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Comment by jimlikeslimes | Hacker News Reader

If you're wondering what to click and not from the UK:

Paddington (busy station): https://github.com/anisotropi4/kingfisher/blob/main/image/P/...

Penzance (rural endpoint): https://github.com/anisotropi4/kingfisher/blob/main/image/P/...

This is very interesting. It looks like most of the London train stations have a regional focus. I often travel to London from Leeds, so Kingscross is the terminating station (true for Scotland and the North East), Euston seems to be mostly North West, St Pancras is the midlands and South East, Paddington is South West and Victoria is South/South East. Fascinating to see this illustrated in Graph form. Nice!

Yes, that's exactly how train stations were built around the centre of London. It's the same in Paris, for instance, where the stations' names make it more obvious.

It's also interesting to see the reach of London. Many people as far as Oxford and Cambridge seem to commute into London.

And weirdos like me who commute out from London into Cambridge, via London Liverpool Street mostly.

That must be a nice quiet commute.

I used to commute out of London. It was anything but nice and quiet. I actually had to buy a car, because using train was not viable (expensive, always late and crowded or trains cancelled, often impossible to board). After coming late nth time, manager said either improve this or we will be looking at letting you go. Getting a car was the best thing I've done.

Our country really need to focus on improving the public transport as at its current state is not fit for purpose.

That is so sad. Here in North America (with the odd exception) we don't even have a choice. Its the car only. The only good thing about a car is autonomy: you leave when you want to leave, and you have control of the environment => no noisy cell phone chats and you can choose whatever music you want to listen to or not.

Many commuters in London also leave when they want to leave, or close to it. Metro trains run every 2-10 minutes on most of the network (I'm including the ends of the lines there), urban/suburban/regional trains around every 10-20 minutes.

Personally, if the service is at least every 10 minutes I won't check the time when I leave. If it's 20 or more I will, and in-between probably depends on the weather and if the station is indoors or not.

Yeah it's cheaper to drive here rather than take a train which is just sad. Hell, it's always cheaper to fly to say Scotland, etc than take a train.

It's bc the UK gov doesn't care in the slightest for rail anymore, which is weird bc it's the foundation of public transport in UK.

During pandemic local branches of foreign airlines got bailed out, but any rail company? Nah, nothing for them.

For a year I commuted out of London, and it was wonderful — usually 1-4 people per carriage, almost always on time, very quiet. Returning to London was busier, but I always had a seat.

There is probably a political discussion based on when I did this vs. the sibling comment, but HN isn't the place for it.

Unlike varispeed's unfortunate experience my commute is indeed very chill and consistent! Train that I catch comes in full, unloads, a total of maybe 50 people board, leaves. Coming back in the evening is a bit more crowded, but it's very rare that I don't get a seat. I use that time to work or read and can enjoy the wonderful English countryside as a background :) Almost the opposite of what a dear friend has to experience in his reverse commute from Cambridge to King's Cross.

Many moons hence, when I was working for Logica, they had a campus out in Cobham ("Cobham Park"). The place was gorgeous, an old mansion on its own land, peacocks in the grounds, Chesterfield leather sofas in reception etc.

Cobham is just off the A3, so my commute from South London was outbound, on a clear road, watching the traffic jam start in the other direction, a few miles outside the M25 (the orbital motorway around London).

Coming back in wasn't quite so clear, London being London, but still a comparatively serene drive compared to the other direction :)

There was a policy in the early part of the 20th century to establish a green belt of preserved space around London.

This didn’t stop people from sprawling ever further, they just skipped over the green belt.

Leaving the gap was also policy. Stevenage was the first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenage#Stevenage_New_Town

The stations were all originally built by separate private railways companies which, naturally, served different parts of the country. Euston, for example, was built by the London and Birmingham Railway.

Reminder to non-UK people: when people in England refer to the “North East” and “North West” and so on, they are referring to only England, even when talking in the context of the UK.

Ashford International, one end of the HS1 line is pretty well served:

https://github.com/anisotropi4/kingfisher/blob/main/image/A/...

or the other end of HS1, St Pancras:

https://github.com/anisotropi4/kingfisher/blob/main/image/S/...

And yet, we've more or less cancelled HS2. Oh well.

Also York (popular destination, middle of the east coast main line but good connectivity to stations west (Leeds, Manchester, …) & elsewhere, with both through-trains and those that start/terminate there): https://github.com/anisotropi4/kingfisher/blob/main/image/Y/...

Not as busy as any of the London terminals, but a key station for many travellers.

York is a good example of how building high-ish speed railways that actually take people somewhere they want to go, leads to people using those railways.

Look at the way the plots taper off to the north and south of York; this isn't just people shuttling to and from London, this is ordinary commuters and rail travellers using the railway as a decent mode of transportation.

I wish the government had the gumption to recognize this and respond appropriately.

Rob Holden, who lead HS1, and delivered it under budget said HS2 has been such a disaster, paraphrasing, because HS2 publicly declared its budget for each section, so the Cotswold tunnels, for example had a budget of, say, $10bn. So the contractors bidding to do it, bid... $9.9bn. Whereas HS1 invited bids from contractors who had no idea how much the government was prepared to spend.

Absolute idiocy.

More details in this and the links in the story: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun...

I remember they started doing it this was because there was concerns about companies with insider information being unfairly advantaged in the bidding stages.

Interesting. I'd assumed it was something to do with the Office for Budget Responsibility and "transparency" of Government spending. I guess not.

It's still absurd that the Government would announce how much they're prepared to pay in advance, and act surprised when bids come in at or above that amount.

Not unlike the Tories to be focused on getting money into their mates' pockets rather than getting the job done.

Construction in the UK seems ridiculously expensive now, as a foreigner the whole country seems frozen in place when it comes to any new major infrastructure...

> York is a good example of how building high-ish speed railways that actually take people somewhere they want to go, leads to people using those railways.

Not just directly from York: there are many trains stopping both here and Leeds, giving us, for example, indirect-but-easy access to some of the north further west (smaller lines to/through Shipley/Keighley/Skipton, Ilkley/Settle/Carlisle) which I find handy when I want to go run around the Dales, and that people from those areas presumably find handy for access to the east coast main line North & South.

York's rail connectivity is one of the (many) advantages of living here (despite the key disadvantage of housing costs & such) for me, as I don't drive.

What if I'm from the UK and I am still wondering what to click?

So it displays the number of people that transit through a specific station? Or is it the station "reach"?

It’s the number of passengers that traveled from a specific station to any other station in UK.

Passengers are assumed to have taken the shortest rail route from station A to B. Which is interesting, because it might not have been the fastest route. For example there are a few different routes between Euston and Crewe, and I don’t think the fastest non-stopping trains take the shortest route.

Yeah, I noticed that there was no link from Edinburgh to Glasgow on the East Coast mainline from my local station. Presumably the passengers that took this route were assumed to have taken the West Coast Mainline.

Someone adventurous did Wick-Bodmin Parkway... I hope he's arrived by now.

Crewe does take the shorted route - Stafford, Trent valley, then bypassing rugby.

The cheap trains do the same route and just stop along the way. The ticket itself is valid for say journey into Birmingham, soend the day, then continue via Banbury to Marylebone. I’ve done that myself several times, but it’s a minor flow compared to the direct train.

Manchester to London - at least pre covid, had 3 trains per hour, one via Crewe which was slightly longer, the others via Stoke.

I think it's showing the shortest path routes from the chosen station A to the destinations B, weighted according to the number of tickets sold from A to B.

I believe this data is based on ticket sales.

In the UK you can buy a ticket from Cambridge to Norwich where you can get a direct train or you can change at Ely, depending on what time of day you use the ticket. But the ticket sales data can't tell if you changed at Ely or not.

So presumably this visualisation draws cambridge-to-norwich tickets on the shortest route, without trying to figure out or show if they go via Ely.

The UK sales data (if that's what they have) actually can tell you the route in some cases. This is in fact a bad thing, so let's explain...

Britain has repeatedly elected Conservative Party ("Tory") governments, the Tories have an ideological preference for the Free Market, regardless of whether that makes any sense. So, instead of a single nationally owned and likely unprofitable railway industry, it is divided into a lot of separate elements that in theory could be profitable but in fact take enormous subsidies to keep around, for our purposes we care about just one of those elements, the Rail Franchises, a whole lot of separate companies which undertake to provide passenger journeys on set routes and employ staff to operate trains, provide custom services, hire the rolling stock and so on.

Originally these Franchises were supposed to compete for passengers. But if they provide unrelated routes obviously that's not much "competition". A route from Leeds to Glasgow isn't in any meaningful sense "competing" with a route from Salisbury to Cambridge. So OK, what if they're competing only where the endpoints are the same? Well, the immediate problem is that the customers don't want to buy a ticket for "Bob's Railway" they want a ticket from one place to another and couldn't give a shit who provides that journey.

So the franchises "fixed" this by creating special tickets with weird rules. For example instead of a "Bob's Railway" ticket you make a ticket which requires passengers to travel via Tinyton, a small town nobody cares about but which is served only by Bob's Railway. Do the trains stop in Tinyton? Technically yes they do, but you'd barely know it, this is mostly just a way to satisfy the requirement that "Via Tinyton" means "Only use Bob's Railway" and so Bob's Railway can claim 100% of revenue for these tickets. That revenue doesn't actually matter any more, for a few years now the government just takes all revenue and pays the franchises whatever they want instead - but the pretence of competition must remain, because you know, "Free Market".

The result is that tickets are needlessly complicated or incredibly expensive or both, indeed if you're not using software or a specialist human to help plan your journey you will probably pay far more than you should and you might have a terrible journey anyway. The Tories love to say somehow the "Free Market" is going to fix this, but of course the correct fix is ideologically impossible for them, "Take the railways back into public ownership" is at once cheaper, more practical, and completely unthinkable thanks to ideology.

But there are tickets that are only valid for certain providers?

That's true, to do that they use a different hack and we can actually (very expensively) route those too.

These tickets are valid only on a particular service (and connections), since the franchises run the services they can sell tickets for services they run.

Example from a journey I made near Xmas:

  0908 from Bingley to Leeds (Northern Rail)

  0945 from Leeds to Kings Cross (LNER)

  1309 from Waterloo towards home (SWR)

The three franchises get 100% of their part of these routes, and I'm notionally forbidden from, say, getting on an XC to zigzag South and avoid London altogether instead.

That sums up the complexity better than I ever could, but as a tourist visiting London it was relatively painless to tap my Apple Watch and pay by contactless credit card when I got on and when I got off, as long as you’re travelling through supported stops within the city region. This generally included any routes to and from London airports.

Comparing the process in London to that of, say, Paris, it is night and day better with London’s system. Yes, trips might cost more than a flat rate, but you don’t need to have a special card - contactless payments are charged at the same rates as an Oyster card would get charged, including discounts if you take multiple trips in a day.

Compare to Paris where it’s a flat rate, but you can’t get a normal ticket because your anonymous card is somehow designed only for tourist pricing. Let’s not even bother with how long the lines can be to buy said card. I’ll take a system where you tap on and tap off any day of the week over a flat rate system that doesn’t support easy contactless payment at the same rates as everybody else.

I should clarify though - this only applies to any travel by train that you can do from stations that have contactless to stations that also have contactless. Anywhere else, you’re expected to tap off and pay a normal fare for the rest of your travel to an unsupported station by buying it from a website.

And while it is unusual to have such complexity, I should mention that rail travel between countries often has similar complexity - I bought a ticket once from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, but got on a train operated by a different company and had to buy a second ticket - the trains left at the same time to and from the same stations but from two different operators. The confusing part is that the train ticket I needed to buy wasn’t available from a Denmark regional train travel ticket kiosk, it was timed ticket you had to buy in advance from a website as the train’s origins was in Sweden rather than Denmark. (And the Denmark station didn’t have Swedish kiosks.)

I guess what I’m saying is that trains can make airlines look efficient, at least when it comes to buying and handling tickets. ;-)

Edit: I should also mention if I got any of this wrong, I’m actually from North America and about all I can say in response is “at least you have (express, high speed) trains,” as I look at our preference for highways and buses and how most rail in North America is for cargo...

Public transport within London has always been both differently managed/funded and also massively better than public transport anywhere else. If you're using London as your only data point you get a very skewed view of the UK public transport situation.

In this case, Transport for London (a public body) has always had much more control over public transport, specifically local political control, and has had the funding and long term planning horizon to set up things like the oyster and contactless payment systems. (And there are also practicalities, like the worst cases fare within the oyster zone being not very large, so it's OK to not take payment immediately but only when the system finds out where you got off, because you're not potentially out hundreds of pounds for a London to Edinburgh fare if it turns out the card being used declines the payment.)

London is special.

Literally.

Take bus companies. You don't say if you used any buses, but if you did they all work the same in London, they're all painted red, they take Oyster (your Apple Watch will work), the system keeps track and lets you use more than one to get to your destination without special fees. There are a bunch of bus companies in London, but there's no reason you would care about that, they're all the same to you.

Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that. In my home city for example there were four major bus companies, each painted their buses a different colour, each used separate tickets, each had its own "integrated" travel pass system. If I caught a 20 out of the city, then boarded a U6 that's two separate journeys with two separate companies, and thus two separate charges and the city government is legally prohibited from telling them to knock it off and just charge a single fee like London.

Even where there is a single (or 2) bus company, the ticketing structure is often crazy complex.

Fares webpages for Oxford:

https://www.oxfordbus.co.uk/fares-and-tickets

https://www.oxfordbus.co.uk/zone-tickets

> Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that.

Thankfully this seems to be changing. Greater Manchester, through its devolution in the last few years, has in the last few months started the 'Bee network',[0] which operates similarly to London's bus system. It's being brought in in phases.

Hopefully other areas start doing this too.

[0] https://tfgm.com/

The Dutch system seems to suit your expectations quite well.

There are a bunch of disparate organisations providing busses, water busses/taxis/ferries, rental bikes and trams, metro lines and trains running on publicly owned infrastructure.

One card allows you to check in to all of them, all over the country. You can get a subscription card for a 40% discount (€10 per month) or you can check in anywhere with contactless payments or anonymous cards for the full price.

From experience, I think the OV-chipkaart was the best option traveling the Netherlands. You would just to remember to check-out at the end of your journey so you wouldn't be charged end-to-end pricing. And the fact that you would pay only for the portion used in a trip (there was a few eurocents difference if you took the tram two stops or three stops, same for buses) it also made a lot of economic sense versus the all you can eat model everyone else employs.

Second best from recent years I like the new system in the NYC subway: tap & go, same price as a MetroCard without the hassle of buying one.

Yes, I agree. It was a joy to use contactless payment in Amsterdam, and like in London with the TfL app, I could check my payments via the OVpay app, take bikes on trains, and they have very frequent regional trains too. Actually, the OV app is better than the TfL app - I needed a VPN to pretend to be in London in order to check my payments on the TfL app, I didn’t need this for the OV app. Both apps had weird rules about when it would be possible to “fix” or add a tap-off if I’d forgotten to, though, but at least they both have that option unlike Paris, France or Ontario’s system.

And the worst for payment has to be Berlin’s system because they absolutely hate credit cards and prefer cash over other traceable payment methods. It’s nice for anonymity but as a tourist who has to present a passport anyway, I would prefer to just tap and not think about it. Plus they don’t have one app, they have three different apps each with unique features. Paris has the same problem, with regional and local apps, plus even third-party apps that you can buy tickets from.

Transit… some places you have to be a local to understand it and put up with it. Everyone else, at least there’s Uber most places now. Don’t even get me started on paying to use bathrooms by credit card (actually cash only) at a major train station in Brussels.

Ideology works both ways. Public ownership is not a magic solution that would solve everything, and in fact it'd probably create its own set of problems.

Maybe a state-owned company that must operate on stringent efficiency requirements with private sector best practices.

The former British Rail was cheaper to run, cheaper to use, and provided a better service which integrated service delivery, maintenance. engineering, and national R&D (with valuable IP which was given away for nothing after privatisation.)

It was often joked about because it was underfunded and run down, but in financial terms it was hugely efficient.

The ideology isn't really about "free markets", it's about giving public money to donors, cronies, and - bizarrely - foreign businesses, because much of the privatised network is foreign-owned.

In fact the ideology is fundamentally about not spending public money on working people - because they're poor and inferior, they don't deserve it, and if life gets too comfortable for them they'll start talking back instead of knowing their place.

Over the decades the definition of "working" has expanded from "factory workers and semi-skilled" to formerly middle class professions like law and medicine.

Engineering has always been considered a low-status profession, as has competent - as opposed to venal and self-interested - management.

Ideology goes both ways... When Corbyn wanted to nationalise railways and in fact turn them into coops it was ideology as well. Throwing money at things without clear business case and ROI is ideology as well. Your comment is hitting at the Tories for the sake of it, frankly, which seems like ideology as well.

We need pragmatism.

Perhaps state-owned railways would deliver more value but most likely that would mean running the company on sound principles with high efficiency and private sector management principles, and no strikes (none of which is a given in the public sector, unfortunately).

We can also legislate without polarising catch all ideologies. It's not a dichotomy between two extremes of full free market or full public ownership.

Right, there are places where Free Market solutions worked, and equally we shouldn't go "That's bad, get rid of the Free Market". But I'm highlighting the Tory ideology in this case because (a) their ideology makes it impossible to just fix this and (b) they've had a long time in power to do so if they were able and prove me wrong.

The use of Contracts for Difference to fund renewable power generation is an example where ideology and practicality aligned. This is a Free Market solution which nicely matches the problem.

It often makes sense to offer a cheaper ticket e.g. I can go to Brighton via London, which is faster and easier, or I can change at Reading and Gatwick, which is harder and slower, but the trains are less busy, so it makes sense to encourage people not to go via London.

The "via" restrictions are usually dropped if there are problems on the lines allowing people who are delayed to find other routes, but this can lead to problems in one area causing overcrowding problems in another.

Can anyone explain why there so little traffic to Heathrow? Do most people take the Tube and not the Heathrow express? It also looks like traffic between the Terminals is not shown. IIRC, you have to get a ticket to cross the ticket gate (which is free I think), so they must have the numbers somewhere.

The Heathrow Express is extremely expensive. I imagine most people tube, bus or get dropped off by car.

Yes, and the expenses get much worse if you’re traveling in a group. I certainly took the Tube, with my family of four, to Heathrow last spring. It was hundreds of pounds for us to take the Express, or <£30 for the Tube.

The opening of the Elizabeth Line was partway through the statistic period used here. That line provides the cheaper and almost-as-fast option to Central London and beyond, using the same tracks as the Heathrow Express but also stopping at some intermediate stations.

Unfortunately, Heathrow Airport have very good signage to the Heathrow Express, and abysmal signage to the Elizabeth Line. I assume this is intentional.

I'm thoroughly confused on what it costs. The airport supposedly adds a surcharge as they own the last bit of track, but I can't find an official website saying what this surcharge is. More than the tube, but significantly less than the Heathrow Express, anyway.

(Before the Elizabeth Line there were also non-"Express" trains running on the same tracks, but the service was less frequent. Not many people knew about it.)

There's no airport-specific surcharge, it's just zone 6.

Which for the Piccadilly line happens to only contain Heathrow, and Elizabeth line only Heathrow & non-London. But it's not hidden/secret, there's a zone 7, and other lines have more in 6.

They posdibly mean this:

> Journeys to or from Heathrow Airport are priced at a premium due to using the rail tunnel between the airport and Hayes & Harlington. That stretch of line is not part of the Network Rail system but owned by Heathrow Airport Holdings, who charge TfL an additional fee for each train that uses it. Heathrow is nevertheless included within the Travelcard scheme and daily/weekly fare capping as a fare zone 6 station.[80] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_line

They are possibly referring to this:

>Journeys to or from Heathrow Airport are priced at a premium due to using the rail tunnel between the airport and Hayes & Harlington. That stretch of line is not part of the Network Rail system but owned by Heathrow Airport Holdings, who charge TfL an additional fee for each train that uses it. Heathrow is nevertheless included within the Travelcard scheme and daily/weekly fare capping as a fare zone 6 station.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_line

I have now found it on [1]. Yesterday this was showing £5.60 for both options, but now it shows £13.30 for the Elizabeth Line.

I think it's most likely TfL's annoying language/translation plugin (I'm not in Britain now) was messing something up, and the fare wasn't updating.

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/tube-and-rail-fares/sing...

Heathrow Express is a sucker/tourist trap, especially post Elizabeth line. But even without I used to get (still sometimes might depending) the Piccadilly line every time.

With luggage even yes, before someone says that, and never any shortage of others doing the same. The carriages have a dedicated area for bags with signs asking to give priority to that (like for wheelchairs/pushchairs on other lines).

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