PH wrote: ↑5 Jul 2023, 10:44am
mjr wrote: ↑5 Jul 2023, 8:49am
PH wrote: ↑4 Jul 2023, 9:19pm Why not book your ticket and bike space at the same time from one of the websites that allow you to do so? Trainline for example.
Trainline, so we should pay more if we don't pass ticket offices often?
It's one of the options, made in response to gbnz who was already buying online. As I said upthread:
I now use Trainline, along with bike reservations, they offer split ticketing (Traveling on the same train with multiple tickets) they make a small booking charge, but on average I save much more than this costs.
But why Trainline and not one of the competitors like Trainsplit who only charge fees on money-saving split tickets? If most people buy in advance from Trainline for simple journeys, they will be paying booking fees which competitors don't add.
And then you get Trainline's bad user interface for railcards which can easily leave you at risk of prosecution, and their reported collaboration with a couple of Abellio (Greater Anglia, EMR, WMR, LNR) fishing expeditions accusing people who claimed refunds or delay-repay of fraud (which a minority probably have committed, but a lot of innocent people are accused too) a year or more later, when many people will have disposed of the records.
The plan to close ticket offices is a different subject, I don't object in principal, neither do I have any confidence that it'll be done in a way that benefits passengers.
I have confidence only that it'll be done in a way to annoy the unions.
PH wrote: ↑5 Jul 2023, 10:56am
ANTONISH wrote: ↑5 Jul 2023, 9:41am
People who are unable to comply with the new system - I've heard about 20% of passengers - will be unable to travel thus helping to lower "demand" and providing further excuse to curtail services.
It's being reported that last year 12% of tickets were purchased from ticket offices and obviously not all of those doing so were unable to use other means.
Is it obvious? What are you classing as unable? Are people like me with local stations with no ticket office but could go to the next-furthest unable? Are people who can't easily visit the ticket office during its working-hours opening times before their trip unable? Are people who buy from the multiple machines next to the only open ticket office window when the queues are long and risk missing their train unable? And the queues have moved more slowly since the "easy" ticket sales were encouraged so much to switch to machines or online.
When ticket offices have been cut back so deeply, not only to the bone but into the bone in many places, and only 60% of stations have any sort of ticket office, even a part-time single-window shed like Worle (open just 10% of the week, if staff are available, bizarrely in the morning peak when lots of passengers will have season passes anyway), I think 12% of tickets still being sold that way may suggest strong demand.
Nowhere seems safe from this. Avanti plan to close all ticket offices, including Birmingham New Street and International, as well as London Euston, Manchester Piccadilly and Glasgow Central. State-run LNER are a bit less zealous, only closing about half theirs: Edinburgh Waverley, Newcastle, York, Doncaster, Peterborough and London King’s Cross will remain.
Locally, the only ticket office in Norfolk that won't close under these plans will be Norwich. The nearest to me that will stay open be Cambridge. So if someone can't find station staff (or use the call centre intercom) to convince the machines to offer the right ticket (and we know there are some tickets the current machines won't sell, which includes bike reservations at Great Northern's machines) and aren't willing to risk buying the wrong ticket online and being prosecuted, you probably won't use the trains any more. This is ridiculous.
Not that what we think really matters: Harper and co seem as determined to gut the rail budget as they have the cycling one. The consultation is very short but not mentioned on the National Rail, gov.uk or Department for Transport homepages. On LNER's site, the consultation is only on the news page behind a very upbeat news headline "LNER Proposes Evolutions And Enhancements At Its Stations". Greater Anglia are a bit better but Avanti are awful: attempting to access the Rail Delivery Group page from Avanti's page at
https://newsdesk.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/ ... -retailing (the last link before ENDS) results in a demand that you register your device (and that's if you've "normal" sight or can override their buggy colour settings and have security weak enough to allow their javascripts to find that page in the first place). Then there's all the refusals to pass on comments submitted to train operators, so even when you find the site describing proposals for your stations, you then need to find the page on Transport Focus (has the name changed because they're not focused on passengers any more?) or London Travel Watch for your response.
They've basically done the modern equivalent of putting the consultation in the "Beware of the Leopard" toilet. I'm going to respond anyway but I'll be astonished if closures aren't forced through before this government expires.
