When you are competing with both flying and driving you need a complex ticketing system because you need both advance tickets and flexible ones.
You'd lose far far more revenue than the ticket offices cost if you had only one class of ticket that was as cheap as an advance but as flexible as a flexible one.
When you are competing with both flying and driving you need a complex ticketing system because you need both advance tickets and flexible ones.
You'd lose far far more revenue than the ticket offices cost if you had only one class of ticket that was as cheap as an advance but as flexible as a flexible one.
Plus any modernisation/simplification of the ticketing system will create winners and losers. And the losers will complain a lot.
The Netherlands manages just fine without a complex system, just distance travelled across ALL public transport, with a single payment system OV-chipkaart. In fact, just like travelling in Greater London
And almost no ticket offices. The UK just loves complexity
The Netherlands is a much smaller country so you aren’t competing with flying - so therefore you don't need advance tickets.
The distances are also lower so you also don't need to encourage people not to travel via London.
I also don't actually think the rail journeys per capita in the Netherlands is actually that impressive - although they treat it as a state secret so its difficult to tell.
Competing with flying seems like a strange point of comparison. How many people are turning up on the day trying to book London to Edinburgh or Plymouth to Aberdeen? Surely most flight-comparable routes are booked online or through travel agents.
For London to Edinburgh for example you are competing with the airlines and with driving.
Therefore to compete with the airlines you need a low cost inflexible advance ticket and to compete with driving you need a higher cost flexible ticket.
You also want to encourage people going from Reading (for example) to Manchester to go via Birmingham as there is more spare capacity on that route than going via London.
Don't forget that actually our railway has pretty high usage per capita even given the reliability issues. It works pretty well.
The Swiss beat us on usage by a good amount - and they are good on reliability and 4G in the tunnels - but they also still have ticket offices.
Agreed. But dynamic pricing doesn't have to be complex at the point of sale. The person at the ticketing desk is usually just typing the same things into their system that you'd type at home into your browser. They may have a little insider knowledge on different ways to search the system to produce different results, but that's not inherent complexity, it's just bad interface design.
You're right also on the inevitable complaints, but there are legitimate and illegitimate complaints. We should listen to complaints that come from people who are genuinely harmed, or whose concerns we haven't properly taken into account. Any modernisation will miss some edge cases, and those need to be fixed. But we shouldn't be paying too much attention to the people who have saved hundreds of dollars over the years because they've found a way to work the system, and then are no longer subsidised under a reformed system. Losing privilege is NOT the same thing as being disadvantaged.
When you are competing with both flying and driving you need a complex ticketing system because you need both advance tickets and flexible ones.
You'd lose far far more revenue than the ticket offices cost if you had only one class of ticket that was as cheap as an advance but as flexible as a flexible one.
Plus any modernisation/simplification of the ticketing system will create winners and losers. And the losers will complain a lot.
The Netherlands manages just fine without a complex system, just distance travelled across ALL public transport, with a single payment system OV-chipkaart. In fact, just like travelling in Greater London
And almost no ticket offices. The UK just loves complexity
The Netherlands is a much smaller country so you aren’t competing with flying - so therefore you don't need advance tickets.
The distances are also lower so you also don't need to encourage people not to travel via London.
I also don't actually think the rail journeys per capita in the Netherlands is actually that impressive - although they treat it as a state secret so its difficult to tell.
Competing with flying seems like a strange point of comparison. How many people are turning up on the day trying to book London to Edinburgh or Plymouth to Aberdeen? Surely most flight-comparable routes are booked online or through travel agents.
For London to Edinburgh for example you are competing with the airlines and with driving.
Therefore to compete with the airlines you need a low cost inflexible advance ticket and to compete with driving you need a higher cost flexible ticket.
You also want to encourage people going from Reading (for example) to Manchester to go via Birmingham as there is more spare capacity on that route than going via London.
Don't forget that actually our railway has pretty high usage per capita even given the reliability issues. It works pretty well.
The Swiss beat us on usage by a good amount - and they are good on reliability and 4G in the tunnels - but they also still have ticket offices.
Agreed. But dynamic pricing doesn't have to be complex at the point of sale. The person at the ticketing desk is usually just typing the same things into their system that you'd type at home into your browser. They may have a little insider knowledge on different ways to search the system to produce different results, but that's not inherent complexity, it's just bad interface design.
You're right also on the inevitable complaints, but there are legitimate and illegitimate complaints. We should listen to complaints that come from people who are genuinely harmed, or whose concerns we haven't properly taken into account. Any modernisation will miss some edge cases, and those need to be fixed. But we shouldn't be paying too much attention to the people who have saved hundreds of dollars over the years because they've found a way to work the system, and then are no longer subsidised under a reformed system. Losing privilege is NOT the same thing as being disadvantaged.
The advanced tickets have different advantages and disadvantages. As do the route based tickets in many cases. There’s quite a lot of complexity.
Don't forget the ticket offices cost under 1% of the railways costs and under 1.5% of revenue. They are cheap in the scale of things.