My suggestion for Season tickets to not be sold for travel on HS2

[Bletchleyite]

I still maintain that HS2 can still act as a walk-up railway, with phone apps etc allocating and directing passengers to available seats as they arrive at the station. (With paper reservations still availabke for those who request them)

It depends what you mean by "walk up". I'm not aware of any of the compulsory reservation railways (TGV, AVE, Le Frecce etc) where you can't simply walk up and buy a ticket at the currently available rate and board the next train. People seem to think "compulsory reservation" means book in advance - it doesn't. You can even rock up and buy a ticket on Ryanair for immediate travel if you want, but you'd best have deep pockets, and I'd say HS2 is very likely to be the same.

Compulsory reservation just means two things - one, that when it's full it's full, and two, that everyone is allocated a specific seat and should sit there.

 

[Bletchleyite]

"Intercity" with journeys that would be amongst the shortest intercity journeys on the system?

Do you think you will maintain a "high quality" intercity style product on the Birmingham trains when the maximum journey time is 45-50 minutes, or Manchester at 66 minutes?

Yes. Because there will be plenty of "classic line" competition, and so the budget option will be on those services. HS2 is going to be running in the same market as TGV, ICE, Frecciarossa etc, just as Avanti sort-of does now. Not the Javelin commuter services.

 

[Bletchleyite]

As HS2 replaces current WCML InterCity services, all of which have walk-up fares, where do you get this opinion from?

I believe it's been proposed in formal papers somewhere, though I couldn't quite say where. Also it is the practice in most non-Germanic countries for high speed rail.

 

[edwin_m]

Isn't the point (maybe not the benefit) to move the existing services (with the same passengers) off the existing routes to release capacity on those existing routes for shorter distance commuters?

The objective is to do with economic rebalancing as I suggested above.

Part of achieving that objective is to improve the service to intermediate stations. Inevitably these will be used by commuters, and you can't reasonably charge new commuters more than existing ones, but commuting over medium distances is less unsustainable than commuting over longer distances at higher speeds. Better service to and between these stations will also help locally-based businesses, and allow local residents to visit each other more by train, rather than simply being focused on providing journeys into London.

I contend that the number of daily commuters on a journey such as Birmingham-London is fairly small. Perception of certain people on this forum may be influenced by knowing people who do such journeys on staff travel arrangements, but only ex-BR staff have full privileges and almost all will have retired before HS2 opens. It's also worth noting that the existing city centre stations where HS2 provides an alternative aren't really commuter origin stations, because there is little housing nearby and what there is is probably occupied by people working locally. It's much more likely that existing long-distance commuters will access the rail network at a station not in a city centre, that will have a more frequent but not faster service at its existing station, rather than one that will have HS2 service.

Some of that small number of city-to-city commuters will pay extra to use HS2, some may move to an intermediate station that now has a better commuter service, and some will continue to use the slower train where they may now have more space to get the laptop out and do some work.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The more likely model for HS2 isn't daily commuters - there are very few even now because it's too expensive even from Brum. What you'll get, as you to some extent already do, is people who make occasional visits to a central office but mostly work from home or at a branch office, and regular ticketing is just fine for them.

 

[Class 170101]

This might in fact result in the situation where there are no season tickets on HS2, a commuter just buys five Anytime returns.

Pull the other one. A season ticket is way better value than buying daily tickets and wouldn't encourage people to swap WCML Intercity to HS2 thus releasing capacity for commuter services on WCML Fast Lines.

A season ticket holder gets less for each delay per day than a some one who buys a daily ticket for the same journey this tends to show how good value a season ticket is compared to buying daily tickets.

 

[HSTEd]

Yes. Because there will be plenty of "classic line" competition, and so the budget option will be on those services. HS2 is going to be running in the same market as TGV, ICE, Frecciarossa etc, just as Avanti sort-of does now. Not the Javelin commuter services.

Even Paris-Lille is 200km or so on a straight line.
London-Birmingham is more like 160.

These distances are not traditional intercity distances in Europe.
Also in France increasingly the budget option is also a TGV......

It is unlikely to be any cheaper to provide a seat on a Class 350 to Birmingham than it is to simply provide an extra seat on the High Speed set.
Indeed I think it is likely to be the reverse.

And you need everyone who can use HS2 to use HS2 to allow these mythical released paths to actually exist.

 

[Ianno87]

Yes. Because there will be plenty of "classic line" competition, and so the budget option will be on those services. HS2 is going to be running in the same market as TGV, ICE, Frecciarossa etc, just as Avanti sort-of does now. Not the Javelin commuter services.

Although all have instances of "budget" or "market" pricing. E.g. SuperSparPreis on DB, Ouigo on TGV, etc.

And Javelin does have good abundance of cheapo Advances.

Pull the other one. A season ticket is way better value than buying daily tickets and wouldn't encourage people to swap WCML Intercity to HS2 thus releasing capacity for commuter services on WCML Fast Lines.

A season ticket holder gets less for each delay per day than a some one who buys a daily ticket for the same journey this tends to show how good value a season ticket is compared to buying daily tickets.

Depends how they are priced. Plenty of flows today where (for example) a Weekly season is only about 4.8x the cost of a Daily Return ticket. Granted, that *tends* to be truest for shorter distance flows. But in these instances an annual season represents relativly poor value relative to actual need to travel in a world of flexible working. Value for money for a season ticket gets even worse for anybody with the flexibility to travel on off-peak trains (e.g. after school drop off)

If anything the percieved high up front cost of an annual season ticket is a major barrier to demand at the moment. Shifting the strategy to more of a "Pay as you go"-friendly pricing may attract new business from people not needing to travel every day.

The notion of people turning up for the 0745 train every day, standing in the same spot on the platform and sitting in the same seat to get to the fixed desk for 0855 is increasingly outdated.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The notion of people turning up for the 0745 train every day, standing in the same spot on the platform and sitting in the same seat to get to the fixed desk for 0855 is increasingly outdated.

Even to the extent that it still does exist, it only happens around cities. It isn't going to happen on HS2 any more than it already does on Avanti's Birmingham services - there are some, but not many.

The cost is the off-putter, not the journey time. People, after all, commute from Brighton which has a similar journey time to Birmingham. The present annual season ticket from Birmingham to Euston Any Permitted is a shade over twelve grand. There will always be a very limited market for this sort of thing even if it exists; sure, housing is a bit cheaper but if you go out as far as Milton Keynes and Northampton (to use the WCML as an example) it's not that much different from the nicer parts of the West Midlands, certainly not to the extent of saving you £500/month on your mortgage on an average house to make it worthwhile doing that.

There is absolutely no way they're going to halve that (a reasonable top end for affordability, I'd say, and still a lot) for HS2 - no way.

 

[Ianno87]

Even to the extent that it still does exist, it only happens around cities. It isn't going to happen on HS2 any more than it already does on Avanti's Birmingham services - there are some, but not many.

The cost is the off-putter, not the journey time. People, after all, commute from Brighton which has a similar journey time to Birmingham. The present annual season ticket from Birmingham to Euston Any Permitted is a shade over twelve grand. There will always be a very limited market for this sort of thing even if it exists; sure, housing is a bit cheaper but if you go out as far as Milton Keynes and Northampton (to use the WCML as an example) it's not that much different from the nicer parts of the West Midlands, certainly not to the extent of saving you £500/month on your mortgage on an average house to make it worthwhile doing that.

There is absolutely no way they're going to halve that (a reasonable top end for affordability, I'd say, and still a lot) for HS2 - no way.

But what could be done is to make the price of daily tickets better relative to season tickets.

For example, it's currently £180 for a Anytime Return, £300 for 7 days Birmingham-Euston.


Pricing Daily Tickets* closer to the (say) £80-100 mark would redress this balance to make 2-3 days per week commuting more affordable in a HS2 world.

*Not necessarily meaning an Anytime Return at the this price, but having fixed train (or semi-flexible) tickets at this price available 1-2 days before travel.

 

[PeterC]

It depends what you mean by "walk up". I'm not aware of any of the compulsory reservation railways (TGV, AVE, Le Frecce etc) where you can't simply walk up and buy a ticket at the currently available rate and board the next train. People seem to think "compulsory reservation" means book in advance - it doesn't. You can even rock up and buy a ticket on Ryanair for immediate travel if you want, but you'd best have deep pockets, and I'd say HS2 is very likely to be the same.

Compulsory reservation just means two things - one, that when it's full it's full, and two, that everyone is allocated a specific seat and should sit there.

Exactly. I have used the TGV only once, in its early days. I had a rover ticket and I just bought reservations for the next available train that afternoon out of a machine at Gare de Lyon.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Pricing Daily Tickets* closer to the (say) £80-100 mark would redress this balance to make 2-3 days per week commuting more affordable in a HS2 world.

Whyever would we want to do that? Commuting over 100 miles is to be strongly discouraged. My point was of people maybe going to the office once a week at most for a day of meetings, and if an Anytime-equivalent was a bit pricey they might choose to travel for say 11am arrival, have the meetings including a lunch meeting, have dinner and go home at 9pm, say.

That said I do agree that £184 Anytime Return is outrageous, and the fare from London to Manchester should be more like that.

 

[HSTEd]

There is absolutely no way they're going to halve that (a reasonable top end for affordability, I'd say, and still a lot) for HS2 - no way.

If halving it gets you five times as many passengers, then you should definitely do it.
As you say the insane costs of commuting are what stop it being a major use case today.

We have functionally unlimited capacity, the marginal cost of extra seats until the train is at full length are incredibly small.
Birmingham will have 3 400m long-capable trains per hour.

Even without adopting commuter seating the capacity is collosal.

EDIT:

I am not sure why we should deny people travel just because the train has no more seats.
If people are willing to stand to, or partway too, their destination, we should let them.

It is only 35 minutes from Old Oak to Birmingham Interchange/Curzon Street.

 

[Bletchleyite]

If halving it gets you five times as many passengers, then you should definitely do it.
As you say the insane costs of commuting are what stop it being a major use case today.

Commuting over 100 miles in each direction is insane, not the present season ticket price.

 

[Class 170101]

If anything the percieved high up front cost of an annual season ticket is a major barrier to demand at the moment. Shifting the strategy to more of a "Pay as you go"-friendly pricing may attract new business from people not needing to travel every day.

The notion of people turning up for the 0745 train every day, standing in the same spot on the platform and sitting in the same seat to get to the fixed desk for 0855 is increasingly outdated.

Of course a fixed payment could remain albeit as you say you could offer a flexible ticket at a slightly higher price overall (ie pay for the flexibility) because of course money arriving in one lump helps a TOC to plan ahead unlike money kept by customers until payment.

Commuting over 100 miles in each direction is insane, not the present season ticket price.

Unfortunately that will depend on the service provided. Would you consider Newark to London, Nuneaton to London or Stowmarket to London mad distances to commute even though the journey times are somewhat different.

 

[Ianno87]

Commuting over 100 miles in each direction is insane, not the present season ticket price.

Not insane if only 2-3 days per week *and* time on the train is used as productive time offset against the overall working week (so not leaving home early or getting home late). It could easily catch on as a way of life, if it opens up more choices of places for people to live to suit lifestyle choices and housing affordability without inroading into home lives.

 

[Mainline421]

Completely disagree with this, let's not start trying to forcibly categorise services for certain types of travel. It's a train not a plane!

 

[HSTEd]

Commuting over 100 miles in each direction is insane, not the present season ticket price.

Why is it insane?
With the ongoing decarbonisation of the electricity system, the impact of a HS2 commute is likely to become negligible before the route even opens.

 

[Ianno87]

Completely disagree with this, let's not start trying to forcibly categorise services for certain types of travel. It's a train not a plane!

In most cases, if you're daily commuting on HS2 you'll probably be "doing it wrong" anyway. The nature of the office worker type market it will be directly appealing to are, in general, workers who won't need to be present in the office every single day and employers come the 2030s will likely not be actively encouraging this. Treating commuting-type travel on HS2 on a "Pay as you go" (rather than season ticket) basis will satisfy this market.

 

[Mainline421]

In most cases, if you're daily commuting on HS2 you'll probably be "doing it wrong" anyway. The nature of the office worker type market it will be directly appealing to are, in general, workers who won't need to be present in the office every single day and employers come the 2030s will likely not be actively encouraging this. Treating commuting-type travel on HS2 on a "Pay as you go" (rather than season ticket) basis will satisfy this market.

You're not "doing it wrong" HS2 will make Birmingham only 40 minutes from Euston. I've done commutes longer than that.

 

[Ianno87]

You're not "doing it wrong" HS2 will make Birmingham only 40 minutes from Euston. I've done commutes longer than that.

Hence my careful choice of phrase "in most cases".

 

[HSTEd]

Assuming the currently projected Paddington terminators on Crossrail are extended to Old Oak, there is little to chose between OOC and other London termini. At which point Birmingham Curzon Street/Birmingham International is 31 minutes from London. Which makes it equivalent to something like Welwyn North or Welwyn Garden City.

 

[edwin_m]

Why is it insane?
With the ongoing decarbonisation of the electricity system, the impact of a HS2 commute is likely to become negligible before the route even opens.

You're not "doing it wrong" HS2 will make Birmingham only 40 minutes from Euston. I've done commutes longer than that.

For most people it's not a 40 minute commute. Virtually nobody living within a short walk of New Street or Curzon Street is going to be commuting to London, they'll be living in a flat and probably working locally. The people commuting from Birmingham will have made an additional journey to get there.

As I posted above, what's much more likely is somebody living in a rural area and driving every day to one of the park and ride HS2 stations. That's much more likely with HS2 because there are few places on the existing network with a combination of good road access and a fast service into London. And it's that useage that I see as unsustainable.

 

[HSTEd]

For most people it's not a 40 minute commute. Virtually nobody living within a short walk of New Street or Curzon Street is going to be commuting to London, they'll be living in a flat and probably working locally.

Why not?
Living in central Birmingham is still rather cheaper than living in Central London.

And people commute from Welwyn even though there is no arcology built over the station.
This is no different to how people commute all the time.

As I posted above, what's much more likely is somebody living in a rural area and driving every day to one of the park and ride HS2 stations. That's much more likely with HS2 because there are few places on the existing network with a combination of good road access and a fast service into London. And it's that useage that I see as unsustainable.

They will probably make the car journey anyway.
Instead of driving to their place of work they drive to the station.

Environmental impact from the outlying station to their place of work will be functionally negligible.

 

[The Ham]

I think its almost a given that fares via HS2 will be higher than current WCML fares despite what the current government says, it does not tie the hands of the next. services on classic lines in Kent to London were slowed down, and this is from those that used them, to make HS1 services more attractive and it also has HS1 specific fares. The same will happen for HS2.



I still think you will have some catering between Birmingham and London and Crewe to London via WCML as not all the intermediate stations will be 'served' by HS2 but will still be long journeys. The same on the MML and ECML.

What will see the end of it will be station catering and prices of catering on trains relative to off train catering. If trains price themselves too high relative to the competition then there will be fewer sales and hence closure.

Let's look at some numbers:

A 390 has 470 seats/589 seats Vs ~1,100 seats on a HS2 train. Given that you need one just one driver regardless as to which train they are driving. That means that the cost of the driver on the HS2 train costs less per seat.

Next up, there's either 9 or 11 coaches on each train on the 390's over the (say) 16 coaches on a 400m long HS2. Does that mean that the leading costs will be higher? Well possibly not and here's why.

The current services to Manchester takes 2 hours, so a round trip for each unit of 5 hours. HS2 this drops to 3 hours. At 9 coaches over 5 hours for 3 services that requires 135 coaches (which is the very minimum of coaches, this rises to 165 coaches). This compares with 144 coaches for HS2.

Therefore, given that some services are going to be 11 coaches currently, the last costs are likely to be similar, even though there'll be a lot more seats.

This time saving also reduces the number of staff required to run the same number of services. This further reducing the cost per seat.

Therefore if you earn as much money in total as you did before then you're going to be making more money.

Given that Virgin had been paying a premium to the DfT then this money (as well as the extra profits from the lower costs) would be able to pay for the relevant costs of building the line in the first place (I say relevant costs as some of the costs are paid back through taxes).

 

[The Ham]

For most people it's not a 40 minute commute. Virtually nobody living within a short walk of New Street or Curzon Street is going to be commuting to London, they'll be living in a flat and probably working locally. The people commuting from Birmingham will have made an additional journey to get there.

As I posted above, what's much more likely is somebody living in a rural area and driving every day to one of the park and ride HS2 stations. That's much more likely with HS2 because there are few places on the existing network with a combination of good road access and a fast service into London. And it's that useage that I see as unsustainable.

Only about 15% of the whole population live in rural settlements (any settlement of less than 10,000 or areas, (and there's a fair percentage of them already in the South East) as such there's not going to be a lot of them.

The bigger users of HS2 will more likely be those who wish to do business in London but don't want the expense of having offices there. Those expenses are much more than just the office space, but include your junior staff, support staff, cleaners, etc.

That then allows them to live in a nice big place (and certainly much bigger than if you lived somewhere within the M25) somewhere fairly close to a HS2 station and then claim expenses each time that they need to travel to London (which may well be most of the time, but it's not coming out of their pay).

As the business grows their staff may semi regularly need to travel to London as well, however they're not doing it every day and neither are they paying for it.

Why do I know that this will happen? Simple, it's the model of a lot of businesses around the areas 30 to 90 minutes from London do. There's no reason why it would be any different on HS2 rather than (say) the SWR network.

 

[paul1609]

The whole point of HS2 is not to do with moving passengers off existing services - you're confusing features with benefits. The point is to improve the UK economy and to re-balance it away from London and implicitly towards a more sustainable future. I contend that encouraging commuting, rather than business (and to a lesser extent leisure) travel, would run counter to those objectives.

Under my proposal people who commute from Birmingham to London would enjoy a similar service at a similar price to what they get today, but would have to pay more for high speed. But peak fares for one-off journeys would be less, probably from intermediate stations as well because they shouldn't be disadvantaged relative to the places served by HS2. This might in fact result in the situation where there are no season tickets on HS2, a commuter just buys five Anytime returns.

It's difficult to do because people will lose out on an arrangement they have based their lifestyles on. Much less difficult just not to introduce the facility on high speed, as this doesn't disadvantage any existing travelers.

I agree in general that there should be parity of fares including intermediate destinations being consistent with the fares between HS2 stations. This suggests a cross-the-board cut in Anytimes. But for the reasons I've explained I would make an exception for seasons - not conceptually much different from the operator-specific seasons we have today.

Don't forget what happened in Kent as well as the premium for us

But what could be done is to make the price of daily tickets better relative to season tickets.

For example, it's currently £180 for a Anytime Return, £300 for 7 days Birmingham-Euston.


Pricing Daily Tickets* closer to the (say) £80-100 mark would redress this balance to make 2-3 days per week commuting more affordable in a HS2 world.

*Not necessarily meaning an Anytime Return at the this price, but having fixed train (or semi-flexible) tickets at this price available 1-2 days before travel.

 

[paul1609]

But what could be done is to make the price of daily tickets better relative to season tickets.

For example, it's currently £180 for a Anytime Return, £300 for 7 days Birmingham-Euston.


Pricing Daily Tickets* closer to the (say) £80-100 mark would redress this balance to make 2-3 days per week commuting more affordable in a HS2 world.

*Not necessarily meaning an Anytime Return at the this price, but having fixed train (or semi-flexible) tickets at this price available 1-2 days before travel.

An Ashford to London (plus high speed) Anytime Travelcard is £79.60 with the Annual over £7k. 10 years after HS1 opened the 12 car peak trains are full and standing on departure from Ashford and the line desperately needs more rolling stock. The HS services apparently loose a huge amount of money at that fare level.

 

[Bletchleyite]

An Ashford to London (plus high speed) Anytime Travelcard is £79.60 with the Annual over £7k. 10 years after HS1 opened the 12 car peak trains are full and standing on departure from Ashford and the line desperately needs more rolling stock. The HS services apparently loose a huge amount of money at that fare level.

Ashford-London is about 50 miles. That being the case, by "rest of the Sarfeast" standards those fares are outrageous. Wolverton is a comparable distance but 2/3-3/4 of the price.

What that just highlights is that commuter rail is not a profitable endeavour in most cases (though there have been exceptions) because you need huge amounts of peak capacity that then lies unused between the peaks, and yield management doesn't really work because the vast majority of your passengers have no realistic choice when they travel.

 

[HSTEd]

You can yield manage the trains to being full by simply slashing middle of the day fares to negligible levels.
Once you have the rolling stock for peak time services, running it up and down all day costs virtually nothing.

Energy and marginal maintenance is rather small - don't even need more staff because a 200m train requires one crewmember, just as a 400m one does.

If you start selling 11AM Birmingham-London tickets at a few pounds return, things start to happen quite quickly.
Modern high speed trains manage 0.033kWh per seat km.
That implies moving an extra seat from Birmingham to London is using ~5-6kWh.
Which even at domestic rates is something like a pound's worth of electricity.