Or drive, which does a good job of filling the Government's coffers.
It isn't. Greater Anglia couldn't provide any services whatsoever without Network Rail's funding.
Technically, there can be no guarantees of this. The eligibility age and criteria may change freely in the new world, or the product may be retired. That this is unlikely to happen in the next few years doesn't say much about what might or might not happen in 25-29 years time.
Only before 1982, of course.
This is a completely warped understanding. Nobody leeches off anything by buying a train ticket. This is utterly ridiculous.
Very much the latter I think
Zone 1 is the exception, due to the difficultly of driving there (and it's still surprising how many people try!). Or people don't see the appeal and don't go, which you do find even among people who technically live in London. If anything, someone living in a commuter town with fast rail links to Central London e.g. St Albans is generally far more knowledgeable about Zone 1 than someone living in a Zone 5/6 town.
Exactly, and people's travel needs have become more localised. As a young adult, your travel needs will be things like visiting parents from uni, visiting school/uni friends who have disbursed across the country, going to major cities, events. Railways are good at this. As you get older, it becomes doing the shopping, taking kids to/from their friends, parties and events, collecting/buying household items, visiting attractions out of town (National Trust etc.): the kind of travel the railway isn't great at (possibly with the exception of Overground in some cases).
Yes exactly. None of this really gets to me, I never pay that much for my travel.
And that's the same for all passenger operators. On a level playing field, Greater Anglia are contributing and Northern are not.
Very few current over 60s were ever eligible for anything other than the student card. Do the maths.
At present they don't, but it needs to stay like that. 30-60 year olds are in the most productive period of their lives, they can buy their train tickets without a discount, just like all current over 60s did before they were 60.
Is there any evidence that there's a vast amount of people who would love to use the train in the 'regions' but would only do so if they got 1/3 off the fare? I think the reality is that they aren't using the train because it doesn't provide the solution that they need. Taking 1/3 off an eye-watering fare to travel on a crowded and unreliable route isn't going to get anyone out of their car, no matter how much you want it to. I'm lucky enough to have access to PRIV fares but wouldn't dream of subjecting myself to a long distance journey on Cross Country.
No passenger or freight services are contributing financially, it's a fallacy to suggest so. In my view that's as it should be, given how low down the priority list financial concerns are versus economic concerns.
As I said previously, people who were born around 1958 or prior. So about 18% of the population.
The post I responded to was also concerned with reliability, punctuality and good journey times, i.e. general strong practice not simply having capacity.
The UK generally performs extremely strongly on international benchmarks for skills and training. It also tends to perform very, very poorly for infrastructure outside of London. Spending more time talking about skills while refusing to pay for new infrastructure up-front is arguably one of the causes of the current arrangement.
They might use the train more, and they will be confident in doing so as they are already rail users. A lot of non-railcard holders only use the train for journeys where parking is difficult/expensive but there is a compelling reason to go, hence the focus on London.
But, why would they? Someone who's paying £6000= a year for a season ticket or can afford a couple of hundred quid each for a long distance journey to a weekend away is clearly not motivated by price so doesn't need a discount funded by the taxpayer.
Surely that's obvious though? There are very very few well-paid jobs in, say, Ilfracombe, Barnstaple or Bideford. Public transport and other service infrastructure is also creaking and utterly inadequate, even highways. So if you can access higher-paid work, Bristol has lots and lots to offer, and is about as close as possible, despite it having little better infrastructure than Ilfracombe does.
If I lived in Bristol I'd want Liverpool to have approximately the same level of per-capita capital spending from public resources, thus negating any possibility of this kind of competition between Bristol and Liverpool, or indeed anywhere else. Especially given that Bristol and Liverpool are very similar economically and are a similar size.
Federalism sounds great but it's utterly unworkable in a country like the UK. Of course more devolution is required but rather a lot of the baseline spending will always be fixed from the centre and handed over for local leaders to spend however they wish. Not in accordance with your preferences for it! Even in the US where cities and states have very very broad control over taxation and service prices, federal public money remains important.
It's not my political preference to have better infrastructure, it's simply economic reality. It's a non-negotiable necessity, in all of the UK's cities (yes I know there's the St Asaph vs Reading question but I think people can understand what I mean, obviously Reading should have trams and St Asaph shouldn't).
It is a general observation of mine that when people talk about "twisted right wing economic philosophy" they often mean "mainstream economics"
Now you can decide to take that in two completely different ways depending upon political persuasion
But while it is true that there is a lot in economics, macroeconomics especially that is a bit... sketchy... simple stuff like opportunity cost, scarcity, comparative advantage, externalities, deadweigh loss, supply and demand are imo not too far off physical laws and so arguments like @Magdalia 's maybe ought to be best expressed directly in those terms. It then becomes clearer whether your argument is with the building blocks of basic microeconomics (in which case imo it can be disregarded but others of twisted left wing economic philosophy may disagree) or if it's with how he fits the known facts within these frameworks and if he's missing or twisting something. I certainly find his arguments convincing but that shouldn't come as a surprise
(I do wish he'd stop claiming that net contribution to the exchequer is the same thing as net contribution to the economy though)
