To think that something has gone seriously wrong with our public transport policy if despite high petrol prices its now cheaper for me to drive to work?

[headfairy]

Last week I was on a course so didn't have to go up to town and I'm probably coming to these train fare rises a bit late.... My single train fare is now more expensive than driving to and from work (I get my transport home paid for as I usually finish work after midnight)

Thats got to be all wrong hasn't it? If only from an environmental point of view.

yes although have you added the per mile cost of owning a car - tax/insurance/repairs/MOT etc. Not just petrol.
But generally agree. Public transport if too expensive, especially for families.

Same here. It costs £12.50 on the train to do a 28 mile round trip from Eastbourne to Lewes - less than a fiver's worth of fuel. It would cost £25 for my DH and I to go on the train for a night out, a journey costing 5 times less in the car

I've always felt this way.

Around here (Wiltshire and Somerset) it's always been far cheaper to drive.

Adding on the time it takes you to get to the bus stop, waiting around in the cold for a bus that may or may not turn up there's abosultelty no reason to use public transport.

YANBU.

We have no public transport policy - we just have packs of greedy self serving corporations screwing the public.

We cannot carry on as we are. We have to re-nationalise the trains or heavily subsidise them as they do in Europe.

I pity anyone from overseas trying to negotiate their way around our idiotic ticketing system too.

YADNBU!

Our Christmas travel was all done on a single tank of petrol (£60) and would have cost around £280 quid by train.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that flying is cheaper than the train. For my recent business trip it would have been 3x as expensive to go by train. Surely it has to be more fuel efficient to travel by train than to fly?

WTF is going on?

Its not just petrol though. Add in all the other stuff.

I suppose it's different if you work in London as you have the hassle of congestion charge, parking etc. But I live 14 miles from the centre of London and used to pay 2K a year for the privilege of having a small standing space in someone's sweaty armpit on the train.

yanbu , before dd got her car we were £60 a week to send her to college , her pertrol lasts 3 times that , and even with her insurance it all worked out cheaper over the year ,

Kalskirata, I already have the car. The tax, MOT, insurance etc cost me the same whether I do 10 miles a year or 100,000. The only additional cost is the increased cost of wear and tear

Yanbu

There's no point in adding in all the other expenses of owning a car unless your public transport system is so good that you would give up owning a car and use buses/trains all the time.

Most people use public transport alongside their car ownership so the ticket price/petrol price comparison is generally valid.

yep prices are crazy.
I needed to get to Liverpool in a hurry recently - last minute work thing - a standard return was nearly £300 - i could fly to NY for that

As Nigel says the cars already taxed and insured.... No congestion charge as we're just outside the zone, and free parking at the moment, so just a little bit of extra wear and tear to factor in....

YABU. Most people who own a car tend to only count the cost of the petrol and parking. You need to count what a whole year of motoring costs including insurance, road tax, MOT, repairs, tyres, parking, financing and depreciation then divide by the number of days you use your car.

I have not driven for over 20 years and take a lot of taxis and use public transport and walk and occassional train. My total annual transport costs are far far less than owning a car.

That said, I do wish train fares were regulated in siuch a way that there was a standard fixed price per ticket to cover the cost of issuing it and upkeep of the station plus (eg fuel and staff on the train). Economic theory says that the On-peak travellers should also pay for the capital cost of the train so that would need to be added either as a fixed or per mile tariff to On peak ticket prices.

There are far too many different fares and it makes it near impossible for travellers to make an informed choice.

YANBU. I had to use public transport for four months after an operation last year and I hated every second of it - the waiting around in the cold and wet, people smmoking in the bus shelters, buses running 45 minutes late, not being able to get on with a buggy, not being able to sit down with DS if I didn't bring his buggy, having to take out £20 and get change for a bus ticket when I don't normally carry around cash, getting mugged at a bus stop, taking 10 times as long to get anywhere and do anything than it did by car. I know it pollutes the atmosphere etc. but I am never voluntarily getting on a bus again.

TYPO:.... plus a per mile tariff to cover costs of running the train (eg fuel and staff on the train).

YANBU.

Even considering costs other than petrol and parking, I'm sure there are many journeys that are cheaper by car. Especially if you consider that you own a car anyway, a particular journey where you could choose either the train or the car is not going to add to the costs you already have to pay if you choose the car.

We always drive when we go into London (about a two hour journey), whether it's dh, two children and I, or just me and dh. It is always cheaper to drive than to get train tickets, even if we walk to and from ten station at out home end, and considering congestion charge and central London parking.

Plus it's more comfortable. It's a no brainier really.

We do heavily subsidise the rail industry. I think it was Private Eye that pointed out that the government has handed over "invested" more in the rail industry than they ever did when it was a nationalised industry. The difference is that now those subsidies help to prop up the profit line of private companies.

YANBU. I used to live in Tokyo which has a huge, efficient and reasonably priced transport network, so did not bother having a car for years - a combination of trains, buses, taxis and my bike worked fine. Even once we got a car, it was often cheaper and easier to use public transport.

But I am now in a UK city with notoriously bad public transport. Even though I live centrally, and within ten minutes' walk of a dozen or so bus routes, I still use a car far more than I would like because of the expense and unreliability of the buses. It costs more for a return bus trip (only half a dozen or so stops) for me and two DCs to the new shopping/ entertainment centre than it costs to park there for about four hours, and the trip by bus would take about 40 minutes (inc walking to the bus stop) compared to 10 minutes by car.

YABU

Factor in the cost of using up finite resources; causing congestion to others (which costs the economy millions of pounds a year); being the recipient of congestion; spread out the cost of insurance, MOT, wear & tear, the initial cost of the vehicle... because people get hit with lump sums when using private vehicles it's very difficult to work out the true cost of ownership (and I factor myself into this - it's one thing to look at a research report saying public transport is more cost-effective and quite another to apply it to my transport use).

WRT train tickets, buying earlier makes it a lot cheaper, which I know doesn't work for many business trips. We have the most aggressively cheap and aggressively expensive train tickets in Europe, with not much in the middle. On Friday I got into London from Newcastle for £9.95 (with railcard). DP (no railcard) cost £15.

If anyone is interested the Stern Review is very readable and really makes the case for travelling by public transport. In a nutshell he says that if we don't act now (and by now he meant 2006) and spend 1% of GDP changing our behaviours we're going to end up in a series of resource wars by 2050.

The problem with making the rail industry more efficient is a) the govt don't write tough enough franchises (e.g. make the companies purchase more trains... although the companies are also restricted in what trains they can use as they lease them from a third part of the rail sector) and b) many parts of the network are running at full capacity, particularly in London and the SE, yet we can't put on the larger trains they have on the continent (double decker) because the UK gauge is too small. To fit those trains onto our network we'd need to raise every bridge, tunnel and all the wiring in the country, which could work (at exorbitant cost) outside cities but, especially in London, will never happen as so much is built over the railway that can't be moved.

YADNBU - but it is incredibly variable depending on whether you can game the system with tickets in advance for what you need.

I do take into account all the costs associated with my car per mile (extremely anoraky about these things) and all in, it will cost me about 35p (20p of that is fuel) per mile assuming I keep the car for 6 years (I bought it when it was 5 years old). On my motorbike it's very similar at 34p per mile.

My daily 30 mile round trip commute therefore costs about £10 if I use my own transport.

The for this journey would be £7.20 return. That's good - but I do seem to be on a very cheap route and would be a slave to a very variable service.

However, if there was more than one person, the car is cheaper. That in my opinion is a little counterproductive. Equally the park and ride near me charges per person for the bus, not per car - again, stupid policy.

I've found train fares range from the astonishingly cheap (in advance I got a trip to Torquay from Cambridge return for £30) to the downright ridiculous (full fare on the day the day working out at £300 for a 450 mile round trip). There are just too many options and the entire system needs a lot of simplification.

That should say 'the train for this journey' - sorry

By the way, anyone who says 'additional journeys cost no extra' is deluding themselves. The only way to truly measure cost is taking account all the costs of running your vehicle over the time you own it and divide it by the mileage you do.

Of course, by doing additional long journeys in your car, you may well be bringing the average cost down (i.e. the depreciation cost depending on when you bought the car is potentially going to be similar irrespective of the amount of miles you put on the car).