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Yep £130 return to London from Glasgow or Edinburgh by car for four people. You might get less than £100 return on the train for one adult if you book 2 months ahead and don’t travel in the school holidays or when there’s a gig or a football match on. Last time I looked it was over £400 return for my family. You can’t tax cars to make them cost as much as transporting 4 people by train; that would strangle the economy. The government has to make running the trains more efficient and subsidise them properly. One glaring example; why is HS2 costing something like 5x more per km compared to French costs.

A big part is right of way; it's non declared government policy that land prices must always go up.

For HS2? No its not, even if you deduct the £8bn for land purchases it’s still way more expensive. Most expensive French line so far from Lyon Marseille was around €35m/km crossing the Haut Massif on 50 tunnels and bridges. Most recent Tours-Bordeaux was ~€23m/km. London Birmingham is costing something closer to €300m per km. I can’t be bothered to google the sources again and think about inflation but even with inflation and land prices I’m confident that it is costing at the very least 3 times more than it would in France maybe as much as 10x; something doesn’t stack up.

> Despite high fuel prices, it's still cheaper for me to drive from northern England to London (where my office is) than to get a train, even allowing for a nominal "maintenance" allowance for my car.

I can second how bad this situation is and how it's been bad for a long time.

In 2021, it was cheaper (half the price) for me to drive my fiancee and I to Liverpool and back than it was for just the train tickets. That's not even factoring in the extras like the transport to/from the train stations. In 2023, with trains becoming appallingly unreliable before the strikes, I can't blame anyone for decided to drive.

It's unfortunately clear that the current UK government has no interest in tackling the climate crisis or the long-term effects on the economy.

It's definitely not cheaper or more convenient for me to drive into Edinburgh from Fife - the train is pretty convenient and not too expensive (£15 return). But that's a relatively short journey.

Going down to the east coast mainline isn't too bad, the the west coast mainline is horrific and I try to avoid at all costs.

I don't mind flying but I hate airports and you often have to get a train at the other end anyway - don't think I'll ever travel on Southern again if I can possibly avoid it, they are actually worse that Avanti West Coast, which I didn't think was possible.

It wouldn't be cheaper to drive if your government properly taxed the petrol and road usage to help pay for and offset the environmental damage your transportation choice caused, would it?

They do tax those things. 45% of the price of petrol is tax. I pay £1,000 per year in road tax and plenty of council tax too.

The issue is inefficiency. That money ends up lining the pockets of private firms with crazy margins on government and council contracts.

Our train privatisation scheme is basically a money funnelling exercise to fund middle managers not trains.

It's daylight corruption.

It's daylight robbery, corruption would imply there's something shady going on here. This is how government services operate anywhere and everywhere in the world.

> and offset the environmental damage your transportation choice caused, would it?

I live in the UK, not America.

My car does an average of 45mpg+ and I pay ~£8.14 per gallon for fuel.

They tax us plenty for driving here, train prices are just _that_ bad, the worst I've experienced anywhere in the world.

That's frustrating that train prices are bad.

I think I understood that you live in the UK when I wrote my comment, idk how though.

I guess it seems crazy but to me those gas prices still sound cheap. Maybe I'm just an obnoxious environmentalist but I think gas taxes for private vehicles should simply be high enough to fund a carbon offset for the usage. I don't have numbers at hand but I'd imagine it'd be pretty high.

And yup thus in my dreams planes would basically be outrageously expensive to fly on. I guess for me the convenience trade-off is worth me being confident that my grandkids will have coral reefs to look at, which I'm basically 90% certain won't be the case for now.

It's a nation wide issue unfortunately. Since our rail was privatised the goal has (as is expected from a business) profit and not (as should be expected for a public service) utility.

Fuel prices aren't cheap here,though not the highest in Europe either, and ~50% is taxes, I'd hope some of that goes to good use for environmental efforts.

> And yup thus in my dreams planes would basically be outrageously expensive to fly on. I guess for me the convenience trade-off is worth me being confident that my grandkids will have coral reefs to look at, which I'm basically 90% certain won't be the case for now.

This is a difficult problem, form an environmental-only perspective that sounds reasonable, but to make it so that only the wealthy and elite can fly widens the class divide. I came from a working class family, but have traveled all over the world; that wouldn't have been possible if we simply priced ordinary people out of flying. Living in the UK, on an island, flying is one of the main ways out.

Rather, as an Engineer, I'd look to solve the problem with more efficient and sustainable technology, we should make the transport cause less harm, not price anybody but the wealthy out of it.

I saw a chart showing cost vs carbon for different travel modes, trains had a huge cost to carbon ratio compared to cars, which are basically heavily subsidised. In the UK there's an idea that trains should be self sufficient (not that they are) but for some reasons cars get a free pass.

> Despite high fuel prices, it's still cheaper for me to drive from northern England to London

I assume you calculate all the costs of car usage, not just the fuel?

You're being downvoted for some reason but it's a valid point.

My answer is; yes and no.

I could still add the cost of annual service, tyres, brakes etc and still be cheaper to use the car, but the reality is, my family has a car because we need it otherwise, we live in the suburbs and have two kids who need to get places, so if I'm asked to travel to London and back tomorrow, it costs me ~£70 I wasn't expecting to spend today on fuel, or going by train would cost me anywhere between £200-400+ for the train, plus connecting transport; so add roughly half the cost of my fuel bill (~£30-35) for that.

The reality is, our trains are poor and overpriced have have been increasingly so since privatization. It also happen to be on the West-Coast Mainline, the operator of which is basically robbing us blind before they lose their contract due to poor performance.

nice one