Seat Reservations on FGW

[whole diary]

[tramway]

Perhaps a variation on musical chairs should be introduced. For the first few minutes of the journey out of PAD^» (Paddington (London) - next trains) at peak hours a soothing melody could be played to be terminated at random by the TM^‡(resolve) at which point all un taken booked seats become available. 

[devon_metro]

Perhaps a variation on musical chairs should be introduced. For the first few minutes of the journey out of PAD^» (Paddington (London) - next trains) at peak hours a soothing melody could be played to be terminated at random by the TM^‡(resolve) at which point all un taken booked seats become available. 

 

[Tim]

I'm a long time commuter on the services to and from London, and both myself and my wife have annual Gold cards spending and extortionate amount of ~^8500 per year between us to travel on these trains but on a number of occasions (which seems to be ever increasing), we have not been able to get a seat on the way home due to virtually the whole train being reserved

I hesitate before posting this because I suspect that it will make me unpopular and please don't take these comments personally.. BUT

Season-ticket holders often think that the fact that they are very good customers of the railway makes them entitled to some kind of perferential treatment when it comes to seating but they forget that they are already treated extremely perferentailly when it comes to ticket prices.  ^8500 is a lot of money in anybodies book but I bet that it is an absolute bargain when compared to open returns brought on a daily basis.

I don't know your route but as an example the Bath-London annual season is ^7768.  Assuming that you travel to work 235 times per year (5 days a week minus 25 days for holiday), the daily cost is ^33 which is laughably small when compared to the open return peak time ticket price of ^146.  Plus you get "free" weekend travel and other perks if the ticket is a goldcard.  You would be hard pressed to beat ^33 with advanced tickets at peak times.

I think that an arguement can be made for cheap season tickets on short distance routes and the underground (London would grind to a halt if workers couldn't live in the suburbs where hosusing is cheaper and work in the city where wages are higher- you might regard these people as essential commuters).  But season ticket on longer distance "intercity" routes are unfairly cheap.  Why should the occasional business traveller effectively subsidise commuters from places like Bath.  Such commuters are generally not essential commuters but rather people who have chosen to live somewhere nice a long way from London - that is fine but they should pay for their lifestyle choice.

Some bulk-purchase discount is of course justified (20 to 30 % would seem fair) but can you imagine Tescos offering a "buy 53 and get 175 free" discount which is what the price differential from Bath represents?

[original post modified to correct ticket prices]

[Mookiemoo]

"Why should the occasional business traveller effectively subsidise commuters from places like Bath.  Such commuters are generally not essential commuters but rather people who have chosen to live somewhere nice a long way from London - that is fine but they should pay for their lifestyle choice."

Its not always a life style choice.  Since I went independent I have worked in:

London
Nottingham
Manchester
Uxrbdige
Swindon
Rugby
Birmigham
Uxbridge
Stafford
Oxford
Putney
Reading
Belfast
TBA

Now unless you propose I move house every six months and relocate the family, there is no choice.  Yes us long distance commuters may be fewer than local, but we should not be discounted on the basis of it.

[GaryM]

Season-ticket holders often think that the fact that they are very good customers of the railway makes them entitled to some kind of perferential treatment when it comes to seating but they forget that they are already treated extremely perferentailly when it comes to ticket prices.  £8500 is a lot of money in anybodies book but I bet that it is an absolute bargain when compared to open returns brought on a daily basis.

I don't know your route but as an example the Bath-London annual season is £7768.  Assuming that you travel to work 235 times per year (5 days a week minus 25 days for holiday), the daily cost is £33 which is laughably small when compared to the open return peak time ticket price of £146.  Plus you get "free" weekend travel and other perks if the ticket is a goldcard.  You would be hard pressed to beat £33 with advanced tickets at peak times.

If we're going to start bringing cost into the equation then no, I don't think commuters get a bargain at all. Season ticket prices are extortionate and every year they go up by more than the rate of inflation. It wouldn't cost you £33 to get from Bath to London and back in a reasonably fuel efficient car. And the government say they are trying to get cars off the road and encourage people to try and use public transport more. Well it doesn't look like that to me and they're not putting enough pressure on these private companies to restrict the ever increasing amounts of money they seem to be able to demand While private train companies claim they need the money to improve the service, all I can see so far on the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) network is refurbishment of the train carriages (done more than 2 years ago) and some enhancements to a few stations. £33 a day to travel is questionable but £146 a day is a complete and utter rip-off.

Private train companies aren't really offering discount prices to season ticket holders...they're just using it as an excuse to be able to justify hiking up the price of all other types of tickets saying those tickets are the "normal" prices. We all know full well that train travel in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) is one of the most expensive in the world so I don't really think I need to say any more on that. And I think we all know where most of the money we pay really goes...

Anyway, I'm digressing and going off topic in my own thread so continuation of the cost argument / rant is probably best left for another topic.

[moonrakerz]

Season-ticket holders often think that the fact that they are very good customers of the railway makes them entitled to some kind of perferential treatment when it comes to seating but they forget that they are already treated extremely perferentailly when it comes to ticket prices.  ^8500 is a lot of money in anybodies book but I bet that it is an absolute bargain when compared to open returns brought on a daily basis.

I don't know your route but as an example the Bath-London annual season is ^7768.  Assuming that you travel to work 235 times per year (5 days a week minus 25 days for holiday), the daily cost is ^33 which is laughably small when compared to the open return peak time ticket price of ^146.  Plus you get "free" weekend travel and other perks if the ticket is a goldcard.  You would be hard pressed to beat ^33 with advanced tickets at peak times.

 It wouldn't cost you ^33 to get from Bath to London and back in a reasonably fuel efficient car.

I'm afraid Gary is pulling the old trick of not comparing like-with-like.
It may cost less than ^33 in Petrol to get to London and back, but that isn't the cost of doing that trip. According to the AA, a medium size car doing around 10000 miles a year costs in excess of 45.82p per mile to run.
To ensure a valid comparison, the Network Rail mileage from Bath Spa to Paddington is 107 miles - so: 107 X 2 X 45.82p = ^98.05, almost three times the train fare quoted !

[Tim]

Its not always a life style choice. 

I agree it isn't always a lifestyle choice, but it often is and in shaping general policies you have to look at generalities rather than exceptions.

For every person like you who needs cheap seasons for their job, there is someone else who equally needs cheap day returns.

I'm not convinced that everyone needs to pay exactly the same price as everyone else for their tickets (you could argue that commuters should pay less because they are a secure income stream or because they are likely to be the most economically active taxpayers in our society - or you could argue that they should pay more because it is their demand to travel peak time that means that extra stock is needed that is not fully utilitised the rest of the day so can never pay for itself).  But when an annual season is 4.5 times cheaper per day than an open return, something needs to be done to bring them closer in price. 

And I am sorry GaryM, but ^33 per day to travel peak time from Bath to London (more than 200 miles at high speed) is a bargin whatever way you look at it. 

sensible pricing might be something more like:

off peak return ^40
peak return ^60
off peak season ^25 per day
peak season ^45 per day
advanced purchase return ^25 to ^35

[Btline]

Don't forget that most rail users have cars, so they are still paying for maintenance/insurance AND the train fare.

[willc]

Private train companies aren't really offering discount prices to season ticket holders

All I can say to this is... eh? If a season isn't a discounted fare, then what on earth is it?

And moonrakerz has neatly covered the one about the real costs of motoring - though I should add that the AA route planner gives its best Bath-London road route as 116 miles - and that's never mind all the fuel you would burn stuck in the endless queues along the M4 around Reading and Heathrow of a morning.

[GaryM]

As already stated, this thread is about seat reservations and while I have my own views on fare costs, I'm not going to specifically comment on them any more in this particular thread. If you want to go off-topic and start talking about actual prices and what is / isn't value for money or what is / isn't discounted then please start a new thread and I will happily join the discussion in that one Or maybe a moderator would like to split the off-topic cost related posts from this thread into a new one so we can just continue with them.

Anyway, back to the actual topic of seat reservations if anyone has anything more to add...

[grahame]

My personal view is that no-extra-charge seat reservations are something of a privilege which are almost inevitable prone to distortion in their use / uptake precisely because the (ab)user of the system suffers no penalty at all when he / she doesn't take up the facilities earmarked for him / her, to the detriment of others who would love to use those facilities. And I find it deeply ironic that these free reservations are given away on the cheapest of fares ... not the cheaper rate fares to regular customers (season tickets) but the one-off discounted journeys.

I think we've established that there isn't the ground work information available about just how big a problem  reserved seats which are not taken up can be.   We know it's a problem with the heart (I feel it too - with you on this one Gary), but there's no data for the head that lets any substantive ideas be evaluated, even if it was in anyone's interest to actually evaluate and implement any changes - I don't see people moving their  custom away from FGW^▸ (First Great Western) because of problems with reserved seats, so I don't see any"stick" available to wave.  As a "carrot" - potential increase in income that people optionally spend - I wonder about including a seat reservation option for all First class travel journeys and eliminating it in standard.

GaryM asks for one of the moderators to split the thread.   Hmm - there are some posts which are very clearly on fares but there are many (such as this one) which look at the reservations and fares issues which are interlinked, and it would be a braver person than me to try to decide which goes where. And such a split could add in a bias in favour of those posters who don't wish for / see a relationship between the fare level someone pays and whether they should be able to reserve a seat. Besides, I'm not a politician who wants to make his mark by meddling  in this case in a perfectly reasonable thread.  So - sorry - no split.  But, please, I do endorse GaryM's request to keep this thread (if it continues) such that all posts have some link to seat reservation issues.

I started a(nother) fare comparison thread more recently at
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=4520.0
and that may be a good point to continue / resume any pure fare discussions

Me?  I'm more concerned with getting TransWilts trains at sensible times and frequency ... let alone whether or not I get a seat, and what I have to pay.  I'm invited to a meeting in Swindon this evening. If I go by train, it would have been on the 07:17 (left half an hour ago) and I would be back at 06:40 tomorrow morning.

[Tim]

giving free seat reservations away with advanced fares shouldn't on the face of it be a problem because advanced fares ought to only be available in significant numbers on less busy trains which ought to have enought seats for everyone anyway.  Commuters in general will be travelling on peak trains which should have few seat reservations.

In practice it doesn't seem to work like that because FGW^▸ (First Great Western) apepar to offer advanced fares on all trains including peak time ones (where the saving is often minimal)

[moonrakerz]

Don't forget that most rail users have cars, so they are still paying for maintenance/insurance AND the train fare.

...............AND - don't forget all the subsidies you are paying the rail companies via your income tax, VAT^▸ (Value Added Tax), etc, etc, etc, whether you have a car or not ! 

It is almost impossible to work out the true cost of rail or road travel.

[moonrakerz]

As already stated, this thread is about seat reservations If you want to go off-topic and start talking about actual prices and what is / isn't value for money or what is / isn't discounted then please start a new thread

Am I missing something here ? Who is going "off topic" and starting to talk "about actual prices" ?   

Posts from GaryM:-

"If we're going to start bringing cost into the equation then no, I don't think commuters get a bargain at all. Season ticket prices are extortionate and every year they go up by more than the rate of inflation"

"It wouldn't cost you ^33..."

"^33 a day to travel is questionable but ^146 a day is a complete and utter rip-off."

Off you go then Gary !

[GaryM]

Am I missing something here ? Who is going "off topic" and starting to talk "about actual prices" ?   

Posts from GaryM:-

"If we're going to start bringing cost into the equation then no, I don't think commuters get a bargain at all. Season ticket prices are extortionate and every year they go up by more than the rate of inflation"

"It wouldn't cost you ^33..."

"^33 a day to travel is questionable but ^146 a day is a complete and utter rip-off."

Off you go then Gary !

Maybe you'd like to read the WHOLE thread properly first before accusing ME of going off-topic in my own thread. If you're not sure then please see post #67 in this thread where you will see who started the "off-topic" pricing comments. I simply gave a response (rather than just ignoring it) and as you will see at the bottom of my response (post #69), I said that any pricing discussion should be done in a new topic. The pricing continued to be discussed / argued so I re-iterated that I would refuse to comment any further on pricing issues in this particular thread (post #74).