Rail in the UK
There have been a few articles recently about having a ticket similar to Germany’s ‘Deutschland ticket’ and similar schemes in Portugal and France, where almost every train in the country can be used for a low monthly subscription (49€ in the case of Germany, for example).
While I think the idea is good, the UK’s public transport infrastructure isn’t good enough to be able to cope with more passengers.
Maybe the idea would work in London, but reducing the cost there would require a bigger government subsidy, which is probably not going to happen at the moment.
Outside of London, trains are largely full, don’t run frequently enough, don’t have enough carriages for the number of passengers, and run in creaking infrastructure that frequently fails.
For example, I was on a train from London to the north of England, and there was a signaling failure. The conductor of the train said it was the third time that week the signaling at that section of track had failed. Likewise, I was on an intercity train out of Birmingham that was so full people had to get off onto the platform to let passengers alight before re-boarding the train to continue on. On this route, the trains being standing room only occurs almost every time I travel on the route. Or perhaps the fact that every time I go to London Paddington, there is a points failure preventing almost every train from departing and arriving.
Covid was probably the best thing that could have happened to the railways in the UK. The decrease in passenger levels to numbers seen around a decade ago on some routes gave some breathing space for the infrastructure, and should have been followed by the government investing in making the infrastructure more reliable and higher capacity. But this didn’t happen. Instead, funding was pulled from large projects like HS2 phase b, and east-west rail. Northern rail development and electrification projects always seem to be in consultation but never actually have any work start on them.
Making trains more expensive will be the only way for the government to allow the infrastructure to cope with passenger numbers. Look at Euston - there are many more people using the train station than it was designed for, and the government has reduced the number of platforms it will have with the HS2 refurbishment (at least HS2 is now going to Euston though).
Rail was renationalised during Covid, with all trains being run under contract by the government. Although I don’t agree fully with the previous arrangement, allowing other governments to run rail franchises in the UK and extract the profit, it did lead to massive increases in passenger levels and probably better experiences for passengers. Franchising also allowed the government to largely ignore rail.
But public transport, whether that’s by road or rail, is important for economic growth. The recent budget announced by Rachel Reeves this week has provided no additional investment for transport infrastructure (besides half a billion pounds to ‘repair potholes’).
Until the government takes infrastructure seriously, economic growth will be stymied and the UK will remain a shrinking European economy. The influence the UK has, and its excellence in engineering, will continue to decline without solid foundations.