London public transport: Overpriced and rubbish?

Question

Why does our public transport fare (no pun intended) worse than our European counterparts?

Answer 1

I never use public transport in London.

Cost per mile is higher than the cost of driving. I can take 3 passengers for free and we travel in (old) Mercedes comfort. I run the car on Belgian plates so I don't pay the congestion charge either.

Ian M

Answer 2

The best way to get around London is to use either the pay as you go Oyster card or season ticket Oyster card.

Answer 3

Every european sytem is very heavily subsidised by their governments via taxes, and some systems are state-owned and are regarded as high priorities in the national infrastrucure.  So they enjoy cheap fares and modern networks.

Here, successive governments have contributed comparitively little to London's public transport...they have always regarded it as a body which should ideally be self-funding. Since de-nationalisation in the 1980s, public transport has been a low priority for British Governments. Remember when Ken Livingstone tried to cut tube fares by half when he was leader of the GLC? The government said it was illegal and stopped it!

The only way the tube can now raise revenue is through high fares...and that still doesn't give it enough to up-date a very old system quickly and without disruption.

Answer 4

i don't live in london, but will be going for a day conference in september? i was horrified to find out how much a single tube fare is from zone 1 to zone 1 - £4. and a return is no cheaper. to get the cheap fares i need to buy a £12 oyster card. what a rip off!

Answer 5

When you draw comparisons, are you comparing like for like; all cities being different?  And are your own journeys typical?  And are you one of the many who want personal transport for the price of Public transport?  I suspect London;s transport problem is insoluble; too many people in too small a place, all expecting too much.  Answer?  Leave, go live in a small town.  Cities are over-rated.

Answer 6

Does it?  When you consider the size of what it covers and the number of people it caters for it I think it's not all that bad.  Don't get me wrong I complain when the tube is a minute late, when it's so hot on the tubes in the summer and when lines are closed for repairs.  However in the grand scheme of things the tubes are frequent and usually on time.  Then there are the DLR, trams, buses and trains that offer a great system.  Plus there is a night service of buses and trains.  I think, like anything there is room for improvement, but it is not the worst in Europe.

Answer 7

Its definately worth less than we pay for it. The transport here really pisses me off sometimes.

Answer 8

i think London has the BEST transportation in Europe

no other transit compares to its size or speed

the trains are only usually 4 Min's apart and they are usually on time.

the reason why its expensive is for security reasons the extra money is put into emergency helps systems that are the best you will find in the world.

i cant remember the name of the emergency help team but they are always alert and they did a fantastic job when the London bombings happened.

yeah there were paramedics and police there but the LU emergency service teams are the ones that are able to get under crushed trains and get people out safely from the most dangerous places if it wasn't for them on 7/7 the death toll of 52 would of much much much higher in the hundreds.

it might be expensive but it gets me where i want ot go quickly and i feel very safe it may be overpriced but remember the extra money you pay is what is getting you to your destination quickly and most importantly SAFELY !!.

and the London transport system must be good to some extent the underground alone carries over 2 billion passengers a year.

Answer 9

The reason for high fares here in UK on public transport, is due entirely to the fact that most of the companies are private operators with greedy shareholders who are only interested in profit and not inovation.

Meanwhile in France with it's magnificent state owned railway network, they have this. . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWd_xOyX5...

Answer 10

London underground was the first one of it's kind. So the rest of the world was able to learn from our mistakes

Answer 11

It's better than it was.

But how could you explain to a foreign tourist why a single underground journey (in zone 1) costs an extortionate £4? That could be a single stop journey. I couldn't explain it when asked.

Fares are regulated within London (which means within the M25 ring), on trains, but not elsewhere.

Rail privatisation was the worse thing to ever happen. The only gainers were the friends of the Conservatives.... their friends the 'experts' and other consultants who made fortunes.

In 1996 all the UK's passenger rolling stock was sold for £88 million to a single company.

6 months later, the same rolling stock was sold for over £900 million to Porterbrook. No clawback for the Treasury and remember these had been bought and paid for by the old BR, i.e. the taxpayer inn the first place! A new single 4 carriage electric passenger train costs about £1.1m. You can work out the profit margins when it was privatised for yourself.

That same company is the sole supplier of leased trains and charges extortionate rates for leasing along with one sided leasing contracts with heavy penalties for breaching its terms.

The Conservatives keep going on about 'value for taxpayers', but they are very quiet on that, or at least at the last general election when my local candidate, claimed it was a 'mistake'.Yeah right.Amnesia again.

The National Audit Office was scathing in its criticism of rail privatisation. You don't need a degree to know that the taxpayer was well ripped off.

To make it look good, the Conservatives deliberately starved the rail network of investment: remember those 1960's 'slam door' carriages still running in the late 1990's?!

You could also add the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which has been used to repair the tube. Metronet went bankrupt, so in effect the (London) taxpayer had to pay twice. Once under the contract and again when the company went under and the work either hadn't been carried out to a good enough standard or not carried out at all, yet still paid for.

It might be added here and PFI deals are inflexible and a very poor deal for the taxpayer.The borrowings don't appear in the Govt finances, so it can be 'claimed' to be cheaper.

If you are paying private firms more than twice what the old BR got in running costs from the Govt, how can that be a 'great deal'? Creative accounting.

Rail franchise contracts are notoriously lax in their enforcement. South West Trains cancelled 25% of their off-peak services some years ago, earning them a 'tap' on the wrist from the then Rail Regulator.

Several months later those services (due to overcrowding on the 75% still running) were re-instated. SWT got a bonus on top of its regular subsidy payments for increasing its services. They hadn''t increased anything though have they, yet they still got extra money?!

Trains that are less than 5 mins late aren't considered to be late, according to franchise agreements. Little comfort when your train is late and you miss a connecting service that runs hourly.

Connex South Eastern made such a mess with its franchise that after much handwringing (and several years) the Rail Regulator took it away. It was then owned by the state. Trains ran on time, fewer were cancelled and complaint letters decreased.

However the Rail Regulator readvertised the franchise and it was taken out of state control and given one company out of the tiny number who bid for these. You can guess what happened.Conservative dogma: private sector good (plenty of lucrative jobs), public sector bad (no pickings for us or our City boardroom mates).

Connex was a French company. I doubt the French Govt would have allowed it to get away with what it did in the UK and that goes for Deutsche Bahn in Germany, which is as far as I know partly privatised, but they seem to have much better lawyers writing their contracts. We could have used them in the UK.

Answer 12

Who says it does? Not many places in the world have a public transport system or a rapid transit network like the tube of a size that compares with London's, and few can compare in value.

Answer 13

Your all complete idiots.

The tube and the buses are brilliant. £4 for an off peak travel card in Zone 1 - 6? Come on, thats brilliant!

And Oystercards are even better. Cards cost £3, and from then on single journeys from Zone 1 to 6 cost £1.