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Yet another rail fare review! The British system of rail fares is a strange mixture of anomalies dating back to nationalisation (and probably long before), with additional layers of complication interposed on top since privatisation in the 1990s.
It’s more of a car crash than a system - unfair, confusing, illogical and hardly fit for purpose in 2018.
The only answer is to start again, with a structure of walk-on mileage-based fares based on single fares for single journeys, as long advocated by RAIL’s Barry Doe. The proliferation of railcards can mostly be swept away, too.
In reality, the number of people (like me) left in the full-fare zone between the plethora of young and old discounts is now almost gone. Why not replace the lot with a national card? Or more controversially, just knock 33% off all off-peak fares?
The concept of ‘peak’ and ‘off-peak’ has also become much too complex. The reality in 2018 - with home working and part-time working spread throughout a 24-hour day - is that it’s no longer strictly necessary to control peak travel quite so rigorously.
The mass of regulations could probably be replaced with a simple, widely understood national definition of peak travel, covering only trains into key cities during a narrow morning peak, with everything else defined as off-peak. As time passes, and travel patterns continue to evolve, even this might be abolished.
None of this can work without a root and branch realignment of fare levels for every route.
Every reader will know of local anomalies that ceased to make sense a long time ago. Some may have been introduced as part of long-forgotten government employment schemes, while others have just fallen haphazardly into place over the years.
We need a commission to look at a fair rate per mile on the various routes, taking into account local income, employment patterns and level of local service. This will inevitably raise some fares and reduce others, but the long-term result will be a fairer system for everyone.
Obviously such massive changes can’t take place overnight, but the change to a simpler structure can - leaving the modernised fare levels to be eased in gradually over a number of years.
The only freedom I would leave for today’s private operators (and no doubt future nationalised ones!) is over the terms and conditions of advance tickets for travel on specific days and specific services, but with the essential proviso of a tight cap on the number of pre-booked advance tickets sold for each train. The situation on CrossCountry is intolerable.
Of course, none of this will happen. How can private operators - some of whom bid for services many years ago, on the basis of wafer-thin margins - be expected to deal with such massive and unpredictable change? In truth, fair fares will never happen while this absurd teetering franchising system remains in place.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic that these supposedly lean commercial operators are far more tightly restrained than British Rail ever was, and the franchising model itself is actively preserving anomalies dating back to a very different railway in a very different country.