Transport in London is shit

Eh? How many people do you reckon they employ?

i cant see train travel getting much cheaper as a result of competition from air travel. maybe we should read my friends dissertation about rail/air competition for business travel between leeds and london. isnt the problem partly that franchising to an extent creates kinda flabby uncompetitive practice, where profits can be made in relative safety from predatory activity, if there isnt strong enough contractual arrnagements or tight enough regulation on the performance of the franchisee?

eg "we award you this contract but will continue to allow you to increase fares/reduce penalties for poor performance, and you can do this for the next 10 years" as opposed to "you have a guaranteed revenue stream for the next 10 years but oyu must ensure to do X Y Z and not do P Q and S"?

i dont really know anything about this anyways.

i guess in a sense i dont really compare london to other cities in europe so that gives me a warped sense of how good transport is in comparison to other UK CITIES (dear sirz, outside of london there are population sizes larger than Basildon, Letchworth, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy). but then again what other european cities are comparable? how does paris do? it might be hyperbole but what euro cities are comparable in terms of geograpohic spread, density of developemnt, population etc etc?

moscow was pretty awesome but they run everything on vodka there, or something. actually it was sort of shit outside the metro, but it depends what your criteria for "good public transport" are

When it comes to the 'after midnight' bit, in London that usually means walking through the rain then freezing at a bus stop for half an hour then sitting on a very slow nightbus full of nutters, or paying twenty-five quid to a random ex-convict with a 'taxi' who'll drive you home (eventually, after getting lost) while spouting reactionary nonsense at you the whole way. In New York there seem to be five yellow taxis waiting for you immediately at any time, they don't cost much, and with the grid system they don't get lost.

again, its hard not to laugh when you are subject to the whims of a properly deregulated market outside of london. First Groups bus fares went up 4 times in a year in s yorks, now its 1.50 a single on first buses. still 1.20/30 in london?

as for tube fares, what is expensive about a 2.50 tube fare? in comparison to previous prices? or are you assessing the cost of labour, infrastructure, distance travelled etc etc and concluding that it is overpriced?

-- ambrose (ambrosewhit...), February 14th, 2006.

what's expensive is, it's expensive! let someone else do the math. but yes 'distance travelled' being about 2-3 miles, it does seem out of proportion.

still 1.20/30 in london?

It's now £1.50. Considering that, what 4 years ago(?), local journeys were 70p, I'd say that is somewhat above the rate of inflation.

another factor to consider might be the *vast fucking profits* made by the operator too?

Bendy Bus 38 on diversion Saturday. Confused the hell out of me. KEN OUT! etc.

But 80p on Oyster or Carnet.

*or sitting down on the floor where they get kicked
** for many people, they won't know their train isn't coming until several minutes after the fact since all the video terminals are fucked

OAPs get freedom passes and their are concessionary fares for Jobseekers/New Deal

Not having an oyster of some sort is foolish

I never heard of this when I was signing on, but that was a couple of years ago.

Now I just get the X68 both ways (long walk at the Zone 1 end, but I probably need it) and tend to spend around £30-35/month. (Z1-3 Travelcard is £100/mo, Z1-2 is £85/mo [would allow me to use buses outside Z2 but not rail], All Zone Bus Pass is £52/mo).

The capping of Oyster Pre-Pay so that you never pay more than an equivalent daily Travelcard or Bus Pass if you find yrself bus- and Tube-hopping is a nice feature. Now, if they'd just install Oystercard readers at SE London surburban rail stations...

The full horror of British Rail prices will soon hit me as my Young Persons Rail Card runs out in March. A peak time return from Glasgow to Edinburgh costs about £18. That's a 40 minute journey. Peak time Glasgow to Stirling, however, costs £8.30. And that's a 35 minute journey. WTF?

That said, having travelled on the geriatric, freezing and slow trains south of London in order to get to ATP, we've at least got half decent rolling stock in Scotland. At least, in those parts of the country unaffected by the Beeching Cuts.

London transport is pretty decent, but then I don't live there so don't have to face all the problems commuters do. The big problem with transport systems in British cities is the lack of integration. The best public transport I've come across is in Berlin. As soon as you work out the difference between the s-bahn and the u-bahn etc you're sorted.

dude, you're not.

when you're looking to move somewhere - in london or elsewhere - you check out the transport links (tube, buses, nightbuses, overground, tram, dlr, whatever) and if the provision is incompatible with your lifestyle, don't move to that part of london/wherever. i'm sure there are far-flung places on london's edges that are not served by nightbuses, but i've never found any and wtf would you be living there for? it's not meant for you, obviously.

but if you live in london, you can totally stay out as late as you want and get home on a bus/combination of buses. except possibly in aforementioned far-flung "zone b" places or whatever.

im questioning how much you value transport, and where you get your concept of cheap or expensive from. how much should transport cost us as a proportion of our overall outgoings?
should we be able to commute from hitchin to london every day? given the restraints on capacity on the train network in london, how possible is it to accomodate the numbers of commuters coming in every day?

why do planners in hertfordshire allow developers to build new blocks of luxury/executive apartments right next to rail stations with decent commuter train services, when there is no improvement to the service to accomodate the increased number of comuters that these developments are sure to bring?

im questioning the concepts that a) we should be able to travel where and when we want/need to, from where and to where, and b) that this travel should be "cheap" "affordable" or at the least "not expensive" c) the travel should be reliable, or high quality, or predictable, ro something. why are any of these givens that we "should" have access to them? becasue it costs 1.50 to get the bus? does that cover the full cost of providing that service? i appreciate that anger is mainly focussed on he fact that fares are set to cover increasing profits for the private involvement in providing transport services rather than covering the costs, but i find it strange that bus dergeulation for example took place a full 20 years ago, and yet an organisation like "We Want Our Buses Back" has only just been set up.
the fact that london is the most safeguarded against the worst effects of privatisation in public transport and that other areas are desperately trying to get round the impositions in place to achieving a similar set up means that its hard not to envy, rather than denigrate public transport in London from a provinicial persepctive

Is this actually true? I'd always thought received wisdom said the exact opposite.

Yeah, I found New York transpot to be awful. Admittedly it is a lot cheaper, which makes it sort of forgivable, but then when what ought to be a 40 minute journey regularly ended up taking 90 minutes, I tended to feel I'd have been happier to pay more and just get there.

Ok, I'm going to rant here. You know the handy electronic readouts you get on the tube telling you how long you have to wait for the next train? None of that on the NY subway, you just have to stand and wait and hope. On the A/C line (where I was staying) it seemed 4 out of 5 trains were express, and didn't stop at my stop, so even though a train might pass every five minutes, i'd only be able to get on one every 25 minutes. Each weekend at least one line will be closed completely, for engineering works or whatever, and there's no staff around to give out announcements to let you know about that. There's just A4 sheets stuck to some pillars, which are easily missed, so it's very easy to stand and wait 20 minutes for a train that isn't ever coming. Stations stay open all night, yeah, but quite often a station will close all but one entrance/exit, which can mean a ten minute walk in the wrong direction to even get inside there. and once you do get in, you find that trains after 11pm only run on certain routes, and become incredibly infrequent.

Really, Londoners don't know they're born.

when government decided to build a commuter belt on the basis that the people who lived there would many of them work in london, they kind of made a commitment, don't you think, to affordable transport?

you get a lot of people mindlessly scrolling neverending max-volume Insta reels, bonus points if they're in the middle of a crowded train carriage with a massive backpack on or shambling at 0.25mph through a busy part of a station

it makes me want to throw my own phone in the Thames so much, but then what would I drown them out with

agonised screaming iirc

Yeah, it's so grim. Are there signs about it on public transport yet? Think they used to have signs telling you to be careful with how loud you play the music through your earphones.

NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN
[cute cartoon of an axe arcing towards a guy with a blaring phone]
EVEN HIS FAMILY WILL REJOICE

I think the genie's out of the bottle with this one because it's not kids doing it.

not reviving the rate people on public transport thread but on the London train back from Villa-Fulham the other week, there was a guy watching the Ryder Cup on his phone, loudly clapping and shouting COME ON EUROPE. he thought the golfers in America could hear him

he later switched to cheering for Arsenal in their game and then made a random lead balloon joke about a woman on the train having chlamydia

and I was like "Mr Smith-Rowe, please-"

And to return to my personal bugbear of Lime bikes, the fact that it's mostly respectable middle class people who use them and, as with phones on buses, not the usual suspects means a blind eye is inevitably going to be turned to their misuse. (By the way, go up to Highgate or Hampstead, as I have these last couple of weekends, and you won't see any sign of them being dumped on pavements, not a single one).

Lewisham's got a bit better on the Lime detritus front last few months I think

To be fair, I've noticed Islington has actually started putting aside aside areas to park hire bikes - not sure what motorists think of this idea - but of course people ignore them nonetheless.

The apps can fairly easily enforce controlled parking like that so not sure why they aren't doing that more esp. in zone 1 but maybe they find the usage just drops 'too much' when they do. Huge spike in use during the recent tube strikes of course.

looking fwd to having to deal with these... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/15/driverless-taxis-from-waymo-will-be-on-londons-roads-next-year-us-firm-announces

well I hope nobody dies in the inevitable crashes on the north circular

The worst aspect of a tube strike is the sudden influx of clueless wankers who don't use buses onto buses. They don't know where to stand, they don't know to get out of the way to let people off and on, they don't know you don't stand on the stairs, they don't know you don't stand upstairs etc. Mostly tourists of course: families of four or five with rucksacks, cases etc, stumbling around wide-eyed with fear and apprehension.