Christian Wolmar
If there’s one thing more annoying than sitting on a plane next to someone who has paid half what you did for your ticket, it’s to see a fare-dodger push through the barrier at a railway station. Ah, we have a solution says the Department for Transport, announcing that £33.4 million is being allocated to train operators to, as it were, raise their barriers.
Barriers are not the hoped for silver bullet
This little pot of money definitely belongs in the realm of ministers trying to show they are doing something about an issue that raises the hackles of law-abiding train-travellers. Indeed, according to the Rail Delivery Group, the industry-wide body that represents the train companies, it is we, the taxpayers, who bear the brunt of this lawlessness, given that the rail industry is subsidised to the tune of £350-£400 million a year. How is this figure worked out, I wondered, since fare-dodgers are unlikely to own up to their misdeeds? Annoyingly, the RDG told me they could not divulge the methodology as the information was ‘commercially sensitive’. So sensitive indeed that they would not even explain why this was the case. Railway economics it seems are even more opaque than economics as a whole.
