The Big 'Let's sell our cars and take buses/ebikes instead' thread (warning: probably very dull)
Comments
-
It is nuts to have a train journey that costs that much. Period. It is a sign of a totally dysfunctional pricing system.
0 -
Was it a train journey that was actually £300 return per adult l, booked at short notice at peak time and first class?
I've not been following this, but that seems to be the case?
0 -
It took them nine years just to restore a small footbridge in Lawrence Weston.
0 -
2 adults 2 children, open return, is £750. Absolute madness. 1st class is well over a grand.
No guarantee you'll get a seat for any of that either. Or that it will run on time.
0 -
Yup. I'd not mind too much the extra time/hassle to get to the French place completely by train, if it didn't cost so much more. (Mind you, it would be a closer-run thing if I had easy access to St Pancras.) At the moment, pricing seems to be pushing people to flying & driving, which is silly.
0 -
I said it was expensive, but it doesn't need to be that expensive. That is essentially the walk-up price early in the morning. Any normal person would buy the day before and guarantee themselves a saving and a seat. They'd also get themselves a friends and family card.
If it is not on time, you get a reasonable refund.
0 -
So yes then, more or less?
0 -
The point is not that you can get a cheaper ticket. No ticket should cost that much for a family of 4 for a train.
The immediacy of the ticket purchasing shouldn't really matter to be honest.They're running the same service all year, bar engineering works. That's an absolute red herring.
0 -
Question is, how much would the trip cost if all tickets were priced the same.
ScotRail abolished peak time fares recently. Clearly pricing everything most cheaply is the usual SNP magic money tree crowd pleaser... Probably not the best example.
0 -
It's two tickets each way.
0 -
The lack of transparency on train pricing is absolutely maddening. If you go up to the desk and ask them to sell you the cheapest way to get to x within y parameters, it's 50/50 they can. I've had instances where I've asked for the cheapest, they sold me Z ticket - I had enough time to check myself and found a cheaper way using multiple singles and went back. He refused to give me my money back and sell me the singles instead, the pr!ck.
0 -
It has also taken them 5 months to do the actual work, with the road shut. Traffic has been dreadful 😂
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
I'm in favour (to a degree) of using demand-led pricing to alter behaviours... but I must admit I do find it extraordinary though that at least some (many?) people will pay these punitive prices. I'd have thought the WFH shift might have had some effect on these... but apparently not.
0 -
It's just 2 adults isn't it? The screenshot only shows 2 tickets in each direction (which obviously makes it more expensive).
FWIW I decided to check the price for Berlin to Munich which is a similar distance. To travel at morning peak out from Berlin is around £160 but the return is much cheaper at around £70 so it isn't actually that different despite the way people always make out our rail system is so expensive (I checked in Germany as it is one of the few countries outside the UK I've used a train and I was pretty disappointed with the price, punctuality and cleanliness).
0 -
That's how markets work. It's cheaper to book anything in advance.
0 -
-
Pricing like that is just nature's way of telling you to drive.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Krakow - Gdansk, 335 miles, no changes, Pendolino - 1st class - £67, 2nd class £45. Pensioners get 37% discount. Same price all day. Trains are very clean inside and usually punctual.
0 -
England trains have been ludicrously expensive for a long time. I bought a ticket from London to York, one way, adult fare, and was charged £49.
In 1995.
Seems like nothing has changed.
Open One+ BMC TE29 Seven 622SL On One Scandal Cervelo RS0 -
Adjusted for inflation, that is £97.
Standard single London to York is £168.
0 -
Do you think inflation plus 5% over 20 years has increased prices in real terms?
0 -
For reference to this chat you can fly Newcastle to Heathrow at 06:00 for £129. The express train into centre is less than a tenner from memory.
Add on check in time etc and there probably isn't much time saved but train prices are a joke financially.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Doesn’t matter how you chop it, the prices are just ridiculous, always have been. £97 is about $175 of my bucks today. I can catch a single adult, One way ticket from Sydney to Melbourne here this week for just under $100. That’s triple the distance of London to York.
Charging 168 quid - 300 of my dollars - for a ticket to go a few hundred km like that is utter robbery.
Open One+ BMC TE29 Seven 622SL On One Scandal Cervelo RS0 -
For comparison, I think UK fuel price is about 153p a litre at the moment, so a trip of about 370 km London to York in a typical modern car averaging about 7 l/100 km would cost about 40 quid in fuel.
Fairly hard to fathom how anyone thinks a cost more than 4 times as much for a train ticket is justifiable.
I can buy return airfares from Sydney to Bali for 300 bucks each way. 😄
Open One+ BMC TE29 Seven 622SL On One Scandal Cervelo RS0 -
There a reason why people choose to drive on journey like that. Add in that you can stick loads of stuff in the boot rather than have to drag it with you as you would if taking the train and the answer is obvious.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Trains are an option if you want to work on the way somewhere.* Or if you commute. Or if you are retired and want to follow a 1920s period guidebook.
Other than that they are totally shit.
*Pity this is made difficult because the WiFi is so bad on most trains, and the mobile phone coverage in remote parts of the UK such as almost anywhere outside of a town is so patchy because it is based on commercial usage rather than regarded as vital 21st century infrastructure.
1 -
Is that UK trains specifically, or trains in general?
0 -
Couldn't tell you about anywhere other than the UK. I dimly recall an Amtrak from NY about 8 years ago, with vast seats and WiFi, but I wasn't paying so I don't know if it was expensive or not.
It was slow, I know that much, but saved car rental. Seemed not to be well used.
That aside I've only done commuter trains, which overcrowding aside are much of a muchness as far as I can tell. But I never know if a snapshot on a weekday between Amsterdam and the Hauge or something like that really represents how good or busy the system is in comparison to ours.
0 -
Couldn't really tell you about the UK to be honest.
Just a few recent intercity journeys, which have been fine, other than a couple being busy and I don't like other British people. Oh, and being trapped on one near Alnwick for 6 hours because another train hit a deer and derailed a bit.
I found one franchise to have scandalously worn out carriages, piss smelling toilets, no functioning WiFi and small seats. The other was great - LNER oddly enough.
In a nutshell that's probably the problem.
0 -
If the trains work and aren't ruinously expensive, why would I choose to drive if I'm going to a city and I don't have shitloads of stuff?
I remember going NY to DC on the Acela which was nice and not expensive, but it's about the only train in the USA as far as I can tell. Florence to Venice on the Italo train was crazy cheap and very nice.
0
