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It’s almost the work of a psychopath to subject tourists - who either have endured or will endure the horrors of Manchester airport - to such complicated rules and fares.
Mr Burnham needs to bash some heads together.
The contrast to eg Schipol is astounding. Exit on level ground to the train hall, buy a single ticket for €23 to the other side of the country, and get on whatever train turns up next.
In a sensible world, Manchester to Manchester Airport or vice versa would be a simple "Zone N single" and would be the same price for all TOCs, for tram and for bus, or indeed for any combination thereof desired.
Short distance Advances really need binning off. Advances really only make sense on trains where an actual seat can be reserved. If one can't, it's a local train, get rid. Does ANY other country do this nonsense, even ones where IC is all compulsory reservation? (Noting that TER in France isn't purely a local service; some of it is really InterCity but subsidised).
Short distance Advances really need binning off. Advances really only make sense on trains where an actual seat can be reserved. If one can't, it's a local train, get rid.
Take the point re. true commuter trains, but it’s difficult to identify a cut off. Doesn’t your approach risk excluding some pretty lengthy IC style journeys? Eg LNWR London - Crewe or Liverpool, SWR journeys to Somerset and Devon etc.
The anomaly you get is that advance fares for long distance journeys on local trains end up being cheaper than any fare available for the local journeys.
As it is, I don't think there are AP tickets for Crewe or Runcorn to Liverpool.
On the other side of the country there are AP fares from York to Leeds, but the walk up fares are very expensive, particularly if going only one way.
Take the point re. true commuter trains, but it’s difficult to identify a cut off. Doesn’t your approach risk excluding some pretty lengthy IC style journeys? Eg LNWR London - Crewe or Liverpool, SWR journeys to Somerset and Devon etc.
Personally, I would prefer it if they just made the walk-up fares affordable. Keep Advances for capacity management where it's really needed - including IC services where you do want to match seat occupancy quite well.
Looking this morning at future travel, the train I would typically book into London, I've so far looked at every Tuesday between now and December, the cheapest advance I can see is £69.70, the train 30mins later cheapest is £59.40.
I'll check my spreadsheet but believe if booking far enough in advance I could usually get £46.50.
Looks like it'll be the Midland Mainline going forward or the coach.
It’s almost the work of a psychopath to subject tourists - who either have endured or will endure the horrors of Manchester airport - to such complicated rules and fares.
Mr Burnham needs to bash some heads together.
The contrast to eg Schipol is astounding. Exit on level ground to the train hall, buy a single ticket for €23 to the other side of the country, and get on whatever train turns up next.
Absolutely. When you walk from Terminal 2 to the bus & train station it becomes abundantly clear what the priorities were when the thing was constructed. Could have put the train station adjacent to the terminals, or under them, but that would have meant moving a lot of car parking spaces further away. So they chose to stick it a 15 minute walk away. Then when you get there there's about seven different bus and coach companies all with their own ticketing arrangements as well as the pirate rail fares.
It's actually charitable to assume no consideration has been given to the convenience of people arriving in the UK at the airport and wishing to continue their journey on public transport. A level of complexity and user-unfriendliness has been achieved which, as far as I can make out, can only be the result of a special effort.
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Tnhe anomaly you get is that advance fares for long distance journeys on local trains end up being cheaper than any fare available for the local journeys.
As it is, I don't think there are AP tickets for Crewe or Runcorn to Liverpool.
On the other side of the country there are AP fares from York to Leeds, but the walk up fares are very expensive, particularly if going only one way.
In the UK we think it's reasonable to address that phenomenon by having ticket restrictions that don't allow stopping short and enforcing these with draconian fines and threats of prosecution. In a sane world the regulator would simply tell operators they couldn't have such a restriction (and that they couldn't sell the more expensive ticket without telling the customer about the cheaper one that, in the absence of a stopping short exclusion, would also be valid). And then we'd enforce those rules with draconian fines and threats of litigation.
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