......I think perhaps the Mail is not the only one being "hysterical"?
It's a valid point that rail travel can be extremely expensive, almost invariably more so than jumping in the car, particularly if there is a family or group involved, or if the travel is taking place on a "walk up" basis, rather than with the benefit of enough available planning time to obtain a "cheaper" advance ticket - the cost of driving doesn't alter whether you decide to go at one minute or one months notice, and 4 people in a car only cost fractionally more in terms of fuel consumption, whereas 4 train tickets? Considerably more, particularly if Groupsave isn't available/possible.
There is also the ridiculous amount of different fares, splitting, etc, some of which not available from all sources which further complicate the issue.
II hits the nail on the head (as so often) - train fares "can" be a ripoff (can is the pivotal word), some can be cheaper, most are somewhere in between, very few will prove cheaper than a car journey.
No matter how keen one is on trains, or reluctant to accept anything from the Daily Mail, it's important to keep perspective (…..and avoid hysteria!)
All this correct, but it made me start wondering exactly how many anytime tickets on any given route are sold in proportion to the total number of tickets sold for that route?
To take Chippenham to Paddington as an example, the three basic return fares in standard class (excluding any advance tickets, railcard discounts or splitting) are anytime £178.00, off peak £74.60, super off peak £55.90. It is also worth mentioning that a weekly season
CPM» to
PAD» only (ie. excluding LT travelcard) is £282.30. For a regular 5-day-week commuter, this equates to £56.46 per trip, only 56 pence more than a super off peak return, and you also have the option of using at weekends too if you have a mind to.
http://www.brfares.com/#!fares?orig=cpm&dest=pad
So who in their right minds are going to buy an anytime return ticket? Regular commuters certainly won't. 99% of leisure travellers aren't going to either. It is generally going to be a very small select group of people who, for example, are going for one-off business meetings or, perhaps, have to be at an airport before the off peak fares kick in.
I often make the point on non-railway forums when the subject of "criminal
BR▸ Fares" comes up (and especially when the prices are compared to air travel) - "Try walking into Heathrow tomorrow morning and asking for a ticket on the next flight to Aberdeen, and see how much
BA» will screw out of you..." The common counter-argument is "but people plan ahead when they're flying" and they get the reply "to which the answer is obvious, isn't it? Think ahead and get a cheap rail fare"
But the thing that "grinds my gears" about this sort of Wail drivel is not that a coach and horses can be driven through their reasoning, but that huge numbers of their readers believe it to be gospel truth. And these people, based on the swill the Mail and similar papers have fed them, won't go and find out for themselves when they would find a completely different, and more accurate, picture. In short, it is costing the railways money in lost potential fares.
Even people who should know better can get drawn in by this nonsense. A few years go my old school friend who now lives in Berlin happened to be over when I was doing a walk with the Railway Ramblers between Swindon Old Town and Cricklade, including a ride on the railway that inconveniently bisects the footpath and cycle track (
) and I invited him along. He was talking about driving to Swindon and parking there all day (Gawd knows where he thought he could park all day on a Saturday anywhere central...), because he had become so convinced by stories like this that he thought he'd have to take out a mortgage for his off peak return from Bristol...
Of course, whenever anyone takes the press to issue about misreporting or leading it's readers up the garden path by misrepresenting the facts, and wanting to take steps to stop them doing it (eg Leveson enquiry), those self same journalists who write this tripe start bleating about the freedom of the press being undermined.
Funny old world, innit?
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