"Services" that rip me off

Interesting page here with old tickets on it:

http://www.joyce.whitchurch.btinternet.co.uk/tickets/c7.jpg

From this we can see the cost of a single from London to (with year, average salary, relative salary index):

Av.Salary Relative salary

Bath £6.65 1975 114.5

Feltham £0.52 1979 6K 126.7

2010 23K

There is incomplete data on salary, but very roughly approximating exponentially gives a value of 5k for 1975 against the relative salary data which suggests a true figure of 5.4 ; I'll take 5.2. So the expected value of these tickets is £28 for the trip to Bath and £2 for the trip to Feltham.

Surprisingly the price today to Bath (for the cheapest ticket) is £28. If you fail to get these the next is £34 but to travel at peak time costs £77. In contrast the trip to Feltham costs £5.

This is my experience also. What the travel operators have done is not logical on the principle that we pay for what we buy. Instead the charging plan is designed to maximise the cost to the customer. I have been equally displeased with mobile phone pricing and as a result refuse to get involved with mobile phone companies any more. I am ASDA (Vodaphone) pay as you go - this ensures some of the logic that I get what I pay for.

Thus, for short journeys that cost only a few pounds, the new costs seem to be only a few pounds more and so bearable. Expensive journeys have carefully kept down so that they don't spark too much anger since 100% on a £100 ticket is very noticeable when you start spending £100 in one go more!

Yet most journeys are short journeys, I assume, so the average increase experienced across the the population is very high, and the profits gained by the operating companies huge.

Now what I don't understand, and which I have argued with customer services on many occasions, is why I should pay for "services" from a company that is clearly trying to rip me off? Where is the "service" is that? Where above all is the trust!

So sadly companies are stuck between a devil and the deep blue sea. They have fickle investors demanding big profit reports and dividends, and they (hopefully) have customers refusing to be ripped off. Sadly in the age of private/public monopolies most customers don't have the choice but to be ripped off, probably the biggest oversight of all by the governments.

I should add of course that the public services were subsidised by the government from the tax payer so we did indirectly pay more for our rail services than today. Government spending on transport in billions is as follows:

Spending GDP AV. Salary Av Salary as millionth%

of GDP

1975 3.8billion 106.7 3.56%

1979 4.5 199.2 2.30% 6k 3% (millionths)

2010 21.5 1474 1.46% 23k 1.56% (millionths)

http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_year1970_0.html#ukgs302

What doesn't tally however is that salaries have not kept pace with economic growth. We take home on average half of what we did in 1975 compared with the total countries productivity. One explanation is that the extra money lies in the hands of just a few thus biasing the average figure. This makes the data using GDP difficult the compare.

Let us take the government spending per head (assume 60million) and compare it with ticket prices, and salary:

1975 £68/person/year 10 trips to bath 1.3%

1979 £75 144 trips to Feltham 1.25%

2010 £358 12.8 bath / 71.6 Feltham 1.6%

SO extraordinary result that actually we are spending more on transport now than we were! So the rail operators can't complain about changes in funding... although I do suspect that the money we do spend goes on cars.