please empty your brain below
Fares based on distance travelled

diamond geezer | Homepage | 05.06.18 - 12:01 a.m. | #

Problem with these type of consultations is that they throw up straw men to be demolished which then leads to the status quo.

So a better solution may be that fares should be based on distance and quality of service. So Penzance Plymouth is presently cheap because services are infrequent and slow while London to Ipswich is fast and frequent but these type of trade offs are not dealt with in this consultation. It would be much more interesting to see what people think of trades off like these.

| 05.06.18 - 7:11 a.m. | #

"Based on distance" does not necessarily mean linear pence-per-mile. How about proportional to the square root of distance (or another fractional power, or some other similar function), so short journeys are proportionately more expensive, and longer journeys are not prohibitively expensive. And no doubt there should be a London/South East weighting (again, not a lump sum, but decreasing with distance from London, and possibly from a few other other major urban centres).

Andrew | 05.06.18 - 7:48 a.m. | #

The price per mile thing seems at face value a non-starter, but there could be some kind of rural-factoring (think the reverse of "London weighting"), that would take into account some of those issues. That would certainly help flatten out issues relating to split tickets.

Adam Bowie | Homepage | 05.06.18 - 6:14 p.m. | #

Pence per mile pricing can be combined with a 50% discount for journeys over a certain distance, which prevents long distance journeys becoming prohibitively expensive.

Adrian | 06.06.18 - 2:12 p.m. | #

Pence per mile does not reflect the true cost to the railway either, as terminal costs (the cost of running the two stations, origin and destination) are independent of how far they are apart. Likewise the admin cost of issuing, printing, and collecting tickets is largely independent of distance.

It also seems unfair that you should have to pay more because you are sent on a circuitous route, either because Breeching closed the direct one, or the current timetable offers no suitable connections that fit your schedule except by a longer route (from London to my home town there are three routes - the longest charges higher rates despite taking longer and the extra 26 miles being in a bus body mounted on the chassis of a goods wagon)

Breeching | 06.06.18 - 8:03 p.m. | #

Following up on Andrew -

This is a page (unofficial) which gives the fare tables for the main Japanese railway companies:

http://jr-group.jp/higashi-unchin.html

The text is in Japanese, but the tables have distance bands in km and fares in yen, which should be straightforward to parse.

The first thing to note is that the fares are not proportional to the distance, and drop off with larger values of distance.

The second thing is that there are four tables; the standard one, one for rural areas, one for Tokyo, and one for the very centre of Tokyo. The regional table is used for trips that exclusively take place over sections of line that are designated as being in rural areas.

This is an example of a relatively simple system that can accommodate for many of the issues raised in this discussion.

The number of tables has grown over the years, however, which is probably an indication that it is difficult to maintain the simplicity of a system such as this without introducing injustices inadvertently. It does reflect a peculiar aspect of Japanese railways where the bullet train lines have almost completely taken over medium- and long-distance travel in many rural areas.

Discounts exist (e.g., for return travel), with the tables being used for the base fare upon which discounts are applied.

Other, coarser tables are used to define express, first-class and other supplementary charges.

I do not think a system such as this would be too far-fetched for use in the UK....

FoP | 21.06.18 - 4:44 p.m. | #











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