If you try and take into acount every one of thoise factors you would end up with a fare structure where every train had it's own fare for every station served by that train including ones you can reached by changing. Which is impossible.
I don't think that you can compare pricing in shops as you have the choice of of buying by price, by brand you probably also have a choice of places to buy and even not to buy at that time.
With most train journies you need to start at particular station and go to another probably at a certain time on a certain day. You may get a choice of trains in your time band, you may also on odd journies get a choice of route and maybe a choice of operator, but in most cases you are stuck with one train run by one TOC▸ .
Maybe my post was not so cleverly phrased as it could have been. I wasn^t imagining that the cases where there is a choice of TOCs is significant, although more people may in fact have a choice of route, or that individual legs have different prices. My point was that all the factors I listed affect demand and therefore indirectly affect the costs of operation; the fares structure and fare levels have to make sense of this and in doing so (a) ensure the operator receives an income which covers his costs, (b) be understandable to the customer and (c) be enforceable.
It matters not one whit whether the operator is under a management contract where he takes the income risk (^franchise^) or whether he^s operating under a management contract where the client takes the income risk (^concession^) or whether the operator is a unitary national organisation - the income has to be approximately equal to the cost of running the railway if the taxpayer is not to be excessively or unjustly asked to foot the bill.
So the question is simple - how does one arrange the fares structure and fare levels to ensure these requirements are met? The answers, however, may not be!
I tried to point out that the simplest fare structures - flat rate, zonal or distance-based - would inevitably lead to some journeys being over-priced and others under-priced. If demand across the network was uniform, both temporally and regionally, then such simple structures could work. But life is not like that and the fares structure has to accommodate life as it is and not how one would like it to be. So pricing variations are necessary to cope with loadings varying with time, route and direction, level of competition by other modes and so on.
The point to be born in mind about all purchase of travel - coach, plane, train, rickshaw or ship - is that the ticket price is designed to get ^bums on seats^ at a time and place which suits the operator and which helps increase his income. It is not designed to ensure that the individual traveller gets the lowest price for his journey. If he does, well and good, if not - then he has to pay the asking price. Pricing is to do with statistics - not individuals.
It^s not as if any of this is new - different pricing for different flows goes back to the dawn of railways - the Railway Regulation Act 1844 laid down a fare of 1d per mile for 3rd class passengers on one train a day. Although this was enacted for reasons other than maximisation of income the point remains that by this time there were already four price points for each possible journey - First, Second, Third and Parliamentary. Only a decade and a half after passenger travel began the system was already complex.
My comparison with shops was to show that people
can cope with complexity in pricing, and make their purchasing decisions accordingly - although there is no excuse for shops to be deliberately obfuscating. Similarly there is no reason to assume that people should suddenly be unable to cope when they are purchasing rail tickets. However, one has to be careful about the type of ticket under discussion for this type of purchasing decision. From the context it would seem that this issue of ^complexity^ mainly concerns the purchase of tickets for one-off journeys, possibly for business, possibly for leisure. Somewhat surprisingly, these do not make up a majority of journeys.
Analysis of the
ORR» ^s figures for 2012-13 give the following results for the number of journeys and the passenger-km these represent. The total number of journeys was 1,501.7 million which generated 59.7 billion passenger-km. The table gives the breakdown in percentages by ticket type.
Season tickets: made up 42% of journeys and 28.5% of the passenger-km
Anytime/Peak fares: made up 21.2% of journeys and 16.8% of the passenger-km
Off-peak fares: made up 30.9% of journeys and 36.1% of the passenger-km
Advance purchase (valid for one train only): made up 3.4% of journeys and 17.9% of the passenger-km
Others: made up 2.6% of journeys and 0.7% of the passenger-km.
What this means is that nearly half of all rail travellers know what they want and have made bulk travel purchases, i.e., they bought season tickets. Another fifth of all tickets are sold to people who are travelling in the peak periods or want the flexibility that a full price ticket gives. These two categories together make up, roundly, two thirds of all purchases.
This leaves about one third of all journeys which are made using some form of reduced rate tickets, but they make long journeys. It is these passengers that need a system which enables them to identify and purchase the most appropriate ticket easily - not only from the point of view of price but also from the point of view of validity. These people are probably not regular travellers, their grasp of railway geography may not be very good, they are probably not ^au fait^ with the ticket names - they need support the whole way through the process. The current names for the various types of ticket don^t help. For example, as most/all tickets can be bought in advance of the date of travel, why have a ticket type called ^Advance^ when what the name really means is that travel is limited to a particular train, or trains, on a particular day? It^s confusing.
The ^validity^ issues also seem to cause occasional passengers the most grief. It is clear that cheaper tickets need some restrictions on their validity to avoid cannibalisation of the full fare traffic, but these need to be explained in clear text and not simply referred to as ^Restriction J2^ or some such. As the restrictions are part of the contract they should be printed on the ticket so there is no doubt
and be specific to that journey. Railways are not like airlines which check individual passengers onto each flight, so the onus has to be very clearly passed to the passenger.
Identifying the most suitable ticket is the sort of problem that computers are good at solving and designing a suitable web interface for a browser should not be impossible. The issue is that such searches can take time - which is not generally a problem at home, but becomes one if this search has to be carried out at the ticket machine on the station with a queue building up behind. So - a suggestion. Would it not be possible to install what are essentially web browsers with a card reader in the booking office so people can plan their journey, select and pay for their tickets without obstructing others wanting to use the
TVM▸ who know what they want? After purchasing the ticket at the web browser the tickets would be printed by the TVM in a sort of ^Ticket on Departure^ process. One should be able to buy two or three web browser kiosks for the price of one full blown ticket ticket machine.
So I repeat - the issue is not that the structure should be simple, it^s that the structure should be intuitive and the support systems, both IT and human, should be designed around the customer^s needs and abilities.
Click on the map to explore geographics
