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

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I do think it is important to remember that budget airlines are basically scamming the rest of us. Their prices fail to reflect the true cost of their activities. Now, the train companies may well be charging over the odds for their services. But it's up to the politicians to set a fair regulatory environment - and up to us to force them into it, at the ballot box, and with our wallets, or our feet.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I'm going to sympathise with Shelley somewhat here. Yes, there could definitely be an equality in fuel taxation between the airlines and the trains, but the low-cost airlines are burning much less per passenger mile than the traditional airlines, by dint of carrying more passengers per weight of aircraft.

Personally, I think taxes are the better way. And the easiest one to make directly proportionate to fuel cost/carbon release is a tax on fuel itself. (Charging SUVs extra for parking is totally silly - that's exactly when they're not causing all that damage!)

I really do wish the trains could be more sane, price-wise. Travelling on Swiss or German trains is very civilised, and although the London-Basel route would take longer than flying, it's not that much worse. Returning from Leukerbad is going to require a fair bit of train travel anyway, so we should be able to do it in much the same time.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

Current muttering re the latest UK rail price hikes are that it's one way of dealing with the congestion on the trains :/

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Forcing people back onto the roads where they can be charged per mile and they wonder why we don't trust what they say and assume it's all about taxation.

[knell.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, the reason behind the incessant chorus of "The trains on the continent are much cheaper!" is that the per-passenger subsidy for rail travel and local transport (i.e. the Tube) is generally less than half in the UK of what it is in, say France. Of course, the Daily Mail says that tax is bad, mmmkay, so the average Mail-reading commuter on their daily train journey from, say, Bournemouth to London and back generally wants lower fares *and* lower taxes. Can't have it both ways.

The added scam is that tabloid comparisons of, say, Easyjet from Luton to Glasgow with Virgin West Coast invariably seem to compare the cheapest possible fare available by air with the price of a standard walk-up flexible return ticket by train. Rock up at Stansted and ask Ryanair for a ticket on the next flight and you'll be paying hundreds of quid.

(Incidentally, 150 quid for a Paris-London single on ES is pretty outlandish. There are way better fares out there.)

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think taxes are the better way. And the easiest one to make directly proportionate to fuel cost/carbon release is a tax on fuel itself. (Charging SUVs extra for parking is totally silly - that's exactly when they're not causing all that damage!)

but SUVs are evil incarnate! Our mate the nodnol mayor says so.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Well, they may be. When they're moving. On narrow British city streets.

Almost anything can be inappropriate. The SUV is the multi-generational derivative of inappropiate use, to the extent where many of them would now struggle when taken off-road.

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Without a halbtax, a round trip ticket from Basel to Zurich would be just a little less than that plane ticket to the UK!

[uitlander]

I just booked holiday flights for later this year. Before buying I didn't a price breakdown - this was provided on the receipt.

Return flight - 2x £73.
Taxes - £103.
Admin Charge - £10.

I note the taxes were 125% of the overall flight charge from the carrier. The flight itself is more than cheap, the local Govs involved seem to be taking their pound of flesh which I assume in part at least is done under the 'climate' banner. The recent UK increase in them certainly is.

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Good point - on the Basel - Luton return flight I've mentioned charges were half taxes, half fare.

[knell.livejournal.com]

Be careful - a lot of what the airlines call "taxes" is actually "fuel surcharges" and "insurance surcharges" and so on - the airline pulling big chunks of its own costs out of the ticket price and calling it tax. This kind of manipulation of headline ticket prices has got them in trouble in the past. The "admin fee" is effectively part of the fare as well.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

You're not vegan are you?

(Decides to fly to Picocon after all)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Naughty, naughty Feorag.

I assume you're flying to P-Con? (Says the man who booked the ferry tickets today.)

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Going by boat to P-Con isn't practical until I have a full driving licence. I did tell you my tale of woe when I tried to get to David Stewart's funeral by train, didn't I?