Why is train travel so expensive in the UK?

sand_hun

A return ticket to my place of work costs about £30 per day. I can also get a Flexi ticket which lets me do 8 journeys in a 30-day period at a cost of £221. I am based in the Midlands.

I was in Budapest recently and their public transport system was world class. Regular buses (with digital signage at every stop). The trams and metro were efficient, clean and comfortable. Astonishingly it only cost £12 for a 15-day pass (covering buses, trams and metros). How do other countries get away with making public transport so affordable in comparison to the UK?

MattMattMattUK

sand_hun said:

A return ticket to my place of work costs about £30 per day. I can also get a Flexi ticket which lets me do 8 journeys in a 30-day period at a cost of £221. I am based in the Midlands.

I was in Budapest recently and their public transport system was world class. Regular buses (with digital signage at every stop). The trams and metro were efficient, clean and comfortable. Astonishingly it only cost £12 for a 15-day pass (covering buses, trams and metros). How do other countries get away with making public transport so affordable in comparison to the UK?

A combination of reasons. When comparing to Budapest wages will be far lower for everything for the staff operating the trains to the workers who built it in the first place. On a more strategic level because most other European countries did not privatise their rail services, they subsidise their rail services, they do not allow the unions to extort rail passengers with excessively high wages and because they have considerably lower population density it is a lot cheaper to build train lines. 

DullGreyGuy

Average subway driver there gets £18,500 whereas in London is £70,000. General station staff are on £15,000 whereas in London it's £35,000.

Tickets are more heavily subsidised by government. 

Budapest is a relatively small city meaning less buses, metro trains, stations etc are required and management is simpler resulting in less costs. 

Budapest is more the outlier than London though, compare a daily ticket for central London with Paris, Berlin, Barcelona or Madrid and they are all fairly similar, there's more variance in single ticket prices though. 

sand_hun

DullGreyGuy said:

Budapest is a relatively small city meaning less buses, metro trains, stations etc are required and management is simpler resulting in less costs. 

I don't think it's a small city. Say, in comparison to Birmingham, Budapest has a much larger area that one might consider to be the 'city centre'. Yet, over there a 15-day pass across multiple modes of transport is cheaper than a 1-day pass in the UK that restricts you to trains only.

ThorOdinson

It's not wages, it's commercial operators paying out big salaries to bosses and big dividends to shareholders. Much like with water, it's asset stripped, only a bit more restrained because the government can take the franchise off them. A bit.

daveyjp

I don't think comparing the UK to a country with far lower income is valid.  Compared to India Budapest is expensive.

It is down to political decisions.  You can choose to have a true public service which everyone pays into and everyone benefits from whether they use it or not, or you can choose to have a private service, provide a low level of subsidy from taxation and charge users more so the user pays more of the cost.

I was in Geneva recently and as a visitor staying in a hotel all Genevan public transport for my stay was free, however Swiss train walk up fares are not at all cheap.

MDMD

This is how fares get split (from a few years back)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46398947.amp

Herzlos

Privitization is a big one. In the UK most of the services are privately owned so a large chunk of the money (though I'd have thought it was more than 2%) goes to shareholders and CEO's.

State owned public transport doesn't have that layer of waste and the priority is to provide a good service and not provide profit.

MattMattMattUK

Herzlos said:

Privitization is a big one. In the UK most of the services are privately owned so a large chunk of the money (though I'd have thought it was more than 2%) goes to shareholders and CEO's.

2% is the profit, that could go to shareholders, or some could be retained. CEO's remuneration will be included in staff costs. There are issues with badly run private train services, especially as there is pretty much zero competition to drive efficiency.

Herzlos said:

State owned public transport doesn't have that layer of waste and the priority is to provide a good service and not provide profit.

The UK had issues with publicly run services as well which were hugely inefficient and dominated by union extortion of the taxpayer, so in effect we have just not been very good at running trains for the last sixty years regardless of the operator.