From Sky News:
A UK-French taskforce is to tackle Channel travel chaos after gridlocked traffic caused hours of hold-ups last weekend - with rail strikes on Saturday and holiday traffic expected to add to the misery.
I paid for an annual travel card at the end of last December (as I do every year).
Our office shut down at the end of March. I didn't cancel my travel card and ask for a refund straight away, because I thought lock down would only last a couple of weeks and it wasn't worth the hassle of cancelling and paying for another one.
By the end of May, I accepted that this lock down was going to drag on for a while longer and asked for a refund. TfL refunded me seven months' worth a couple of days later. So far so good.
To my pleasant surprise, they sent me an email a couple of days ago, which said that as I hadn't used my travel card for the whole of April and May, they'd refund me another two months' worth.
The money's not in my account yet, but fingers crossed.
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UPDATE 15/7:
1. The second refund appeared in my bank account today.
2. C. left this comment, but then deleted it, not sure why, because he makes good points:
Remember that an annual travelcard is priced at 10 months and 13 days, so a refund of "7 months" is only approximately 67% back rather than the 58% back that would be expected on a pro-rata basis. In other words there is no such thing as a 7 month refund - the entire thing is refunded and you are re-charged for a 3.5 month travelcard, which is a third of the price of a 10.5 month (=annual) ticket.
Yes, that is what they used to do, and fair enough. But I can confirm that my annual travel card cost £2,400 on 31/12/2019 and they sent me refunds totalling £1,812, which looks like 9/12 of £2,400 to me.
Two Zone 1-5 peak single fares on the tube is £9.40 and an annual ticket is £2468. So if your commute is a single tube journey each way and you make no other journeys, you need to travel 263 days a year, which is probably cheaper to pay as you go. If your commute is multi-modal or if you travel for leisure, then a travelcard is probably worth it.
Yes, I probably commuted in fewer than 263 days a year so on that basis, the travel card was more expensive. But all the other journeys within town, in the evening and at weekends were effectively free. Plus I didn't need to bother tapping out, I could just walk past the queue at the stupid machine, which was also of value to me (especially if there was a long queue and I was in a hurry or it was raining).
From Midlands Connect:
* Revealed for the first time, 73 stations on the existing rail network stand to benefit from improved passenger services as a direct result of the capacity released by HS2, including 54 stations with no direct HS2 services;
* Evidence submitted to the Oakervee HS2 Review by Midlands Connect;
* High speed line will take long-distance rail journeys off the existing network, providing capacity for new routes, as well as faster and more frequent local and inter-regional services;
And so on and so forth (they seem to be repeating the same basic argument over and over).
Quite clearly, HS2 was never about improving the London-Birmingham connection, which was absolutely fine. Trains every 20 or 30 minutes, sub-2 hour journey time and a reasonable ticket price (compared to some routes on English railways).
Somebody calculated that even at the original £20 - £30 billion estimate (ha!), it would be cheaper to demolish Birmigham and just rebuild it half an hour closer to London on the existing line.
Hooray for local public transport and local passenger trains, of course. If they had advanced this as their original reason for building HS2, people might have bought it, but to suddenly "reveal for the first time" at this late stage in the game seems a bit desperate.
This all reminds me of the reasons trotted out for introducing ID-cards, every few months they'd think up a new one to see if any of them stuck. None did, and the scheme was quietly shelved.
From City AM:
Transport for London (TfL) is considering funding the £3.1bn Bakerloo line extension with a tax on landowners. The proposed works would extend the line from Elephant and Castle to Lewisham via stations on Old Kent Road and New Cross Gate.
However, the project has been left unfunded with no indication from central government that it will foot the bill. It was revealed today by New Civil Engineer that TfL is considering taxing landowners along the proposed route to pay for the line as they would likely benefit from increased property values from the extension...
The Centre for London and the Adam Smith Institute think tanks said the landowner levy would make sense.
Adam Smith institute research associate Charlie Paice said: "Rather than relying upon central government handouts for infrastructure investment this land levy will mean that those paying are the ones who stand to benefit as the value of their properties go up.
"If land owners aren't prepared to pay for a project which will further increase their property values – then why should they expect taxpayers from the rest of the country to stump up their cash?"
Good arguments FOR. Now let's see the KLN:
However, the low-tax lobby group the Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA) took a drastically different view.
Harry Fone, TPA grassroots campaign manager, said: "Imposing levies on homeowners who had no idea of the proposal when they bought would be deeply unfair."
OK, let's rephrase that: "Income tax hikes on people who had no idea that their taxes would be used to subsidise landowners elsewhere in the country when they started their current jobs are perfectly fair and reasonable."
Spotted by TBH in The Guardian:
Rail passengers commuting into London could have services disrupted by freight trains if a no-deal Brexit causes logjams at the Channel tunnel, it has emerged.
Go-Ahead, the company behind the rail operator Southeastern, said it was working with the government to try to ensure commuters were not affected...
Spotted by @TheaDickinson in the Birmingham Mail:
An expert has sensationally claimed bus services may STOP after Brexit - amid fears over the recruitment of drivers.
Services across Birmingham and the Midlands could worryingly grind to a halt, the expert has claimed.
Warning Brits they face impending chaos after March 29, former Stourbridge MP Lynda Waltho suggested the UK could face an exodus of drivers...
From yesterday’s City AM:
Property heavyweights vent frustration in light of new Crossrail delays
Senior property executives expressed anger and frustration at the delay in the opening of Crossrail, as it emerged the postponement of the new line could result in a series of setbacks for London developers.
Emoov research carried out for City AM suggests property values could sink by as much as £10,000 in the short term, with hopes that falling house prices would rise after the Elizabeth Line’s opening now being put on hold.
Meanwhile, with the £15 bn project’s launch being pushed back from December this year to Autumn 2019, commercial developers within London’s West End are also worried that an eagerly-awaited bump in retail footfall will come nine months later than expected.
“We were massively disappointed when we found this out. For our retail side it is probably far more damaging, as a lot of their business models were based on new customers coming in. It’s tough enough for these guys at the moment being squeezed by business rates,” said Jace Tyrrell, whose firm New West End represents retail giants along Bond Street and Oxford Street.
He added: “We’ve known for some time there would be issues but never to this extent.”
Last week Ireland’s largest hotel group Dalata unveiled plans for a £91m new site in Aldgate, with deputy chief executive Dermot Crowley saying the transport links were a large factor in the decision to move to the area.
However, Crowley told City AM yesterday that while the delay does not change their investment decision, “it is frustrating when things like this get delayed – you’re told one day it’ll be ready in three months, and you find out the next day it’s 12 months.”
From The Metro:
"Everything is late at Waterloo because they slowed trains down to as little as 20mph to avoid buckling the rails," said travel expert Simon Calder.
"Thirty degrees is not something that should trouble infrastructure, but it’s very frail. The Victorians built it and we are doing what we can."
Most of the planning and layout is from the 19th century, but the actual rails are replaced every ten years or so, so this is a pretty pathetic excuse.
From City AM:
New research seen by City A.M. has shown that most British househunters are snubbing new-build homes in favour of older properties…
But in a survey of 2,000 UK adults, 81 per cent said they were not keen on the prospect of living in a new-build, while 79 per cent thought the government should focus more on supporting the refurbishment of traditional properties.
Efforts to solve the housing crisis have resulted in a record 162,880 new homes being built over the past year. But 1.4m properties are currently empty across the UK, a 20-year high.
1. Define "new build". If it means completed in the last few months and for sale to the first occupant, it's about half a percent of the housing stock. So if 19% are happy to live there, that is quite enough demand and irrelevant.
2. People might not like "new builds" because they
a) are smaller than older ones, or built to lower standards (the old housing which was low standard has largely been demolished or refurbed since) and
b) older homes tend to be in the more desirable spots (either because that was the most obvious place to build them or the town has grown up around them) and new greenfield housing estates are a bit bleak for the first few years until shops, kids nurseries etc open up and buses are re-routed.
So it's not comparing like with like. The pricing mechanism will sort that out.
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Also from City AM:
Taxpayers already dish out almost £5bn annually to the [railway] industry, despite the fact a relatively small number of people use the railways. Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show households on average spend just £3.60 per week on rail travel, compared with over £30 on the operation of personal transport.
Actually, support for rail users is incredibly regressive too. The bottom fifth of households by income spend on average just £1 per week on rail. This compares with £11.20 for the top decile. Little surprise then that ONS stats show that the bottom fifth of households obtain £26 in rail subsidies per year, on average, compared with £173 for the richest.
It stands to reason that increasing taxpayer support would exacerbate this regressive effect, with measures such as freezing rail fares or limiting increases effectively taking from working taxpayers to give to the rich.
His argument is, subsidies for rail transport are wrong, with which I would largely agree (I'm not quoting the bits I agree with). But the factoids he quotes do not particularly support his argument.
1. A small number of people commute by train because it is largely a south-east/London thing. Much higher population densities make railway more viable. In turn, while going by train is more expensive than by car (on a per mile basis), with higher population densities/land values, you need to focus more on efficient use of available land. So overall the extra cost of running a train network is less than the cost of the land that roads and car parks would use, so it is still a saving to the economy as a whole.
2. The statistic on lower earners spending less on trains is also facile. Firstly you can strip out the south-east/London effect. And nobody is going to pay thousands for an annual travel card to go and do a minimum wage job miles away. But it's worth it if you are commuting to a higher paid job.
3. Lower earning non-rail users are *not* subsidising higher earning rail users. Subsidies come out of tax, and higher earners pay a lot more tax. So it's higher earning non-rail users who are subsidising higher earning rail users.
4. For example, my wife and I spend about £4,000 a year on our London Transport travel cards and earn a fair whack between us. Half TFL's budget is from ticket sales and the other half is from subsidies out of taxes we pay. AFAICS, if they abolish the subsidy, double ticket prices and give us a tax cut, we would end up better off, with the upside that the trains would be less crowded. Sounds good to me (out of narrow self-interest) but that's not much consolation to all the people doing low paid jobs in London, who would clearly end up worse off. If the extra taxes I pay go on reducing travel costs for all the burger flippers and office cleaners in London, then that seems like a fair trade-off to me - but that is the very thing he opposes.
5. From a Georgist point of view, his statement that subsidies are "effectively taking from working taxpayers to give to the rich" is quite true if you mean that taxes on output and employment are spent on subsidising rail fares, which in turn boost land values in areas with a good rail network, which end up in the pockets of landowners. But I'm sure that's not how he meant it.
From The Metro's Good Deed Feed:
A BIG thank you to my dad, who took a week off work to take me to London for my work experience.
Amy, Essex.
Essex?
From The Guardian:
The number of train journeys made each year has more than doubled since the late 1990s, according to a new report.
About 1.65bn passenger rail journeys were made in the past 12 months, compared with 801m in 1997. The figures come from analysis by the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train operators and Network Rail, and is based on data from the auditors KPMG.
Sounds impressive, but so what?
The number of passenger journeys on the government-run, state-owned London Underground in 1997-98 was 832 million; the number of passenger journeys on the London Unddergound and the DLR in 2015 was 1.44 billion.
... says Graeme* in the comments, with a link to The Telegraph:
Travelers on the London-to-Uckfield train line were probably not that surprised to hear their service faced delays on Saturday afternoon.
However, while delays on Southern rail are far from unusual, the reason this time was at least a novel one – a herd of cows had invaded the platform at Hever station. Student Francesca Ryan took a picture of the animals – one of which had fallen off the platform onto the track [see article for glorious photo]
Southern issued a statement saying:
“A herd of cows (up to 60) are [sic] on the line between Hever and Ashurst. Network Rail response staff are on site trying to herd the cows back onto the land they escaped from. There is currently no service between Oxted and Uckfield.”
* It only seems fair to link back to his blog in return. Via his Blogger profile and a few clicks later I ended up at masterspleasingbitch.com. Not sure if I took a wrong turn on the internet or something.
From City AM:
Housebuilders have added to the call for the government to firmly commit to Crossrail 2, saying it will be crucial in helping address the capital's housing crisis.
Some 66 homebuilding and property figures, including representatives from Taylor Wimpey, Berkeley, British Land and Derwent have written to the government saying the infrastructure project will help unlock new homes, as well as commercial space...
In the letter, the homebuilding and property representatives, argue the new railway will transform transport capacity, as well as connectivity, for underdeveloped areas of the capital like the Upper Lea Valley. Housebuilders said it would give them the certainty to accelerate the development of up to 200,000 new homes.
Tony Pidgley, chairman at Berkeley, said: “Crossrail 2 is a fantastic opportunity to improve London and the South East’s infrastructure, and will help us build the homes this region desperately needs."
Could they be any more blatant when they are holding out the begging bowl?
City AM makes the fundamental error of believing its own propaganda, it is so hard-core Home-Owner-Ist that it somehow thinks this is normal, that the point of spending taxpayers' money on railways etc is to generate bigger profits for land bankers.
The other point being that all these lovely new roads and railways will do naff-all do "address the capital's housing crisis", it will merely stoke demand and attract yet more people/businesses and rents and prices will not fall in the slightest, they might even go up on the whole. To put it crudely, if they really wanted to do something about "affordability", they could just shut down London transport and rents and prices would plummet.
From The Telegraph:
House price growth at stations on Southern Rail's routes has ground to a halt as strikes by the RMT Union continue to make commuters' lives a misery.
New research by the online estate agency HouseSimple found that properties on the Brighton Mainline, Mainline West and East routes have fallen in value by an average of 0.4pc, losing £1,875 in value in the last three months.
This is not due to a general slump in house prices in the area during a traditional summer lull: in the south-east of England, house prices have risen on average 2.4pc between June and August, according to the Land Registry.
Von T's rings assume constant travelling speed (in the days of horses and carts) so it is only distance that matters; what actually matters is time, cost and hassle, so if a train service is less reliable, that is effectively further away from The Centre.
Right at the end there's a nice bit of Home-Owner-Ist double counting:
Alex Gosling, chief executive of HouseSimple, said: “House prices along Southern Rail routes haven’t gone into freefall just yet, but these figures do suggest that the ongoing dispute is hurting local property markets.
"It would be a real kick in the teeth if homeowners, who have had to endure the daily misery of train delays, cancellations and strike action, started to see the value of their homes falling because of the RMT and Southern Rail’s inability to reach a deal."
The amount by which rental values (and hence house prices) fall is not in addition to the grief and hassle, it is the market's estimate of the cost of the grief and hassle.
From The Evening Standard:
Tube commuters will be told to stand on both sides of the escalator at a busy central London station for six months - in a new trial which could pave the way for a permanent change.
Passengers are again being asked to ignore the decades-old "walk on the left" rule at Holborn in a bid to cut queues and ease congestion.
A three-week test run at the station late last year showed 30 per cent more passengers could travel on the escalator if they stood on both sides, Transport for London said.
This is one of those lovely counter-intuitive solutions, it took me a while to suss it out.
The point being, if an escalator is very long, then very few people will want to walk/run up the left hand side and most will wait/jostle in the queue on the 'standing only' side.
Imagine the escalator were so long that nobody can be bothered to walk/run up it and everybody waits/jostles for a place on the 'standing only' side... in that case, making it standing only on both sides doubles the capacity and greatly reduces the time spent waiting at the bottom.
Conversely, if an escalator were very short, most people would be happy to walk up it, so making it a 'no standing at all' escalator would also speed things up.
From The Evening Standard:
Zac Goldsmith grabbed headlines with his claim that a fare freeze by Transport for London would mean a 59 per cent increase in council tax [February 9].
However, anyone who reads the article will see that the true increase would be 17 per cent. Even his claim that the fare freeze would add £175 to an average council tax bill is deeply flawed.
[Missing third para, explaining that the required annual council tax increase would be more like £33.]
This seems like a sensible option to me, especially if the increase were targeted at the super-expensive homes in Zones 1 and 2 who pay the least toward TfL while getting the best value from it.
Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party.
Exhibit One
From The Evening Standard:
Zac Goldsmith claims Sadiq Khan would fund fares freeze with 59% rise in council tax
The row between the mayoral candidates over transport fares intensified today as Zac Goldsmith claimed his Labour rival would be forced to increase council tax by £175 a year for families to pay for a freeze.
Woah! Average Council Tax in London is £1,050 a year, slightly lower than the rest of the country (despite rental values and local per capita spending being about twice as high). That looks more like 17% to me…
Tory analysis of the figures suggests Mr Khan would have to increase City Hall’s council tax by 59 per cent — £175 a year for a typical household.
Sneaky! Technically, a London Council Tax bill is split into £850 for the local borough and a precept of £300 for the LGA (not many people notice this). £175 divided by £300 is of course something like 59%.
It's not even clear where the £175 comes from. TfL fare income is £3.8 billion a year (page 118 of their annual report, the other half of their budget is subsidies from the taxpayer), so if the normal price increase is 3% a year, a freeze means that TfL is foregoing £114 million a year, divided by 3.5 million homes = an average increase in Council Tax of £33 for each year that the freeze is in place.
Which seems like a perfectly sensible way of doing it to me, especially if the Council Tax increases were focused on Zones 1 and 2, who benefit most from TfL but pay the least towards it in fares, and especially if this meant that general taxpayer subsidies to TfL were reduced.
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Exhibit Two
From The Nuffield Foundation (who are otherwise decent chaps):
Public sector employers, such as the NHS and schools, will need to find more than £3 billion a year from 2016–17 to pay higher National Insurance contributions.
Aren't we always told that National Insurance is there to pay for the NHS?* Total NIC revenues are around £110 billion, the NHS costs a bit more than that, so it's not far off. A tax is not a real cost to the NHS, because the NHS is taxpayer funded (a point which Lola has made about a million times).
* Cognitive dissonance being what it is, pensioners also claim that they have paid for their current state pensions (just under £100 billion a year) with their past NI contributions. When challenged, they refuse to accept that National Insurance is not a magical tax which can be spent four times over (for both the NHS and other people's pensions in the past, as well as the current cost of the NHS with a surplus built up being used to pay current pensions). I have actually seen pensioner propaganda saying that pensions are too low because their past NI contributions were squandered on something else, meaning it is spent five times over or some such accounting bullshit.
This idea has some appeal:
Our three key measures are:
* the phased introduction of a flat fare structure, making zones a thing of the past, with the immediate abolition of zones 6 and 4,
* justice for part-time workers, with a daily cap that matches the rates paid by monthly season ticket holders
* a new 'ONE Ticket' allowing changes across all modes to close the gaps for people who currently pay twice when changing from bus or train to the Tube as well as ensuring that people changing buses pay only once for their journey.
"It's not fair that people in outer London pay so much more to get to work in the centre of the city - especially as it's also easier for people in the centre of town to use even cheaper or free alternatives such as hire bikes, cycling or walking," says Sian Berry, the Green candidate for Mayor of London.
Instinctively, it makes sense to make people pay more if they travel longer distances, but with local transport, people aren't paying for the distance as such, they are paying to get to work, mainly in Zone 1 or 2, or to get into Zone 1 for an evening out or to go shopping.
Currently, annual season tickets cost this much:
Zone 1 only - £1,296
Zones 1-2 £1,296
Zones 1-3 £1,520
Zones 1-4 £1,860
Zones 1-5 £2,208
Zones 1-6 £2,364
That's pretty flat already - a journey within Zone 1 is probably less than a mile, from the outer reaches of Zone 6 into Zone 1 is about fifteen miles, but it only costs twice as much.
But people don't pay to sit or stand on a train or a bus. It's a burden rather than a pleasure.
You could easily argue that Zone 1-2 prices should be higher than Zone 1-6 prices. If Journey A gets a commuter into town in five or ten minutes, then that's a much better service that Journey B which takes three-quarters of an hour to get you into town. That's exactly the same as rents being higher nearer the middle of town - people are paying their landlord for shorter commute times; why not have them pay the body actually providing the transport?
But it would be interesting to see what happens if there were a flat season ticket price of averaged out £1,860 or something. I strongly suspect that the behaviour of people in Zones 2 to 3 would not change that much, they would just pay the extra £300 or £600. Perhaps a few people in Zone 1 would walk to work instead? I also doubt that a £350 or £500 annual saving would encourage many more people to commute in from Zone 5 or 6. The only way to find out is to do it.
Another thing worth mentioning is that Transport for London's income is roughly half ticket sales and half subsidies. Rental values are a function of ticket prices, so a subsidy to travel is a subsidy to landlords. If the subsidies were abolished, an annual season ticket would cost around £3,500 a year (wild guess).
That would push down rental values by the same amount, i.e. instead of a working couple paying £18,000 a year rent and £3,500 for two annual season tickets, they would end up paying £14,500 rent and £7,000 for tickets. This effect would be stronger near the centre and less so on the outskirts, so abolishing the subsidies would be an indirect and slightly crude form of Land Value Tax on London landowners, as well as being a corresponding saving for taxpayers everywhere else in the country. So win-win, I think.
From City AM, some time in the 19th century:
A member of a powerful commons committee is calling on colleagues in parliament to scrutinise HM Commission for Transportation in London (HMCTL) over its drastic new proposals to impose draconian regulations on underground train services.
Richard Fuller, a Conservative MP who sits on the business select committee, told City A.M. the proposals were “precisely the sort of thing the committee should be looking at”.
“What is the purpose of some of the regulations? Why is it in anyone’s interest to make people wait longer for a train?” Fuller said. “I don’t understand why a regulator feels that these are so important for the public interest. And if they’re not for the public interest, then who is the regulator working for?”
HMCTL said yesterday that it will consult on multiple proposals to regulate underground trains, including imposing a minimum waiting time of five minutes between trains, banning carriage-sharing and stopping companies from publishing timetables in advance. It has also suggested forcing operators to offer pre-booking of train seats seven days in advance...
Mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith said last month that regulations needed to be imposed to prevent handsom cab drivers and from being “extinct in a matter of years”.
Mr Goldsmith has also spoken out vociferously against the construction of 'bridges' spanning the River Thames, saying that they would make Thames ferrymen "a thing of the past".
