As a North American who travels in the UK multiple times per year, I really need you to elaborate. My experience has been nothing less than amazing, in comparison to the complete lack of rail options at home.
Low bar? British people tend to compare with rail travel experienced on holidays in places like France. Those systems do seem to be better (I do not have recent experience myself) and this then feeds the usual British tendency to take a rosy tinted view of the rest of the world and pessimism about the UK.
It also varies a lot in different places. Costs vary with types of tickets, who you are, and whether you have various discounts.
Local train services are very weak where I live (Cheshire) so while I can get to major cities quite easily its difficult to travel between towns in the county on trains (or buses).
I’m an American who lived in London for 3 years and was also impressed, but as someone who only had to use national rail for leisure (got around London by bus/tube) I was oblivious to two things:
1) Commute hours are brutal. Trains are packed and even a few minutes delay can feel like ages when you’re missing a meeting.
2) The cost of 5x weekly round trips is enormous. The average annual pass for someone commuting into London from outside is like £4000. That’s in a country where the average wage is around £40,000. That’s a huge amount of money to spend on public transportation. I know a car would be more but I’ve never met a single American who spends that fraction of their income on public transportation.
Still though … I’d rather have expensive and unreliable trains than no trains at all.
Also it's hard to state how much, and especially when it comes to transport, that London isn't England.
London is it's own bubble with "Transport for London" running all transport.
It has lots of investment, cheap busses, frequent trains and a reliable underground. It has synchronisation between different forms of transport, and timetables that make sense.
The rest of the UK, the rest of England especially, has incredibly expensive buses, might be lucky to get one train an hour in some places, and might have 3 different bus companies serving a small town, meaning you can't even travel on a day pass, as you'll find that one bus company refuses to accept your ticket because it's a different bus company. Or you find you have to wait much longer for your return journey as the "wrong" company buses turn up first.
Note that when an English person says the north, they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about the north of England, not the north of the UK even if everyone else is talking about the UK.
Similarly, Americans expect people to be aware that California is not "the South", despite being on the southern border, and that the Midwest is actually in the eastern half of the country.
Basically the names of geographical regions don't always make sense.
I think the original phrase was "North of the Watford Gap", but people often mis-abbreviate to "North of Watford". The Watford Gap is not the same place as Watford. It's about 75 miles north of London. Watford is within London's motorway ring road (The M25), and on the underground map. Its only about 17 miles away from the centre.
Did you know that most people outside the US do not intuitively understand the arbitrary US delineations for North, South, West, Midwest? And yet, "they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about..."
You have to remember what public transit is like in NA. What in Europe is unacceptable, late frequently, and problematic, is probably the best public transit someone from NA has ever been on, except maybe the NYC subway. It's a really, really low bar. NJTransit is considered one of the best in the US (and it is, unfortunately), and it's worse than anything I saw in Europe when I visited.
I often travel intercity to London and a ticket travelling out early, say, Monday and returning after peak hours, say, Wednesday costs upwards of £75. I have to book well in advance to get this price. I have just priced such a journey and the cheapest I can get for the days I chose next week is £105, for example. The journey time is about 2:20 but often it takes 10 minutes longer.
Quite often (maybe 1 in 6) my train to London would get cancelled. I would be able to get a refund no problem, but there is no compensation for the fact I have driven to the station and am now stuck without any travel plans.
Conversely I would have to arrive at the station early, for if I missed my train I would forfeit that half of the ticket and would have to pay again to travel on the later train. As such my journey would actually also include an extra 15 minutes of slack time in case the car didn't start and I needed to wake the wife for a lift, for example. It would also be quite stressful on the way home, where a meeting might overrun, putting my chances of getting my booked train at risk.
A year or two ago they opened a new "parkway" railway station (basically park-and-ride) and now the earliest train no longer stops at my local station. It would take me 30 minutes to drive to the parkway station, plus cost me £6 a day parking there, so my only option now is the later train which arrives in London at 8:30, if it is on time, making it impossible for me to start work before 9am.
The trains are supposed to have eight carriages, of which one is first class. On the outward journey I could often get a seat but the return journey would be standing only for the first hour. Quite often the train would arrive with only five carriages meaning it would be absolutely rammed the whole way. This leaves you very exhausted and sweaty for the start of the work day. And forget first class: it is twice the price of standard class.
So I've given up with the long distance train and now drive down to a commuter town near London and get the train just the final bit. I can also get into London much earlier and I don't have to pre-book specific trains. It's actually cheaper too, with the fuel and train tickets coming in at about £65, though obviously there's car depreciation, tyres, &c. on top.
So between £75-£130 for a prebooked ticket on an inflexible, specifically timed, intercity train, with a total journey time of about 3:00, or £65 for a drive down in my own car whatever times I want with a total journey time of about 3:30.
They are not. Everything is prebooked with airport-style "security" scanning. You can't even go onto the platform until your train arrives. And the experience is not quite as polished in various ways.
China is pretty good, but the only place I've ever seen proper turn-up-and-go HSR is Japan. Tap your card or phone (NFC-F, because credit card contactless is too slow for Japan), walk on. If you missed the train you were aiming for there'll be another one 7.5 or at most 15 minutes later, so no big.
China's land area is approximately 25 times of Japan, def has a bigger network. But the top speed is comparable in current generations[1] except the Maglev.
I would think that the vast amount of central/Western land in China that is sparsely populated might skew this statistic quite a bit, where Spain and Japan don't have that at the same scale.
I have lived in Switzerland for year and my very limited experience with trains in Scotland has been great. Trains were on time, and personel at the railway stations were very polite and helpful with us.
America has much more serious problems with rail, but the UK experience still isn't great. The broad root cause is that back in the day we had the genius idea of paying multiple private companies to run trains on shared lines. We set up metrics to measure their performance that, bluntly, do not work. They underinvest and when there's any sign they're not making money, they hand the contract back. All in all, we get all the disadvantages of a nationalised system with all the disadvantages of a privatised system with a couple of original problems thrown in for good measure.
>The broad root cause is that back in the day we had the genius idea of paying multiple private companies to run trains on shared lines.
Train travel has doubled since the privatisation.
The main problem is we don't know how to build out infrastructure in a cost effective manner (see HS2 and the electrification of the Great Western Main Line). This isn't surprising as we do it in a stop/start manner rather than a continual process.
The infrastructure privatisation was reversed a long time ago, and most of the delays, in my experience, are due to problems with tracks.
The biggest problems recently (for me) have been strikes and inadequate services. The rot really goes back to pre-privatisation (it was not great in the 1990s) and arguably started with the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, based on the decision not to subsidise rail in the face of increasing road use.
Pretending horrible bastards aren't 'lobbying' isn't going to fix the problem.
The one-word problem here could be 'lobbyists' or 'lawmakers' or 'bribery' or 'exploitation'. It could even be just as the article said: 'relationships'... But it sure isn't this article, written after the fact, with no hint of actually condoning said behavior other than failing to pass moral judgment.
If you think about it some more, you might be glad that the author reminded us about this. Our lawmakers sell us out to fossil fuels, big banks, corporate media, telecomms, polluters, etc, and then tell us it's raining.
All the while, normal well adjusted people, don’t want to get “political” but wealthy special interests are happy to “open dialogs” and “find common ground” with elected officials we elect once every two years.
Democracy is hard. If participation is limited to voting in an election, the public interest will be ignored.
> Being able to participate more with money disproportionately benefits the rich.
Fully true. The public is relegated to - at best - a veto vote on corruption, which they rarely use (and are rarely informed as to why they should. Thanks press!).
Kind of like those "small boy sells limonade so his bed-ridden father can buy artificially expensive treatment" articles that are meant to showcase community, but actually show the heartlessness of insurance and medical for-profit companies?
My company has developed a spreadsheet based on actual historical effort that spits out a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess). Things are split up into different categories, as building with one technology could be more costly than building with another. It has been remarkably accurate as long as we can stay within the original scope.
I love my Lenovo Thinkpad (X1 Carbon). From the little things like hardware switches for the webcam and microphone to the big things like the excellent keyboard feel and Linux support (I use Manjaro). HOWEVER, get the premium screen, because WOW the 1080p screen isn’t great.
I love my current one to bits (X1c 7th gen) - almost weightless, sturdy, excellent battery life, excellent connectivity, wonderful keyboard.
Oh, and the 1080 screen, which isn't great, but did help improve battery life significantly over the other offerings. I get a full work day out of mine without a charge, which is most useful whenever I'm in the field.
