Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Fares rise row

The inflation-busting fares increase has led to a wave of indignation. Privatisation the railways has of course left several trainloads of hangers-on to support, but there are two factors that do not get a mention.

One is the rising cost of rolling stock. The real cost of a railway carriage is about 8 times what it was in the late 1950s, up from around £6000 now to over a million now, whilst the cost of a locomotive is up from around £30,000 then to nearly £3 million today. Allow a generous factor of 50 for inflation and it is still a huge increase. The new Hitachi trains will cost £2.6 million per carriage and there is also going to be a bill for infrastructure changes as someone thought it would be a good idea to make the carriages 3 metres longer, so they do not quite fit the present system.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most of the fleet is relatively new, all of the stock built before 1975 having been scrapped since privatisation. The public, and ill-informed press commentators and politicians are largely responsible, as this was a panic response to safety concerns. The predictable result of going beyond reasonability on safety has been to drive people to the less safe mode.

The other issue is the cost of speed. In 1963 trains were typically running at average speeds of 50 mph and top speeds of around 75 mph. Trains now are typically cruising at 125 mph. Costs are roughly proportional to the square of the speed. This has a knock-on effect on freight which also has to run faster to keep out of the way of the passenger trains. In 1963, freight trains typically ran at around 25-35 mph and the technique was to keep them rolling, which uses little energy at that speed.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...