Robert Cote schrieb:
>> Another simple example: 70% of the transit trips in Germany are done on
>> "Zeitkarten" (day passes, monthly and yearly tickets). Many operations
>> in Britain don't provide attractive offers for that. The consequence:
>> One TVM runs at about € 30 000, or you need more staff. With a higher
>> percentage of single tickets, fare evasion gets more attractive, giving
>> you higher losses by evasion plus higher staffing costs for ticket checks.
>
> If I understand your point cheating is more common when the difference
> between product and price is large.
No.
The problem here is, that you complain about the costs of railroads in
the USA, but do not bother with understanding, how these costs are
generated.
Ticket sales cost are a major chunk for commuter railroads in the USA.
You will find a conductor, sometimes several assistant conductors or
ticket takers in the train.
In addition, there are often barriers, which need maintenance, and
sometimes even manned barriers or small stations with staff.
In addition, you have to sell everybody a ticket, if they haven't a
monthly or yearly one. This means 3 times the ticket vending machines,
in comparison to practice in Germany. One machine runs at 30 000 € in
commuter operations, but I've been told that US models are more
expensive. These machines have to be maintained, somebody has to
fetch the money, they attract a high vandalism risk...
If you compare this to common practice over here, which is a yearly
ticket with a monthly 1/12 booked from your account every month, you'll
quickly notice, that these customers generate far less cost for the
railroad.
In addition, you won't have any fare dodgers among them, because due
to simple logic, it's not attractive to betray, if you already have a
ticket for the whole year (unless you want to upgrade to forms of
betrayal, which bring you in conflict with a judge instead of a ticket
inspector, but that's an extremely small figure).
So it is only fair and logical, to give these customers a sweet deal,
since a high percentage of these yearly or monthly tickets translate
to much lower operating costs.
> Come on. This is nothing more than porkchop economics. Porkchop
> economics; that's when your child is so ugly you need to tie porkchops
> to her ankles just to get the dog to play with her.
With these porkchop economics, railroads in Germany achieve a farebox
recovery >70% on average, and operate more train miles for the € of
subsidy each year.
And the German systems are still primitive in comparison to
Switzerland.
Hans-Joachim