Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
For sure. I currently live in the US (fairly rural) and I would kill to have my transportation-related costs reduced to about $150/mo. But where I live, I simply need to have a car to do any basic thing since the moment I step off my driveway, there aren’t even footpaths.
I live in the Netherlands and have absolutely no need for this ticket. When I need to go somewhere, I just walk or bike there, never takes more than 20 minutes. I cannot even imagine living in American suburbia
I moved here from The Netherlands in 2004, and have now lived in Florida, California, and Mississippi and stayed for prolonged periods in many US cities for my job. I wouldn’t feel safe riding a bicycle anywhere here considering the speed of traffic, the size of the vehicles, and lack of dedicated biking infrastructure. It’s a completely different world when you share the road with angry F150 drivers blasting past you at 80 MPH. No, thank you.
I live in American suburbia and that's how I live. I can walk or bike whenever I feel like it, drive if it suits me. I sometimes wonder what the average European assumes American suburbia to be. Endless tract homes? Such places do exist, true. But that is far from universal.
I'd be curious what metropolitan area you live in for this to be true! If you're not comfortable sharing for privacy reasons, that's all right. But it seems like this is the case in inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast megalopolis.
Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?
In most of my jobs in Europe(Austria specifically) I couldn't walk to my workplace because most tech companies in my current city put their offices in ugly concrete industrial techno parks outside the city where I don't want to live, meaning driving to work mostly as public transportation there is slow busses only every 30 minutes or one hour of biking. Similarly my GF needs to drive 40 minutes to work outside the city, to one of the few employers in her field. Not everyone lives and works in the city center to be able to walk to work.
So walking to work is such a weird and subjective metric since not all companies in everyone's' area of work will be clustered in your vicinity of your house unless you're lucky or you make active efforts to keep moving close to work which might be in undesirable areas for living.
>your doctor
My current one yeah, but she's terrible and to change her, the only one I found that accepts new patients is on the other side of town so no walking there either, unless I like walking for an hour each direction every time.
MY point is Europe can be highly spread out as well, with people and businesses fleeing inner cities due to space constraints and rent costs, leading to commute distances too long to walk economically. That's why you see traffic jams at highway ramps at rush hour. It's not like those people were too stupid to realize they could walk to work instead of driving if that was an option.
It is though, like, 90-95% of suburbia, and why the US has close to 100% of car commuters ( https://vis.csh.ac.at/citiesmoving/ ). Even small cities like Rennes (or even Clermont-Ferrand, which has objectively mediocre transit) have less car commuters than NYC, which is insane.
I mean even just perusing around a lot of metro areas on Google Maps its by far the norm. I know its by far the norm for just about every metro I've spent more than a week or two in.
Definitely not universal, no. And in some place the "norm" can be pretty different, even in somewhat surprising locales. But generally speaking? Yeah, pretty terrible experience for a lot of pedestrians and cyclists in US suburbia.
I mean, most places I've visited traveling around the US suburbia, bike lanes were practically non-existent, there was zero notable public transit at all, and sidewalks were usually an afterthought if they existed at all.
I already have the NS Flex free weekend subscription (with 1st class addition) and it's the only way for me to travel longer distances. It's also just about the only available public transport in the neighbourhood because I live in a polder.
Nearest train station is a 35 minute walk, nearest supermarkets are almost an hour walk. One advantage, before Covid and I had groceries delivered, mandatory walking back and forth three times a week to the village did wonders for losing weight.
That means you never leave your town of residence. I am Dutch too, and I walk and cycle (of course), but I have friend and family elsewhere too, want to visit other nature, cities and countries as well.
I mostly use a car since it's so much cheaper and faster than public transport, but I bought this ticket in order to do some longer distance journeys as well. I don't really like driving.
I work with a guy from holland. There, he lived in a condo. Here, he owns 40-acers, a couple horses and is trying to grow his own corn. He can play out his rural lifestyle dreams and still work a desk in a city, something that isnt an option without personal transportation. (I would say "car", but he rides an R1 to work most days.)
To be a little provocative, yes British train prices are very expensive in comparison but they perhaps also show that heavy subisidies to make tickets dirt cheap may not be the most useful use of resources: People can pay and will pay more than a few tens of euros per month. As long as that holds true what is the case for more subsidies?
As a resident of the UK, and reasonably well off, I can definitely attest that the price definitely changes my usage.
I will always get the slow 2 hour train into London rather than the faster 1.25 hour train because it's 1/2 to 1/3 the price. The peak hours slow train is approximately double the price, the peak hours fast train is about triple the price compared to off peak.
The local train to the next city (20 miles away) is £7.50 return if you want to arrive any time before 7.15pm. After that it's £3.50 for the same journey.
Almost every time I travel on British trains, it feels like I'm being ripped off. And then to add insult to injury, probably 50% of the times I travel, there's some problem that causes the trains to be delayed or cancelled. Or then there's often the first off-peak train of the day that is so full, it's not only standing room only, it's so packed you can't even move in the aisle. It's just 2 hours of standing, hoping that the train doesn't break down again and that the aircon keeps working.
And then you go abroad, everything seems to run on time, everything is cheap - often priced by kilometre of track travelled regardless what time of day it is, and the experience just feels pleasant.
As long as that happens what is the case for reaming the customer for as much as they can afford to pay, possibly forcing some customers to choose not travel at all even when there are plenty of empty seats?
> I will always get the slow 2 hour train into London rather than the faster 1.25 hour train because it's 1/2 to 1/3 the price. The peak hours slow train is approximately double the price, the peak hours fast train is about triple the price compared to off peak.
So you still take the train?
Fast trains into London (which are indeed very expensive, I won't dare state the price not to shock our European friends) are completely packed at rush hour and busy all the time, in my experience.
My point is that there is quite a bit of elasticity, especially for commute so that as long as people can afford the tickets and do use the service then subsidies to lower the price drastically probably aren't a productive use of resources when taxpayer's money could be put to better use because nothing is actually free ("because cheaper tickets" is not a valid justification for subsidies).
There may be a sweet spot but I really think that beyond a certain point taxes and subsidies to reduce prices are just a waste and don't make any differences, and I think we are in that territory in a number of locations in Europe.
I think seeing it as a market introduces the kind of biases and distortions that make the British system so incredibly expensive, and now also unreliable.
This is not the market for some fruit or some generic consumer good, with competition at all levels and a very flexible incentive structure that will move resources around to make the product as good and as cheap as possible, creating even different grades where demand justifies it.
This is more a piece-wise single provider structure that only has incentives to extract as much money as possible from the user, and substitute services are also pushed up indiscriminately by the government/regulators hierarchy, that sees them as a politically manageable way to fund massive pressure groups.
The NHS works under similar incentives and is also way out of hand by now.
Internally, the incentive to improve processes and infrastructure is much diminished by the fact that money isn't allocated on value or even perceived value, but established budgets that actually get locally lost if they are not spent, so oftentimes spending more for the same is better. Any improvement or extra budget allocation is a power struggle between localities and political pressure groups.
Trying to introduce competition has also been a massive failure. You have companies outsourcing as much of the maintenance as possible to the infrastructure regulator, squatting lesser profitable lines with skeleton-crew service, and actively impeding the entry of other operators.
It's not a matter of subsidies, sweet-spot for prices and passenger capacity. It's much deeper than that.
The Dutch system is primarily public and primarily operated by NS which is a public operator. The Japanese system is primarily private and operated by private companies, and the regulator has a tight control over it. The British system is hard to even categorise. It's a flailing mish-mash of public/private operation that goes back and forth and that is incompetently regulated.
My point is not related to seeing it as a market (although in most cases it is broadly one because it "competes" against other means of transportation).
It is a question of how to pay for the cost of things, allocation of resources, subsidies, best use of taxpayers' money, not least when public finances are under high strain and/or huge structural investments are needed in many countries.
but that is a market you are describing, one for the allocation of resources
it isn't really, the resources are created by the structure commercialising the service, and incidentally the other means of transportation are also made expensive by a connected structure
owning and operating a car in the UK is very expensive, esp. if you need to regularly park it near the most important economic centres, and this is also by design
more than a market, it's engineered scarcity and tax collection running this service and that is what they're maximising for, instead of economy of transportation which is perhaps the implied real metric of what would work as a market
Yeah. Yesterday I had to go in for a meeting with my client. I went "off peak" which meant not getting there before 10am. The alternative is "super off peak" which is only for trains arriving after 1pm. That "off peak" was already double the price of "super off peak" and the train wasn't close to being empty, but there were spare seats. If I'd needed to get there for a 9am meeting, it'd have been about double the price again.
If I compare this to China (just because I travel on the trains there quite a lot whenever I visit), they have a simple price structure - it's all per kilometre (and so weirdly, the quickest trains are often slightly cheaper as they've gone a shorter route), and have 4 set prices - first class (very comfortable, lots of room), VIP (even more space and only the front 8 seats of the train), second class (about the same standard as UK trains) and standing. Occasionally there's also a business class seat too.
An example of the prices, I just checked the app online. For Shenzhen to Guangzhou (136km), the next train is a 90 minute journey. The price of the standing seat and the second class are the same, first class is 25% higher, VIP seat is first class plus 50%, business seat is VIP plus 100%. If you pay for a seat, you get allocated seating and nobody would dream of sitting in your seat and not moving. The base price in this example is second class at about £8 for the journey, the most expensive ticket is about £28.
There is a bullet train half an hour later that takes 30 minutes for the same journey, because it goes a more direct route, it's cheaper and the second class ticket is under £5. This also has sleeping cabins (not useful on this route as it's between 2nd and 3rd stations on a very long journey) which is about £24.
Standing tickets used to be priced at a discount, but they seem to be the same as the second class tickets nowadays. I guess this discourages people from getting them (there are over 10 trains per hour for this route, so you'd just pick a different train) but it means your expectations about sitting or standing are made up front when buying the ticket and if you absolutely have to get on the train and don't mind standing, you can. But most people would wait for the next train.
Obviously, the peak time trains can sell out quickly, so people book earlier or later as required for a train with availability. Normally, tickets go on sale exactly 2 weeks early, but even on the day there's usually seating availability on one of those "local" services (like this one that's just under 100 miles) within the hour, and for the long distance ones there's usually some availability same day, maybe just at an inconvenient time. But the prices are the same whenever travel, so it's about choosing a ticket that works right for you.
Also, because the prices of all the tickets are the same, even though you have pre-booked tickets, there's more flexibility. Every ticket can be changed for free once before you travel, so if you get to the station early and there are seats available on the train you want, you can cancel yours and get those seats without penalty. Even more amazingly, if you miss your train, you can still cancel it and rebook a later train with only a 20% penalty, as long as you do it within 24 hours of your scheduled departure.
Yes, Chinese trains are subsidised, but it's a wonderful service. Delays do happen, but nowhere near as bad as the UK, on a 4-5 hour journey over 1000+ kilometers I've sometimes been a few minutes late.
Mind you, aviation in China is also amazing. I remember deciding one day while travelling to bail on a city because the weather forecast was another week of rain. I got a ticket for a 1500 km flight (2.5 hours) the day before the flight for £100, which is comparable to the cost of a train but about twice as fast (I think it would have been 7 hours). The airlines aren't subsidised, but these do sell out around busy periods like public holidays and the prices can balloon at those times.
But anyway, the elasticity in China is done on seat availability, not pricing. If a train is full, you book another one, so if a specific time is important to you, you book further in advance. But whenever you book, if you have a ticket, at least it's going to be a pleasant journey and reasonably priced. Sometimes if a train is unexpectedly sold out, about an hour or two before departure they'll add an extra carriage or two to increase capacity, and again this tickets are priced at the standard price.