coach was showing as packed on the reservation display, with Coach A (the quiet carriage) looking quite empty, and it was, so instead of having to squeeze through the coach to my reserved seat (And it was busy, I walked to the shop to refill my water once we'd left and people had time to settle down) I was able to sit in the nice and quiet (maybe ~5 people in there (of 46 seats)). Should I be forced under compulsory reservations to sit in the busy carriage when there's plenty of space at the front?
These points aren't all against you, more to the concept as a whole. As a big user of off-peak returns on InterCity trains I look upon the LNER 'trial' with fear.
I doubt many people travel first class long distance on full fat fully flex tickets but the ones that do are such a cash cow they need to be kept.
I don't have a fully formed idea of how this would work but the for brain storming purposes let me propose something and have the holes in it shot down - for those long distance services which also provide the only sensible ways of doing local journies (Durham to Newcastle or much of Cross Country for example) perhaps you could introduce a three class system. First class as it is now, standard with genuinely compulsory reservation, standard. That's what LNER tries to do anyway by messing around with the reservation system but a) it should be properly formalised b) as the quid pro quo you can't just have one coach as unreserved standard - it would have to be a fair amount of the train. You may be able to run slightly longer trains as well since you wouldn't have to get all the reserved coaches in so many platforms (am not sure how much this is constrained by other infrastructure though)
Japan has coaches 1-5 unreserved, 5-10 reservation only, and 11-12 first class on many Shinkansen, and guess what, the unreserved section is massively more popular since most people prefer to just tap their smart card and hop on the next train when they're not priced out of it
Fyi IC cards as pay-as-you-go are effectively never valid on shinkansens. Instead you usually need two separate tickets: one point to point and one train specific. So I wouldn't use them as an example of flexibly ticketed intercity services.
Fyi IC cards as pay-as-you-go are effectively never valid on shinkansens. Instead you usually need two separate tickets: one point to point and one train specific. So I wouldn't use them as an example of flexibly ticketed intercity services.
I'm actually in Osaka right now, so I can confirm there is definitely no departure-specific component. Japan is is a perfect example of a walk up railway (though personally I'm using a Rail Pass it works really well for turn up and go with no booking) Here's a video I took a video just now
My point is that passengers value reliable, decent value, walk on fares, enough that they are drawn to those services that provide them. Dare I say it, even at the expense of discomfort whan an unusually large influx of passengers turns up.
What's more, neither yourself, LNER nor anyone else in the industry has provided a shred of evidence to suggest that long distance off-peak fares are the cause of systematic overcrowding. The train companies already have various methods to spread passenger loads:
- They can reduce the number of AP tickets for services expected to be busy
- They can amend off-peak timings so that there are fewer supposedly "peak hour" services carting fresh air.
- They can alter the balance between 1st and 2nd class accommodation.
All of this suggests that the removal of off-peak fares is a money grab, nothing more.
The trouble with this is that in the afternoon, the last peak service is empty and the first off-peak is rammed, which would be true regardless of when it was. Using this model they can make the first off-peak service priced at somewhere between the old off-peak and the full peak price.
I'm actually in Osaka right now, so I can confirm there is definitely no departure-specific component. Japan is is a perfect example of a walk up railway (though personally I'm using a Rail Pass it works really well for turn up and go with no booking) Here's a video I took a video just now
Oops got a bit carried away: yes on shinkansen with nonreserved seating (which notably is not the fastest trains on the tohoku shink or the tokaido on an increasing number of "busy" days) you can buy flexible limited express supplements. However the main thing I wanted to point out was that Japanese smart cards are explicitly *only* for the base fare and therefore explicitly not for any "limited express" train I.e. anything we would call intercity. The Japanese actually have a very clear distinction between local and intercity services and the intercity ones basically always require buying tickets in advance, sometimes train specific ones.
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Actually even on the compulsory reservations shinkansen I believe you can buy standing tickets if they are fully reserved which is a pretty good way of continuing to let people travel but warning them they likely won't have a seat.
The Japanese actually have a very clear distinction between local and intercity services and the intercity ones basically always require buying tickets in advance, sometimes train specific ones.
I've been using them extensively the past couple of weeks, there is no requirement to buy anything in advance or select a specific train and I haven't done either at any point. They have occasional announcements to go to the (trackside) TVM if you haven't paid for the unrestricted supplement yet, this doesn't require selecting a time, and is already included in Rail Passes or if you selected Shinkansen when buying a ticket as above.
There are a small percentage of trains that don't convey unreserved cars, but so far I haven't personally seen one that wasn't followed by another express that does within 15 minutes
I've been using them extensively the past couple of weeks, there is no requirement to buy anything in advance or select a specific train and I haven't done either at any point
By advance I mean in advance of travel as opposed to PAYG. My point is that for local trains pay-as-you-go (in the form of IC cards) is widespread whereas for intercity travel it is either insufficient (for limited expresses entirely in an IC card area) or entirely invalid (for longer distance expresses). This is a clear difference between local and intercity train ticketing even if the latter mostly still has flexible supplements.
The majority, when given the choice, will remain on a busy train instead of stepping back to a quieter train or taking a longer route, and put up with the crowding.
I’ve stepped back (alighted in fact) once ever due to crowding, and only because it was unlikely to affect my final arrival time. And I suspect that’s one more than most.
Plus planning in advance doesn’t work for operators where the majority of trains are late or delayed. Or conversely when minimum transfer times force inappropriately slow journeys.
Even here I think there’s a normalcy bias. You could just have a queue and let customs run to capacity, and then run trains to capacity on anytime style tickets. That would give better interoperability in terms of scheduling with TfL & National Rail
Pushing people from flexible to fixed-train journeys (whether through imposing reservations-only or by pricing them off flexible tickets) is really bad for national productivity.
The rational HS2 passenger on a fixed-train ticket will spend upwards of 30 minutes travelling at 0mph before their 45 mins at 200mph because they have had to allow for traffic/transport disruptions that might see them severely punished if they miss their booked train.
The cost-constrained traveller heading to an exploratory meeting may end up "killing time" if the meeting turns out to be quite short, because they had to book fixed-train tickets that allowed enough time for a lengthier meeting.
And that is before factoring in the extra time spent booking and amending your tickets.
Pushing people from flexible to fixed-train journeys (whether through imposing reservations-only or by pricing them off flexible tickets) is really bad for national productivity.
The rational HS2 passenger on a fixed-train ticket will spend upwards of 30 minutes travelling at 0mph before their 45 mins at 200mph because they have had to allow for traffic/transport disruptions that might see them severely punished if they miss their booked train.
The cost-constrained traveller heading to an exploratory meeting may end up "killing time" if the meeting turns out to be quite short, because they had to book fixed-train tickets that allowed enough time for a lengthier meeting.
And that is before factoring in the extra time spent booking and amending your tickets.
Hendy and the clique that advises him are small thinkers who attach no value to passengers' time.
You are absolutely correct, though. It's common sense: you allow plenty of time if it's critical to be on a specific train, but if i isn't critical then you can leave quite a bit later aiming for the same train and catching it most of the time. Overall waiting time much less. Overall journeys much quicker and more efficient. Artificially introducing criticality to being at the terrminus in time for a particular train reduces efficiency.
Hendy and the clique that advises him are small thinkers who attach no value to passengers' time.
You are absolutely correct, though. It's common sense: you allow plenty of time if it's critical to be on a specific train, but if i isn't critical then you can leave quite a bit later aiming for the same train and catching it most of the time. Overall waiting time much less. Overall journeys much quicker and more efficient. Artificially introducing criticality to being at the terrminus in time for a particular train reduces efficiency.
They attach no value to that time because it doesn't show in the statistics. That means that they are dealing with gains from faster point to point journeys (which can be measured), being able to hold down costs by managing demand, and being able to increase revenue* by charging premium fares.
But the other side of the equation is that for journeys of any length (say >1 hour/100 miles), most people, most of the time, do plan to travel at specific times and (where available) with reservations. That's partly for on train comfort and convenience (e.g. guaranteed seat), but also to fit in with other schedule constraints (e.g. meetings, family commitments, lifts home). That being so, any loss of efficiency is less than assumed because the baseline for comparison is not that of a fully flexible traveller.
A simple example. My student son is being taken to London for a smart lunch. The train up to London was picked for timing. The one home was picked for the fare. But the spread of advance fares (off peak -> peak) was less than the gap between fixed pre-book and flexible. Assuming that no extra subsidy is on the table (if it is, the question changes fundamentally), then the revealed preference** is that price trumps flexibility.
* - this depends on the assumptions and models used, and experience where peak policies have been relaxed makes the modelling questionable.
** - yes, this is a very limited sample and I know that anecdote <> data.
They attach no value to that time because it doesn't show in the statistics. That means that they are dealing with gains from faster point to point journeys (which can be measured), being able to hold down costs by managing demand, and being able to increase revenue* by charging premium fares.
But the other side of the equation is that for journeys of any length (say >1 hour/100 miles), most people, most of the time, do plan to travel at specific times and (where available) with reservations. That's partly for on train comfort and convenience (e.g. guaranteed seat), but also to fit in with other schedule constraints (e.g. meetings, family commitments, lifts home). That being so, any loss of efficiency is less than assumed because the baseline for comparison is not that of a fully flexible traveller.
People's personal plans might mean they simply can't afford to miss a certain train, but in a great many cases that is not so.
On my football trips up north (when Maidenhead were good enough to have games up north) normally involved aiming to be there about 12. It would be no big deal not to get there until 12.30 or 1pm. The only thing making it a big deal is the high cost of changing the ticket (or writing off the first ticket and buying another if the intended train was missed narrowly).
If it's just a matter of comfort and having a reserved seat, that is perfectly possible with a flexible ticket and you don't need to allow an extra half hour or whatever to make certain of catching the intended train, because if you miss it you can just go to the ticket office to try and get a reservation on the next one and/or be sure to be among the first to board and grab an unreserved seat. And most of the time you will catch your intended train, just with less padding and a quicker overall journey.
Vdry often it's the threat of a disproportionate financial penalty for missing the train that forces travellers to allow a lot of unnecessary extra time.
On the other had if the price differential between off peak and Advances is next to nothing, it's worth paying slightly extra for the flexibility. There's also the risk of financial loss if unable to use the Advance ticket in circumstances where the ticket isn't valid on subsequent trains.
A ticket p[tion that no longer seems to exist was that you got an Advance for the trip out and a cut price Single for the return journey. Ideal for weekend leisure trips where you can be prepared to commit to a fixed departure but not a fixed return.
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