untethered said:
Now if someone wanted to organise a mass fare dodging campaign with the specific intention of drawing attention to the problems of privatisation, I could at least regard that as a credible political act. It'd still be theft, though.
Exactly that happened on First Great Western services last month, in protest against high fares, overcrowding and timetable changes. The company decided against prosecuting any of the fares strikers: they knew damn well that most people agreed with them!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/23/nrail23.xml
The rail companies have people over a barrel. For a lot of people living in the commuter belt, trains are the only viable means of getting to work and they have to travel at peak times. They are a captive market, and the train companies milk this for all they're worth. Someone has to pay for the duplication of roles and multiplicity of completely unnecessary expenses inherent in the privatised railway, and for the 'profits' of train operating companies, maintenance contractors and all the rest of them. That someone, of course, is not only the poor old passenger but also the general taxpayer, since the railways now get something like four or five times the subsidy (in real terms) that British Rail did.
In fact, the TOCs do what everyone accuses poor old British Rail of doing: sticking the fares up to price off demand as an alternative to increasing capacity. BR did do this, because it was denied the money to invest and because for much of its existence the assumption was that rail use was in slow but irreversible decline so increasing capacity was unnecessary. We now know differerent. However, there is very little sign that the privatised railway is capable of coping with increases in demand on the scale now predicted. Infrastructure project costs are too high, the franchising system is inefficient and there's precious little central direction over what money is spent on and where - with the exception of the DfT, whose main interest in the railways is in screwing as much money out of franchisees as possible, who in turn pass the cost on to passengers. The whole system is fatally flawed and cannot do what's being asked of it - unlike nationalised railways across much of Europe, which have steadily been investing in new rolling stock, expanding capacity and increasing their traffic. Even in Northern Ireland, where the railways are run by a publicly owned company much like BR, there's been a 30% rise in traffic over the last few years. So much for the idea that privatisation is behind the recent growth in rail traffic!
Frankly, I don't care very much about fare evasion. In principle it's theft, but in practice it costs me a whole lot less money than having to fork out record fares to pay for the 'profits' of some cowboy train operating firm or others, and I know which I find a lot more objectionable. I wonder why other people don't ... but then, it's always easier for simple-minded people to get angry with individuals fiddling the system a little to help them get by, than it is with those who are responsible for the whole shit system in the first place, isn't it?
