Standing room only!

I bought the Times yesterday just for one article, the proposal by a new consortium, "Grand Central" to start a new railway service from King's Cross to the north: "If you can't find a seat, have a refund". (And I was so excited I forgot they were giving the paper away free at the London Film Festival venue I was travelling to). The market works its magic! And doesn't competition work: "GNER, which is lobbying MPs in an effort to deny Grand Central access to the network, defended its policy of refusing to give any refund to passengers who had to stand." Two outrageous actions in one sentence.

I travel to Newcastle regularly, and getting there is a big problem. The cheapest way to go these days is by easyJet from Stansted, which means you have to put up with all the arsey, time-wasting rituals flying involves these days, destroy the environment and suffer the dehydration and other (I suspect underestimated) damaging health effects resulting from sudden (unnecessary) changes in air-pressure. In short, I'd rather go by train. But as I don't happen to organise my life 6 weeks ahead (when the affordable tickets are rapidly sold) and I don't have money to throw away, I now usually fly.

As an aside, it says something about our societal values that GNER's pricing policy is even legal. We put the right to make arbitrary profits over fairness. And we even allow monopoly providers to do this! Why should someone pay a fraction of the price of someone else simply because they book early? It's the same product. They don't do this at restaurants! If I turn up on the day why should I pay an exorbitant fare? It's not as if they attach another carriage just for me.

Anyway, back to overcrowding: lots of people were standing on the 11:01 from Cambridge to London on Saturday morning as noted in my previous entry - because adequate replacement services were not laid on during engineering works - and, I now report, some people were also standing, as far as Stevenage, on the 22:51 from King's Cross to Cambridge last night. This is hardly a peak time, so the overcrowding is totally unjustifiable. It was simply because wagn chose to run this service with just 4 carriages. Presumably this saves them a small amount, but at a cost which is borne by their customers.

You can tell that wagn (and GNER and many others) are getting away with daylight robbery here, simply because Grand Central can so easily cause consternation by proposing to do something different. Competition is definitely part of the solution to the problems on the railways. But the industry has to be structured so that competition works. More about this another time.

If we really want to control the behaviour of the train operators, though, we will also need to prevent them pushing costs onto the customer. In some cases, as noted in my previous entry, these costs are not obvious, they're drip by drip deterioration of the service. In the case of overcrowding, though, the problem is simple. Grand Central's proposal to charge a half-fare for standers (that is the same as the fare for over 60s, incidentally, who for some reason we are all supposedly happy to subsidise, however well off they are, even if they're civil servants picking up their fat final-salary pensions before the rest of us can retire - hmm, please don't take this personally - in any case, I digress) still means they will make money from these passengers. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I suggest that what we want to do is to incentivise the rail providers to provide sufficient capacity to meet demand. I suggest we will never do this by allowing them to make a profit from people who have to stand: that is, people who, by buying a ticket, have clearly shown they are prepared to pay to travel. If we want seats provided, we have to punish the rail operators for not providing them: passengers who have to stand should have their fare refunded plus a premium of (say) half their fare. Direct financial penalties (costs) such as this are the only language such organisations understand. Grand Central's proposition is welcome, but the fact that it is such an improvement shows just how bad the situation is.

Incidentally, Andrew Gilligan wrote a good piece "Corporate fat cats who get billions in benefits" in Monday's Evening Standard. Unfortunately it's not online (anything to do with the Evening Standard being another monopoly provider perhaps? - and I guess disgraced journalists can't be choosers). Anyway, he noted what soft contracts tube, rail and other providers have managed to achieve. He ends by saying: "The private sector has been enjoying the equivalent of unlimited incapacity benefit for too long. Time, perhaps, for some tough love." I wholeheartedly agree, and I hope the Labour government can overcome its predisposition to try to bring the network back under state control (it's too late and too expensive to do more than they have with Railtrack, and I suspect would not solve the problems anyway, now - we are where we are), and instead manage these providers properly. If they don't, I dread the Tories getting back in, as they'll just let their friends in these companies get away with it even more. I'd venture an opinion on the Lib Dems as well, if I had any kind of clue what they stand for.