Train costs overseas

[mjf981]

Since moving to Australia, one of the big surprises is how cheap train travel is. It’s brilliant, even outside of the cities. I was just looking at a trip to Armidale from Sydney (an 8 hour trip), and the cost is about 26 quid one way!! We’re so lucky, I paid more than that to travel to Brighton from London 5 years ago. The Australian government must massively subsidise this I’m guessing?

Many places have far better and cheaper public transport than the UK. A big difference is when it is seen as an essential public service rather than a commercial venture to be profited from.

I've travelled around Andalucia on public transport quite a bit and it is incredibly cheap. The standard city/suburban bus fare was about 40 cents, if you got the card that was sold everywhere for a token sum, and this was further discounted if you got on a second bus within an hour. A return journey to the city that would cost at least £4 in the UK was about 60/70 p for an equivalent journey. Longer distance buses were about £5 return, trains £30/40 for journeys that could cost 5 times that here or even more.

It's also a vicious circle because impractical, inflexible and expensive public transport pushes people towards car ownership and once someone owns a car, they've probably spent about 80% of the cost whether they use it or not so only have to compare petrol with public transport, so in most cases, providing that they can park for a reasonable price and traffic isn't too awful, the car wins, especially if more than one person is travelling.

I can occasionally get a decently priced public transport option that is comparable in speed with the car, but most of the time, the car wins.

I stayed in Uppsala earlier this year. I had a ticket that covered the trams/buses and the train for 2.5 hours, sufficient to get into town, take a train to Stockholm and a tram at the other end for less than it would cost to park at Bedford station.