So much for trains

[bellinghman]

I was just attempting to get train fares for a journey from Sierre (Swiss Alps) to London.

Holy crap! How do they expect anyone to use trains? I can get from Sierre to Paris at a reasonable price - a very reasonable price for a direct TGV that takes 5:20. But that's no use whatsoever, if it then costs THREE TIMES AS MUCH for the Paris to London link, which is only 2:40.

</rant>

EDIT: Many thanks for the purpletigron/purplecthulhu's advice on getting round Eurostar.

EDIT: OK, I can do Sierre to Paris-Lyon for 113 CHF, if I buy it from the Swiss, and using the halbtax card. That's just under £48. And going via the "I am American" part of the Eurostar site allows me to buy the single/non-flexible fare at $89 each - which is roughly £45. That's compared to the insane £300+ it was trying to do me for originally for the Paris to London leg!

So, Swiss Alps to central London for £93 isn't too bad. I just wish it wasn't such an incredible hassle finding this all out. If I was a PA doing this, and factoring in the cost of my time, it'd be another matter.

EDIT: Ooops, forgot time zone differences. That was 2:40, not 1:40

Comments

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Scamming????

How are they scamming if they are providing a quick, efficent service at low cost - bringing travel to those who can't afford more expensive ways to go?

I vote with my wallet. I use the cheapest, most efficent mode of transportation. In this case, it is easyJet.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

The author of this article says it better than I could. This from the last couple of paragraphs:

All over the world, encouraged by governments that remain wilfully blind to long-term pollution, cities and regions are competing for the right to open new airports, granting easily affordable landing rights to a plethora of airlines with names like Flybe, Wizzair, Jet2 and Excel, which no one had heard of a few years ago, but which all share one thing — the inalienable right to destroy our environment.

Far from trying to rein back on this insane expansion, most countries are subsidising it — to the tune of about £30 billion a year in Europe alone. There is no VAT on aviation fuel, no VAT on new aircraft and no VAT on ticket sales. In Britain, airlines would have to pay £5 billion a year if they were taxed at the same rate as motorists. Since they do not, tickets cost about 42 per cent less than they did ten years ago, and the number of people who fly is expected to double over the next 15 years. We are, in effect, subsidising an industry that is poisoning our planet, in the name of another industry — tourism — that will, of course, be the first to suffer from the poisoning of our planet.

Emphasis is mine. The scam isn't on the passengers of the budget airlines, it's on the rest of us who subsidise it.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

The airline industry is also a net cost to the UK economy. More wealth flies out of the UK than flies back in.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know what you mean by this, but I'm not quite getting it. (In my mind's eye, I'm seeing spivs carrying suitcases full of banknotes onto departing flights.)

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

UK residents take more business abroad than non-residents bring back? The same is true of the tourism sector in isolation.

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Not forgetting the argument which keeps on being trotted out when there's a hint of actually charging fuel tax on the airlines "but you're preventing the poor from flying" or "how will I get to my second house in the south of France at a sensible cost".

Somehow it's been decided that air travel is a right.

[knell.livejournal.com]

There are people who now commute weekly or twice-weekly by Ryanair, having bought cheap rural properties near some of the nowhere-airports they serve. I don't even want to think how many tons of CO2 that adds up to per annum, and it's a really stupid thing to do anyway as Ryanair has no service obligation and will happily chop routes with little notice based on which side of the bed the obnoxious O'Leary got out of that morning.

[drplokta]

There's no VAT on train tickets, either. The simple truth is that it's very much more expensive to provide a train service between two points than an air service, because you need vastly more infrastructure, and the fares reflect this.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Terminal 5 at Heathrow is costing 5.2 billion for the terminal alone. And that's just one airport. How much is going into real rail infrastructure these days, as opposed to repairing the damage from 2 decades of inadequate maintenance? Probably less than that.

[drplokta]

That's about the same price, adjusting for inflation, as the high speed Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to the coast. The latter will accomplish fewer than 1 billion passenger miles per year (10 million people going less than 100 miles), while the former is half of what's needed for something more like 20 billion passenger miles (20 million additional capacity at Heathrow, average distance 1000 miles). Therefore, the infrastructure cost for flying is about 10% what it is for rail, in this particular example.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

I don't think passenger miles is a fair comparison here. You can't go to Sydney or LA on the Eurostar, so you are not comparing like with like. The fair comparison is with the number of passengers in which case the costs are about the same.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

The real scammers are the privatised railway companies, who take massive government subsidies (far higher than anything British Rail ever got), give them straight to the shareholders and then charge outrageous fares, with regular increases well above inflation, which manage to make the airlines look cheap.

My proposal for fuel taxes is that they should be set at a level which makes fuel efficiency the prime consideration when designing new vehicles of the type concerned and so that it's the main driving force behind sales. In this world, an airline such as easyJet would change plane manufacturer because the costs of running a mixed fleet would be far outweighed by the fact that the new type uses considerably less fuel than the old one, and so is much cheaper to run. Obviously this never happens under the current regime.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Wrong.

For example: It seems that aircraft emissions are up to three times more damaging per passenger kilometre than the raw climate change gas emissions data would suggest.

You have to calculate the efficiency of the whole system - not just the visible tip of the iceberg in your wallet today. Total energy efficiency, and financial cost of remediation of external damage, not just your credit card bill this month.

It's also a myth that low cost airlines mostly serve those who can't afford higher priced tickets. The bulk of the travellers are people who used to fly anyhow, and now fly more often.

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

There is also research which indicates that when the emissions are released at cruising height they are more damaging (in much the same way that ozone at the top is good, ozone at street level is a right royal pain).

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Wrong.

I vote on the impact on my wallet. I don't have a lot of extra money to shell out to pay for nicer flights or train journeys.

External costs

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Then you are missing the bigger picture: economic externalities.

That is to say: A full accounting of the airline industry strongly suggests that it has never been economically viable. If that's true, it runs on prestige and hidden subsidies - like a peacock's tail feathers. Now we have good reason to believe that it's a major driver of global climate change too.

Low cost air ticket prices come nowhere near covering the full cost of the flights. (If http://www.chooseclimate.org/flying/mapcalc.html works in your browser, it's informative).

[drplokta]

Damaging in what way? There's some evidence to suggest that jet contrails are the biggest single source of global cooling, and that global warming would be significantly worse without extensive civil aviation. In which case, the warming effect of the CO² emissions from the planes is more than counterbalanced by their cooling effect.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

However, the cooling effect from a jet contrail doesn't last very long. Turn off the aircraft (pace continental US airspace immediately after 9/11, when almost everything was grounded) and the result quickly goes away. They could see a difference within 48 hours.

The carbon dioxide takes somewhat longer to remove again.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

When, as happened to 2 colleagues of mine recently, EasyJet strands you in an obscure Italian airport at 11pm with all nearby hotels full and no customer support to speak of, you might think twice about how efficient they actually are for the passengers.