kcrussell25:
adam277:
[…]
Is 35p per mile bad really? No tax, insurance, mot, maintenance and depreciation to factor in. Are you in a city as thats always more expensive?
I am only 35 so can’t remember British rail but I don’t think nationalization is the way as the main way to bring fairs down would be to subsidise from taxes. Why should I and others then pay to reduce the cost of your commute when we may not have the option of a train ourselves?
It’s a high price when you consider the loss of convenience, flexibility, and comfort.
As for BR, you already are subsidising it - to the tune of several times the subsidy that BR used to receive, without the ridiculously high ticket prices and complex fare structures.
The main purpose of nationalisation is not to enable extra subsidy. It is to rationalise the organisation and eliminate private profits which both leech money from privatised rail.
And the purpose of taxation is not to subsidise rail but to charge the economy for the facility, and avoid the bureaucracy and accountancy of trying to charge different users different amounts according to the economic benefit they gain from it.
Passengers are actually a very marginal use of rail, and the marginal cost of each passenger or freight user is very low - the main costs are the fixed costs of providing and maintaining the infrastructure, and rather than pay hundreds of contract managers to try and work out which activities should pay the lion’s share of the fixed costs, and then have legal battles in the courts over whether discriminatory pricing is reasonable, it’s actually more efficient to just levy the entire economy via taxation.
It’s the same with roads. If every road was a toll road, there would be a huge bureaucracy involved in paying and collecting the charges, and then when it comes to the fixed costs (like the purchase of land, the provision of drainage, the provision of police and fire coverage, the system of justice that enforces the rules, and so on, which are barely if at all related to the number of road users), you’d have to try and work out which are the really valuable uses for which the road is built, and which are the marginal uses, and charge accordingly (otherwise the road would be under-utilised, because you’d be charging the marginal users too much if you levied a flat charge and many couldn’t afford to make use of it despite the existence of spare capacity).
And when you factor in all the bureaucracy for every single business and individual, all the administrative time, and all the extra charging and record-keeping infrastructure, it’s cheaper overall just to levy the economy.
