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• Season tickets now obsolete: we need flexible tickets now (Wired)
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That US tycoon’s vision will only work if he can get control of the tracks & make them safe for higher speeds.
iAt present, the US railroads, who have a long history of fouling theor own nests, are obstacles to that progress.
As for “non-season” tickets, it would appear that some of the TOC’s are dragging their feet badly – & there is always the fear of a Serpell-style mass closure of railways, especially given the ideological leanings of our present “government”. So unless they, the TOC’s & others, get their act together & push the “Clean & Electric” button, really hard, then railways, as we know them are going to be in for a very hard time.
Will they?
The problem with wanting cheap flexible tickets is that it’s a bit like wanting to pay the multipack price for something in a supermarket but only buying them one at a time. Season tickets are something developed in a very different world that almost certainly wouldn’t be introduced now if they didn’t already exist, and it never really made much sense commercially to give your cheapest rates to people who all wanted to travel at the same time and so required a wasteful over-provision of infrastructure that wasn’t needed at other times.
GT: as the article says, this tycoon does have that control.
@Andrew S
I’m not sure your analogy is accurate. More properly it would be that you buy a multipack at the supermarket but only want to take the items home one at a time. The important point is that you pay for the whole amount up front and the company has all your money at the outset. In rail terms it really doesn’t matter if you pay for 10 journeys and take two each on five successive days or on 5 days with gaps in between.
@Andrew S: a counter-argument is that a major social purpose which justifies local rail subsidies is commuter traffic, whereas leisure traffic is largely carried to extract potential revenue from otherwise idle assets and staff and to improve the overall utility of the network but is pretty much gravy as far as the business case goes, and so higher peak non-season fares are there to price off non-essential travel at that time.
Other methods to achieve that which spring to mind would be making public transport tickets for commuting tax deductible (though that would be a regressive subsidy, since poor people would get a smaller subsidy) or having employers give out season tickets as part of a beefed up version of s106. I’m sure better methods would be available, but carnet tickets (or their electronic equivalent) have the advantage of being an old solution (so easy to justify by historical or overseas examples) and requiring less change to existing arrangements.