License fee gone 2027

[Fambo Number Mive]

The deregulated rail system is similar to the health system in America. Profiteering, high prices, poor service and multi tiered pricing that is surely designed to confuse and bewilder. A total shit show. The supposed efficiencies (if they exist at all) are sucked up by the shareholders.

The end user is always the enemy with the conservatives. Always.

It's best to start with the assertion that whatever the Tories are up to will be designed to fuck over the majority. And then build your opinions based on that.

Exactly. For example the Super Off Peak tickets but it's never clear when you can use them and I think they differ among train companies (may be wrong) so I never get them even though I might be travelling at times when I can use them.

And how even during a pandemic they still keep first class so on some trains only seven of the nine carriages can be used unless you want to pay a lot more money, increasing the risk of spreading covid.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The significant difference in rail vs healthcare is the shareholders are, generally speaking state-owned transport companies though any profit siphoned off doesn't even go to a fatcat, it makes transit better in France, Netherlands and Germany... good on 'em for the grift and that.

Then there's the obvious nonsense where the state publicly owns the losses of these inept providers, brings them back to a profitable standard, only to sell them off again.

[Ferris]

One of the joys of cost cutting is that they can't afford ticket inspectors so you can super off peak on the way to work. I've told them I'm Canadian (technically true) and don't understand the system (also true) and they've been lenient.

If they were publicly owned I'd pay my fare every time. If I can stick to privateers and those flipping Europeans by dodging the odd ticket, then I will.

Now I'm saying this, every station probably has those barriers now don't they so you probably can't do this any more. Bastard tory cunts

[Sebastian Cobb]

One of the joys of cost cutting is that they can't afford ticket inspectors so you can super off peak on the way to work. I've told them I'm Canadian (technically true) and don't understand the system (also true) and they've been lenient.

If they were publicly owned I'd pay my fare every time. If I can stick to privateers and those flipping Europeans by dodging the odd ticket, then I will.

Now I'm saying this, every station probably has those barriers now don't they so you probably can't do this any more. Bastard tory cunts

I don't now what it's like in Canada but Britain loves a technical solution, which means ticket gateways or assuming you travelled through every zone without tapping out.

Although I am taken back to this exchange in our teenage years:
us: "5 returns to Selly Oak please"
inspector: "here you go"
us: "These are only singles?"
inspector: "you're out on the piss getting the last train back aren't you?"
us: "yes"
inspector: "nobody bothers to inspect the last train lads <wink>"

[Ferris]

Yeah as I was typing it I realized the last time I used a train/tube in the UK was several years ago and I vaguely remember having to get off at specific non-barrier stations. They're probably all like that now.

Canada gets around this by refusing to have any kind of usable rail system at all, so there's no fares to dodge. Pretty clever!

[Fambo Number Mive]

Northern Rail is currently nationalised isn't it?

Let's hope this will mean longer trains and more frequent services, although given a Tory government is in power I doubt it. Wonder how Tory "Red Wall" MPs feel about their government's attitude towards local rail services.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Northern Rail is currently nationalised isn't it?

Let's hope this will mean longer trains and more frequent services, although given a Tory government is in power I doubt it. Wonder how Tory "Red Wall" MPs feel about their government's attitude towards local rail services.

They re-nationalised stuff fairly recently didn't they? I think before that there was one railway the (david cameron era) tories owned and sold off, at the time it was the only rail service making a decent profit. I'm relying on hazy memory here but I think it might've been in the South-West?

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah as I was typing it I realized the last time I used a train/tube in the UK was several years ago and I vaguely remember having to get off at specific non-barrier stations. They're probably all like that now.

Canada gets around this by refusing to have any kind of usable rail system at all, so there's no fares to dodge. Pretty clever!

Isn't Canada quite good with buses or is that just in comparison to the US (I realise this graphic is cherry-picking)?

[privatefriend]

That's except for viewers in Scotland who've got their own programmes.

[Sebastian Cobb]

That's except for viewers in Scotland who've got their own programmes.

What I like about living in Glasgow is the choice of Stagecoach, First, McGills and those shitty red buses (premier?). It's really great to have to traverse several operators.

[Ferris]

Isn't Canada quite good with buses or is that just in comparison to the US (I realise this graphic is cherry-picking)?

The bigger cities are good (Toronto is the only one I have real knowledge of, but Ottawa-Gatineau, Montréal and Halifax's transit systems have all felt my arse upon their seats at one point or another). I've used transit in the US in Virginia, DC and New York and those systems are definitely worse (dirtier, more expensive, less frequent etc because they've siloed as a service for poor people so we can do a shit job) but still ok.

It's when you go outside cities it is a total disaster. For kicking about and going to the shops, it's alright. If you have to be somewhere by a certain time, I'd walk. If I want to go to the other side of the harbour (10 minutes in a car) it can take literally hours.

Longer distance trains are also not great. They have to go so much further so it's understandable but it can take 24hrs to get to Toronto from the coast (or a 90 minute flight), and the train is usually slightly more expensive. They really don't make much sense as an option. Ontario has some commuter trains that are alright, but all in all the UK (and Europe in general tbh) is light years ahead.

Transit, cycling, walking as a means to get somewhere just baffles people over here. Tell them you don't have a car (like us) and they look at you like you've two heads.

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's when you go outside cities it is a total disaster. For kicking about and going to the shops, it's alright. If you have to be somewhere by a certain time, I'd walk. If I want to go to the other side of the harbour (10 minutes in a car) it can take literally hours.

Much like my experience in Britain outside London tbh.

Something I noticed moving from Aberdeen to Glasgow was how much more tolerant of cyclists drivers are. The local 'active travel' groups still (more-or-less rightly) paint a picture of cyclists being bullied by people in massive cars, but the difference is night and day. Glasgow has much greater traffic density but I feel I'm generally given a wider berth.

[Midas]

If Northern has been re-nationalised, why is it still awful?

Was on a Northern train last week.

Big old cattle wagon. Juddering through the Yorkshire smog. Stagnant pool to my left. Burning slag heap to my right. All around, jagged mountains of grey. In station. Brief moment, not of peace, but of reduced noise. Outside. Gaunt men on platform watch me, suspiciously. Trembling dog on chain pisses on bin-bag stacked in remains of shopping trolley. Inside. Passengers pile in. Someone gags. Train convulses, then the racket starts up again. Sky becomes black with plumes of smoke. Station becomes a distant smudge. Only on a Northern train will you feel seasickness on land.

At my stop. Door malfunctions and won't open. Seconds later, the train has set off again and I have to wait until the next station, climb out the window, and get another train back home, by which point all the shops have closed so I have to fish tin cans out of the recycling and make a broth by rinsing soup dregs out into a bucket.

[mothman]

This is the age of the train!

[Sebastian Cobb]

I reckon the most #deso experience I've ever had was being pinned into the corner of a pacer while the large woman next to me stunk up the carriage eating a burger king out her handbag in 25c+ summer weather.

[checkoutgirl]

Tell them you don't have a car (like us) and they look at you like you've two heads.

There was an episode of Always Sunny where a character was eventually judged to have learning difficulties. One of the pieces of information that made the gang draw this conclusion was that he didn't drive.

[Ferris]

Much like my experience in Britain outside London tbh.

Something I noticed moving from Aberdeen to Glasgow was how much more tolerant of cyclists drivers are. The local 'active travel' groups still (more-or-less rightly) paint a picture of cyclists being bullied by people in massive cars, but the difference is night and day. Glasgow has much greater traffic density but I feel I'm generally given a wider berth.

Interesting. I feel like I get decent space on roads but only because everyone is so polite and I'm a bit of a novelty. Look at this simpleton on his velocipede - it's not his fault Dave, give him lots of room.

You can largely make your way around the UK unassisted if you're hopping from town to town, down to some pretty tiny towns. If I wanted to travel from Edinburgh to Walsall, I can do it by train and walking. I can't really do that city to city here - I need a car and plane tickets just to get to the next largest city west and that's with several million people. Towns under 500k, you can forget it.

The UK has a very impressive rail network, when it's not shitting itself.

[Gurke and Hare]

Towns under 500k, you can forget it.

Isn't that mostly because of the population density? Even if you don't approach it with a strict business head on you don't get much social benefit from building a railway line between two tiny towns 200 miles apart with fuck all in between them.

[Gurke and Hare]

I swear I've been hanging around you lot too long. Because while it feels like an open goal for Labour to say up front right now, everyone loves the BBC, it's one of the best things about the UK (etc., you know the drill), a Labour government will renew the charter yadda yadda... part of me thinks the current Labour leadership won't want to, so as not to offend all the anti-licence fee headbangers. Who'll never vote Labour anyway, but still.

"The Tories want to abolish The Archers" could cut through with the oldies.

[Psybro]

I travelled from New York to Philadelphia in a big loop via Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago and St Louis without a car and the sheer disbelief it raised in the local inhabitants was amusing. I was unemployed at the time and only the desperate and dispossessed would sit for four hours at a Greyhound station with no real clue when the bus may actually arrive.

Asking at our motel reception outside Cleveland for directions to the nearby bus stop to get into town and they all but said "Why the fuck would you do that, you're white". The journey took an hour, there were about three other passengers and the next one after that was in two hours.

This was before smartphones so I was carting around a 300 page hard copy Greyhound timetable which may not exist any more, I'd get a YouTube channel out of it now.

Maybe the BBC, like our rail network, has deep enough roots that even the Tories can't put in the work required to destroy it totally, just make it shitter on every level?

[Ferris]

Isn't that mostly because of the population density? Even if you don't approach it with a strict business head on you don't get much social benefit from building a railway line between two tiny towns 200 miles apart with fuck all in between them.

Yeah there's understandable reasons for it, but doesn't mean I don't miss the ubiquity of decent transport options in the UK. If I want to see family in Moncton I have to rent a car. Fuck that; I want to drink tinnies on the train and watch a film on the iPad.

[Ferris]

Maybe the BBC, like our rail network, has deep enough roots that even the Tories can't put in the work required to destroy it totally, just make it shitter on every level?

It's absolutely this.

People love to knock the UK (as do I, really) but it has some cultural strengths that make it an enviable place to live. I spent 3 months commuting from Cambridge, Ontario to Toronto via greyhound (before I could afford a place in the city) and people thought I was bonkers. I got an incredible amount of reading done.

[Sebastian Cobb]

As much as I reckon cars are fundamentally bad I do quite like the odd opportunity that me forces to get one. I'm in Co-Wheels so can borrow electric and petrol cars on an hourly rate.

I once got a flat on my pushbike when I went to the cinema and got bus home, but then just Co-Wheels'd a van the next day for an hour so I could pull up and sling the fucker in the back. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy tooling about in the van.

[perennialclimb]

What I like about living in Glasgow is the choice of Stagecoach, First, McGills and those shitty red buses (premier?). It's really great to have to traverse several operators.

Out of interest, why has Glasgow never gone down the route of having a publicly owned city-wide operator like Edinburgh? It seems like such a no brainer given how good the service is there.

[perennialclimb]

Maybe the BBC, like our rail network, has deep enough roots that even the Tories can't put in the work required to destroy it totally, just make it shitter on every level?

Honestly, if they want to, I think it will be pretty easy for them to dismantle the BBC, not just weaken it. Most of the things people consider "national institutions" really haven't been around all that long, relatively speaking.

The smarter Tories don't care about "roots". They don't care about being criticised by lots of eloquently written thought pieces in the broadsheets. They don't care about vague concepts of respectability or decency. They've realised they can ignore it and just do whatever they want anyway. A lot of media liberals still haven't come to terms with that.

The libertarian right has never believed in the concept of a "public good", because it's convenient for them not to. It's obvious to anyone with half a brain that services like the NHS, public transport, and a hundred other things (and yeah, I'd probably include the BBC in that list) are worthwhile because of the benefit they have on society.

They aren't profitable in the financial sense, and shouldn't be. But the idea that something is only of value if profit can be made from it is so pernicious now that unless we have a huge political re-alignment, most are going to be chipped away at or abolished by this government, or the next, or the one after that. Corporate power is infinitely more entrenched now than it ever was when these institutions were made.

Things that are broadly unpopular now (privatising the NHS, dismantling the BBC, etc) will rapidly become 50/50 culture war issues once the media starts setting that agenda, and once that happens, it might as well be inevitable. People like Armando Iannucci (see recent tweets) are always so sure that "the public" wouldn't stand for it, which is bollocks. The only reason the government is currently unpopular is that they had a few fucking parties, not because of some nuanced structural critique of all the shitty things they do or want to do.

If anything, the BBC is an easy target. The licence fee is out of date and unpopular, it constantly alienates its natural supporters, and it's really, really shit at defending itself. And all of the really good, irreplaceable public broadcasting stuff gets eclipsed by BBC News, so people don't realise (or don't care) just how much would be lost.

Once the media conglomerates smell blood, they'll do even more than they currently do to keep the Tories in power. They won't stop until the BBC is more or less dead (even if it notionally still exists) and they can fill the vacuum, by which time the Tories will have succeeded in neutering Ofcom too, and the gloves are off. It then becomes infinitely harder to rebuild a public broadcaster in the face of universal corporate resistance.

And on and on it goes.

TL;DR: the BBC is fucked.

[Buelligan]

Nadine Dorries 'kicked off' Tory MPs' WhatsApp group after defending 'hero' Boris Johnson

Operation Save Big Dog: Boris Johnson draws up plan for officials to quit over partygate so he can keep job

Let's begin by rushing to judgment with what appears to be a convincing conspiracy theory about Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and his acknowledged hostility towards the BBC.

Nadine Dorries: BBC licence fee announcement will be the last

I won't bother linking them, they're simply examples of numerous reports, ancient and recent, that may describe a dead cat or a bribe.

[Zetetic]

Exactly. For example the Super Off Peak tickets but it's never clear when you can use them and I think they differ among train companies (may be wrong) so I never get them even though I might be travelling at times when I can use them.

Super Off-Peaks are subject to an exciting array of diverse restriction codes, but the code is on the ticket, along with a National Rail URL that explains the restrictions.

And you can usually ask someone at a ticket office. (Although this always reminds me that the bloke at TMC used to tell everyone to split-ticket, and then they shutdown the ticket office IIRC.)

[Zetetic]

Also, almost always buy train tickets from trainsplit.com , which is the only ticket reseller that actually offers any benefit (including simply being more pleasant to use than 9 out of 10 train operator websites).

[Sebastian Cobb]

I kind of went off split ticketing when I missed a connection in Oxenholme and had to buy another ticket as mine wasn't any permitted route.

[Gurke and Hare]

I kind of went off split ticketing when I missed a connection in Oxenholme and had to buy another ticket as mine wasn't any permitted route.

When you say you missed the connection, do you mean because the train you were on was delayed? If so, you were misinformed and shouldn't have had to buy another ticket.