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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

> the current route is a perfect example of that awkward travel distance to which there is no good solution. Others abound, such as Washington-Boston or London-Edinburgh

There is a very good sleeper train, the Caledonian Sleeper, between London and Edinburgh (and several other points in Scotland). That's a "good solution" for that route, and I'm more than a little surprised that the London-based Economist seems not to have heard of it.

https://www.sleeper.scot/

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Such buses are quite common in India too. Many people prefer sleeper buses even though the prices are similar to flights. One reason is that they have to travel to the airport (city a) and then travel from the airport (city b).

A couple of interesting links:

http://www.indiatimes.com/boyz-toyz/cars-and-bikes/sleeper-a...

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/599348/scania-drive-1st-...

I loved those in India when I travelled around. We would often save the cost for a hotel and just sleep in the bus.

I'm wondering why airports don't try to monopolize airport taxi business. It's the logical extension of traveling from point A to B end-to-end.

What makes you think they haven't?

In the DC area, there is a single provider of taxi service from Dulles Airport (IAD).

http://www.flydulles.com/iad/washington-flyer-taxi-service

Any other taxi service trying to pick up fares from IAD are violating the contract between the Metro Washington Airport Authority and Dulles Taxi.

> Any other taxi service trying to pick up fares from IAD are violating the contract between the Metro Washington Airport Authority and Dulles Taxi.

Why would I care if I've violated a contract between two other parties?

Dulles airport police will not let other taxis pick up passengers at Dulles.

YUP.

REMEMBER: A taxi medallion is a component of a government-enforced monopoly on regional transportation for hire.

One of the great achievements of Uber is highlighting the gap between what's possible when a company is able to compete freely in the marketplace that's been effectively ruined by government.

Before Uber, the taxi companies had ZERO incentive to improve their product. You had no choice when choosing a cab company. Now you do.

The Caledonian Sleeper is quite good, and has a great restaurant car, but it's generally considerably more expensive than flying unless you book very far in advance, and they do some shunting of carriages at one of the stops during the night that generally interrupts your sleep. It's still a good choice between those two cities, especially if you can replace a hotel night with the train, or can book very far in advance.

More to the point, the standard train service between Edinburgh and London is less than 4:30, and around £50 each way booking a few weeks in advance. I do this fairly frequently, and generally it takes the same amount of time as flying, while being a fair bit more convenient. Rail is pretty good :)

> around £50 each way booking a few weeks in advance

Man, how many of those £50 tickets are actually available? A train from Manchester to London, which is less than half the distance, costs twice as much on a lucky day (and 3x on the same day, if not more).

I just ran this search for MAN -> EUS on 2017/08/23 leaving after 10:00.

http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/timesandfares/MAN/Lond...

I got this result:

    Dep 11:15 Manchester Piccadilly [MAN] Platform 7
    Arr 13:20 London Euston [EUS] Platform 3
    Duration:  2h 05m
    Changes :  0

    cheapest fare
    Single Fare
    £27.00

Services at 10:15, 10:35, and 10:55 are £38.00.

Yes, tickets for travel on Monday are over £80, but the poster was talking about buying advance tickets.

What service are you using? How far in advance are you looking? Buying on the day can and will be stupidly expensive.

Oh, and FWIW, split tickets can frequently do better. I've reduced my annual train fares bills from over 11k to under 6k, despite travelling 20% more.

Edit: Just ran a split-ticket search for Monday 14th and got this:

    £33.80
    MAN CRE 10:04 11:01  £4.80 Advance
    CRE EUS 11:02 13:50 £29.00 Off-Peak

> I've reduced my annual train fares bills from over 11k to under 6k

That is nice for you, but neither of these numbers is something that National Rail can pride itself on. In Germany for instance, a "Bahncard 100" that lets you travel everywhere anytime without pre-booking costs about £3.5k - and in addition, you save the dozens or hundreds of hours spent "hacking" the fares to get screwed ever so slightly less...

I'm not defending the UK fare system - it's appalling - and I'm not saying the fares are reasonable - they're not. I'm just replying to the person who sounded astonished about the existence of a £50 fare each way to EDB, claiming that MAN-EUS was significantly more.

It's not (or doesn't have to be) and I provided evidence. So you're replying to the wrong indignation.

Neither of those options are realistic for anybody who actually, y'know, works. The overhwelming majority of passengers will get much, much higher fares.

E.g. 7am MAN-EUS on 23/08: £112

And having to mess around with split fares like I had to reach Singapore, is appalling (is that even the same train? Do I really have to change train to get from the 2nd largest city to the capital? Is this Peru...?).

It sounds to me like you simply want to be outraged about the fares. And that's fine, the fares are, quite honestly, appalling. All I'm doing is pointing out that if you really are so angry then perhaps it's worth spending a little time, taking slightly less convenient journey, and cutting your expenditure in half. Or better:

    MAN CRE 06:00 06:37 £13.60 Anytime
    CRE EUS 06:52 09:37 £22.00 Advance
    Total: £35.60

For reference, I do, you know, work, and I've worked out how to work on the train and take advantage of fare combinations like this.

If you choose not to, and choose to just take the existing fares and services and pay the premium then that's your choice. By all means, feel free to do so and to be angry about the system.

And being angry about the system (or systems, to include things like the trains in Singapore) is quite reasonable. But it doesn't achieve much. Personally, I turn to the machine and create tools to shift the cost/convenience balance to be more in my favour.

I thought it was average at best. I've taken long-distance sleeper trains all my life, but the Caledonian Sleeper has rubbish breakfast, poor bedding, and you have to exit the train right after it arrives.

I mean, one of these three is fine, but all three and it was worthless for its objective. It costs a hundred quid and this is what you get? I could take Virgin for half the price and be there in 5 hours and actually sleep in my own bed instead. It's what I'll do next time.

I suppose the one plus is you get to use the lounge at the station, which is about the one place that Waverly Station has plug points for a charger.

Oh what nonsense. I travel on Caledonian Sleeper all the time and while the breakfast is perhaps not amazing (although its fine) you only have to exit the train immediately at stops that are not the ultimate destinations (like London, Glasgow etc) there you routinely have up to an hour to get off. The bedding criticism is also odd as it's all white cotton sheets and pretty comfortable. Also Caledonian Sleeper has ordered new coaches and are investing a lot in the service. See: https://www.sleeper.scot/news/85-newtrains The sleeper service is an amazing service and I love the ability to spend £100 and get a room saving a packet on a London hotel. I can arrive in London at 6.30/7.00am head to meetings & then be back in Scotland in 4 hours.

Add to which, I've successfully left my East-Edinburgh house at 0630, taken the 0735 flight to LCY and made it to the office for the 0945 stand-up. Although I'd probably leave at 0615 since the new security area was set up -- I don't do it often and the last time I cut it a bit tight.

If you need to get to central London and don't fly to City Airport if it's an option, I'd suggest your routing may be sub-optimal. EDI--LCY is definitely workable as a day trip.

50 years ago in Japan they invented fast trains to cover such distances. We didn’t adopt them in California because Americans prefer cars.

Fast forward 40 years and it’s not so easy to get the right of way to build straight track. Now 10 years in we’re hoping to invent an even faster method of transportation so we can take a longer route.

Not to get into this again, but California also only has 1/3 of Japan's population density, there's very little between the obvious Bay Area and LA endpoints, and there's no viable route up the coast so you have to go inland, which means putting rail through quite a lot of mountains. There's also no realistic world where you get from SF to LA on rail in close to the time it takes to fly (SF to Burbank is only an hour).

HSR works best when the population centers are separated by low population areas because you don't want to stop every 20 miles. So yes California is 163,696 mi² but ignore the paces with < 50 people per square mile and what's left has both plenty of density and population. Because it's really the eastern part of the state that's empty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#/media/File:Califor...

EX: Modoc County only has freaking 8k people and it's 4,000 square miles.

I was merely pointing out that this technology was invented in Japan. Since then it has also been installed and about 20 other countries, including France and Spain. The population excuse was debunked years ago.

Also, no one said that it had to had to take an hour. If you go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco, it’s a pretty nice accomplishment in 3 hours.

HSR was first demonstrated in France. Japan is the country with the first commercial service.

The author has probably heard of it, but deemed the solution as not being good enough by their criteria to be worth mention.

Or rather, it would diminish the value of the article as an ad by mentioning another service.

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