Seen elsewhere

Let’s talk about trains. I am not pondering on the British government’s go-ahead for a high speed railway or that it will only connect a very small number of cities with London. I am not considering why the project will be funded publicly when future profits will presumably go into the private operators’ coffers. I am not stating my bemusement at the fact that in fourteen years’ time we will have trains that only reach the same speeds that certain trains in Europe already achieve or exceed today.

No, let’s talk about the convenience of public transport and let’s call it public even though it is no longer public. The hop on-hop off concept is alluring, except that in Britain we are being discouraged from using public transport in such a chaotic, disorderly way. We are being punished if we board a train without a ticket and this is effectively a punishment for using public transport. Of course, we have long become accustomed to the fact that train tickets bought on the day of the journey are substantially more expensive than those bought in advance. There is no good reason for this practice, apart from what they call optimising profits from a “public” service.

In a perverse way, though, the restrictions make sense: If the train operators do not allow passengers to purchase tickets on the trains, they can do away with attendants completely. It is a variation on the cheap-cheap-cheap theme, which has been plaguing us for years. We can get cheap but we cannot get service or quality, which ultimately means that cheap becomes very expensive for the consumer but is very profitable for the providers.

Perhaps it is all a historical inevitability. Rail travel first became big in Britain and yet today we have one of the worst rail networks in Europe. Or take workers’ rights and working conditions. Karl Marx started his movement out of Britain and yet today working conditions, working hours and pay must be among the worst in Europe.

Other countries take a different approach to rail travel. They encourage passengers to use public transport by making the act of purchasing a ticket easy and flexible. When I visited Austria recently, a small ad in a newspaper caught my eye. It read “Buy your tickets on the train without the premium”. Now there is an idea.

British train operators should see this as a lesson in customer service.

—-

You might also like: