[tialaramex]

The UK sales data (if that's what they have) actually can tell you the route in some cases. This is in fact a bad thing, so let's explain...

Britain has repeatedly elected Conservative Party ("Tory") governments, the Tories have an ideological preference for the Free Market, regardless of whether that makes any sense. So, instead of a single nationally owned and likely unprofitable railway industry, it is divided into a lot of separate elements that in theory could be profitable but in fact take enormous subsidies to keep around, for our purposes we care about just one of those elements, the Rail Franchises, a whole lot of separate companies which undertake to provide passenger journeys on set routes and employ staff to operate trains, provide custom services, hire the rolling stock and so on.

Originally these Franchises were supposed to compete for passengers. But if they provide unrelated routes obviously that's not much "competition". A route from Leeds to Glasgow isn't in any meaningful sense "competing" with a route from Salisbury to Cambridge. So OK, what if they're competing only where the endpoints are the same? Well, the immediate problem is that the customers don't want to buy a ticket for "Bob's Railway" they want a ticket from one place to another and couldn't give a shit who provides that journey.

So the franchises "fixed" this by creating special tickets with weird rules. For example instead of a "Bob's Railway" ticket you make a ticket which requires passengers to travel via Tinyton, a small town nobody cares about but which is served only by Bob's Railway. Do the trains stop in Tinyton? Technically yes they do, but you'd barely know it, this is mostly just a way to satisfy the requirement that "Via Tinyton" means "Only use Bob's Railway" and so Bob's Railway can claim 100% of revenue for these tickets. That revenue doesn't actually matter any more, for a few years now the government just takes all revenue and pays the franchises whatever they want instead - but the pretence of competition must remain, because you know, "Free Market".

The result is that tickets are needlessly complicated or incredibly expensive or both, indeed if you're not using software or a specialist human to help plan your journey you will probably pay far more than you should and you might have a terrible journey anyway. The Tories love to say somehow the "Free Market" is going to fix this, but of course the correct fix is ideologically impossible for them, "Take the railways back into public ownership" is at once cheaper, more practical, and completely unthinkable thanks to ideology.

[rjmunro]

It often makes sense to offer a cheaper ticket e.g. I can go to Brighton via London, which is faster and easier, or I can change at Reading and Gatwick, which is harder and slower, but the trains are less busy, so it makes sense to encourage people not to go via London.

The "via" restrictions are usually dropped if there are problems on the lines allowing people who are delayed to find other routes, but this can lead to problems in one area causing overcrowding problems in another.

[lstamour]

That sums up the complexity better than I ever could, but as a tourist visiting London it was relatively painless to tap my Apple Watch and pay by contactless credit card when I got on and when I got off, as long as you’re travelling through supported stops within the city region. This generally included any routes to and from London airports.

Comparing the process in London to that of, say, Paris, it is night and day better with London’s system. Yes, trips might cost more than a flat rate, but you don’t need to have a special card - contactless payments are charged at the same rates as an Oyster card would get charged, including discounts if you take multiple trips in a day.

Compare to Paris where it’s a flat rate, but you can’t get a normal ticket because your anonymous card is somehow designed only for tourist pricing. Let’s not even bother with how long the lines can be to buy said card. I’ll take a system where you tap on and tap off any day of the week over a flat rate system that doesn’t support easy contactless payment at the same rates as everybody else.

I should clarify though - this only applies to any travel by train that you can do from stations that have contactless to stations that also have contactless. Anywhere else, you’re expected to tap off and pay a normal fare for the rest of your travel to an unsupported station by buying it from a website.

And while it is unusual to have such complexity, I should mention that rail travel between countries often has similar complexity - I bought a ticket once from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, but got on a train operated by a different company and had to buy a second ticket - the trains left at the same time to and from the same stations but from two different operators. The confusing part is that the train ticket I needed to buy wasn’t available from a Denmark regional train travel ticket kiosk, it was timed ticket you had to buy in advance from a website as the train’s origins was in Sweden rather than Denmark. (And the Denmark station didn’t have Swedish kiosks.)

I guess what I’m saying is that trains can make airlines look efficient, at least when it comes to buying and handling tickets. ;-)

Edit: I should also mention if I got any of this wrong, I’m actually from North America and about all I can say in response is “at least you have (express, high speed) trains,” as I look at our preference for highways and buses and how most rail in North America is for cargo...

[tialaramex]

London is special.

Literally.

Take bus companies. You don't say if you used any buses, but if you did they all work the same in London, they're all painted red, they take Oyster (your Apple Watch will work), the system keeps track and lets you use more than one to get to your destination without special fees. There are a bunch of bus companies in London, but there's no reason you would care about that, they're all the same to you.

Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that. In my home city for example there were four major bus companies, each painted their buses a different colour, each used separate tickets, each had its own "integrated" travel pass system. If I caught a 20 out of the city, then boarded a U6 that's two separate journeys with two separate companies, and thus two separate charges and the city government is legally prohibited from telling them to knock it off and just charge a single fee like London.

[mytailorisrich]

Even where there is a single (or 2) bus company, the ticketing structure is often crazy complex.

Fares webpages for Oxford:

https://www.oxfordbus.co.uk/fares-and-tickets

https://www.oxfordbus.co.uk/zone-tickets

[johneth]

> Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that.

Thankfully this seems to be changing. Greater Manchester, through its devolution in the last few years, has in the last few months started the 'Bee network',[0] which operates similarly to London's bus system. It's being brought in in phases.

Hopefully other areas start doing this too.

[0] https://tfgm.com/

[AlecSchueler]

The Dutch system seems to suit your expectations quite well.

There are a bunch of disparate organisations providing busses, water busses/taxis/ferries, rental bikes and trams, metro lines and trains running on publicly owned infrastructure.

One card allows you to check in to all of them, all over the country. You can get a subscription card for a 40% discount (€10 per month) or you can check in anywhere with contactless payments or anonymous cards for the full price.

[lstamour]

Yes, I agree. It was a joy to use contactless payment in Amsterdam, and like in London with the TfL app, I could check my payments via the OVpay app, take bikes on trains, and they have very frequent regional trains too. Actually, the OV app is better than the TfL app - I needed a VPN to pretend to be in London in order to check my payments on the TfL app, I didn’t need this for the OV app. Both apps had weird rules about when it would be possible to “fix” or add a tap-off if I’d forgotten to, though, but at least they both have that option unlike Paris, France or Ontario’s system.

And the worst for payment has to be Berlin’s system because they absolutely hate credit cards and prefer cash over other traceable payment methods. It’s nice for anonymity but as a tourist who has to present a passport anyway, I would prefer to just tap and not think about it. Plus they don’t have one app, they have three different apps each with unique features. Paris has the same problem, with regional and local apps, plus even third-party apps that you can buy tickets from.

Transit… some places you have to be a local to understand it and put up with it. Everyone else, at least there’s Uber most places now. Don’t even get me started on paying to use bathrooms by credit card (actually cash only) at a major train station in Brussels.

[ExoticPearTree]

From experience, I think the OV-chipkaart was the best option traveling the Netherlands. You would just to remember to check-out at the end of your journey so you wouldn't be charged end-to-end pricing. And the fact that you would pay only for the portion used in a trip (there was a few eurocents difference if you took the tram two stops or three stops, same for buses) it also made a lot of economic sense versus the all you can eat model everyone else employs.

Second best from recent years I like the new system in the NYC subway: tap & go, same price as a MetroCard without the hassle of buying one.

[pm215]

Public transport within London has always been both differently managed/funded and also massively better than public transport anywhere else. If you're using London as your only data point you get a very skewed view of the UK public transport situation.

In this case, Transport for London (a public body) has always had much more control over public transport, specifically local political control, and has had the funding and long term planning horizon to set up things like the oyster and contactless payment systems. (And there are also practicalities, like the worst cases fare within the oyster zone being not very large, so it's OK to not take payment immediately but only when the system finds out where you got off, because you're not potentially out hundreds of pounds for a London to Edinburgh fare if it turns out the card being used declines the payment.)

[mytailorisrich]

Ideology works both ways. Public ownership is not a magic solution that would solve everything, and in fact it'd probably create its own set of problems.

Maybe a state-owned company that must operate on stringent efficiency requirements with private sector best practices.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The former British Rail was cheaper to run, cheaper to use, and provided a better service which integrated service delivery, maintenance. engineering, and national R&D (with valuable IP which was given away for nothing after privatisation.)

It was often joked about because it was underfunded and run down, but in financial terms it was hugely efficient.

The ideology isn't really about "free markets", it's about giving public money to donors, cronies, and - bizarrely - foreign businesses, because much of the privatised network is foreign-owned.

In fact the ideology is fundamentally about not spending public money on working people - because they're poor and inferior, they don't deserve it, and if life gets too comfortable for them they'll start talking back instead of knowing their place.

Over the decades the definition of "working" has expanded from "factory workers and semi-skilled" to formerly middle class professions like law and medicine.

Engineering has always been considered a low-status profession, as has competent - as opposed to venal and self-interested - management.

[mytailorisrich]

Ideology goes both ways... When Corbyn wanted to nationalise railways and in fact turn them into coops it was ideology as well. Throwing money at things without clear business case and ROI is ideology as well. Your comment is hitting at the Tories for the sake of it, frankly, which seems like ideology as well.

We need pragmatism.

Perhaps state-owned railways would deliver more value but most likely that would mean running the company on sound principles with high efficiency and private sector management principles, and no strikes (none of which is a given in the public sector, unfortunately).

[AlecSchueler]

We can also legislate without polarising catch all ideologies. It's not a dichotomy between two extremes of full free market or full public ownership.

[tialaramex]

Right, there are places where Free Market solutions worked, and equally we shouldn't go "That's bad, get rid of the Free Market". But I'm highlighting the Tory ideology in this case because (a) their ideology makes it impossible to just fix this and (b) they've had a long time in power to do so if they were able and prove me wrong.

The use of Contracts for Difference to fund renewable power generation is an example where ideology and practicality aligned. This is a Free Market solution which nicely matches the problem.

[CWIZO]

But there are tickets that are only valid for certain providers?

[tialaramex]

That's true, to do that they use a different hack and we can actually (very expensively) route those too.

These tickets are valid only on a particular service (and connections), since the franchises run the services they can sell tickets for services they run.

Example from a journey I made near Xmas:

  0908 from Bingley to Leeds (Northern Rail)

  0945 from Leeds to Kings Cross (LNER)

  1309 from Waterloo towards home (SWR)

The three franchises get 100% of their part of these routes, and I'm notionally forbidden from, say, getting on an XC to zigzag South and avoid London altogether instead.