Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
Inflation busting fare rise
BBC: London travel fares to increase
I add insult to injury to those poor souls on the over-priced hamster wheel of London, they'll
be paying more to be treated worse than cattle. Were'nt congestion charges meant to help
keep charges down ?
Posted by doomwatch @ 10:33 AM (632 views) Add Comment
15 Comments
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1. crunchy said...
Deflation will win through. lol
2. mark wadsworth said...
Why does everybody indulge in one-sided economics where London Transport is concerned (which, all things considered is a fantastic system)?
Either we complain that it's overcrowded or that it's too expensive. But you can't have it both. If they made it even cheaper, it'd be even more crowded; if you want it less crowded, then they could double the prices to reduce the number of commuters by maybe ten per cent. If they expand the network (like the new-ish Jubilee line extension) it only takes a couple of years before people adjust their commuting patterns and now that line is as crowded as any other.
Any-hoo, what do I care? If they put up ticket prices, then all things being equal, house prices will go dowm, so it's swings and roundabouts.
3. rumble said...
This is good. People need to be encouraged away from the mighty gutter.
4. doomwatch said...
Wow, here's an incredible idea. Maybe businesses should be encouraged to re-locate outside the over-priced
ripp off, queue for everything, looney parking mess that is London.
5. need-a-crash said...
@4. "Queue for everything"
I gave up using the underground a few years ago. Life's too short to keep doing that to yourself. I mean if you live on one side of London don't take a job on the other side!
Anyway on the subject of queuing I'd never queued to use a cash machine before I moved to London but now it's rare that I ever find one with fewer than 2 people already waiting!
6. crunchy said...
"Queue for everything"
Queueing for a house.
7. uncle tom said...
There is absolutely no justification for those who don't travel having to subsidise those who do.
Rail is so hopelessly uneconomic, it would need an average ticket price hike of over £3 per journey just to break even, despite the railways generating no tax revenue, unlike their competition from the coach operators. Most suburban overground rail lines would function better if they were converted into express coach routes.
A good government would want to reduce home to work journey times, by encouraging the co-existence of living and working space; and of working from home. There are sound economic, social, and environmental arguments for such a policy - yet no proper statistics seem to be kept, and no political party pays the subject any serious attention..
8. cat and canary said...
London underground fayres need to go up... to pay for the pay rises of the drivers who recently went on strike for 2 days, completely crippling travel across london, forcing poor folks to spend hours stuck on the roads trying to get to work.
They striked because they argued that £40,000 per year wasn't enough money for the expertise of driving a tube train, (that's 90% computer controlled anyway).
9. crunchy said...
7. uncle tom
Spot on.
The penalisations continue but the rewards/incentives are completely missing. Why?
"A good government would want to reduce home to work journey times, by encouraging the co-existence of living and working space; and
of working from home." Spot on again! Our government seem hell bent to do quiet the opposite and to think that I have only taken receipt
of my new "green" recycling bin yesterday. Taxation and penalisations without improvement or "real" rewards/incentives is starting to bug
me too.
10. mark wadsworth said...
@ Uncle Tom: "despite the railways generating no tax revenue"
What railways do, is boost land values (this is a simple observable fact, and has been noticed ever since the railway was invented), ergo, they do boost Business Rates revenues, more people find more/better jobs and pay more income tax etc. See also the dicussion on how Crossrail should be financed.
In my parallel universe, where we replace as many taxes as possible with Land Value Tax, we'd be able to make a fair comparison, and we'd probably find that £1 of subsidy to railways boosts LVT revenues by about £10.
11. timmy t said...
If we had LVT then businesses would be encouraged to have smaller premises and get their people to work from home. Wasn't the internet supposed to transform the way we work - when will this happen then?
Crunch - are penalisations anything like penalties?
12. crunchy said...
11. timmy t
No they are far more painful especially when they get under your skin.
13. ontheotherhand said...
I cycle to work so don't have a vested interest in the tube, but I do hate the way London is not allowed to keep any of its wealth to reinvest in infrastructure to get the worker bees to their place of production smoothly. Fine that over 65% of the economy anywhere outside the southeast is government spending sponsored by London salaries, so long as London finally gets Crossrail after 20 years, or perhaps a few new express lines built along the existing tunnels to interchanges. So I say put the prices up, fine, but invest some of our money in infrastructure please.
14. Yum2yum said...
But when you are pulling in multi six figure bonuses and sitting on 1 mill plus of equity, who cares?
15. shipbuilder said...
In the corporatocracy, work/life balance is no more than another buzz term. Happy citizens don't make for big profits. In a country that sees the longest working hours in Europe as a positive and where the CBI jump at every news opportunity to label their employees as lazy potential skivers, it's hardly surprising that working from home isn't on the agenda or indeed anywhere near it.