If the UK government proposed to increase tax ON THE 1% and make trains free then of course I'd be in favour.

The rest of us are paying our share already and not seeing the benefit of it.

Are you only referring to the national rail network, or also local services like tube/metro/etc?

If it’s all inclusive, yes, absolutely.

Totally. Especially if the rich can't get around it.

Do I get a magical garauntee that it would happen? Because otherwise no given the state of governance; they would absoloutely raise taxes then talk about making trains free until everyones forgotten and then maybe make trains cheaper for a specific age group for a while with that reduction being completely eaten by ticket price rises within 2 years.

Yes, definitely. I think it would do wonders for the economy by making jobs more accessible.

BUT there could be a claimable annual tax refund if your sole residence is more than X miles from a train station, or if you can show you've not used a train that year. Something like that.

I am for free public transport from taxation there are some important caveats that would need to be worked out though:

• We currently have low capacity relative to latent deamnd capacity (mostly at peak times) and at the moment that is managed through fares. We would need a system that manages demand in another way.

• Our transport system is in large need of upfront investment to stop the current managed decline so you'd want a way of making sure that making it free doesn't mean the government is now more limited

Its also worth noting that its unlikely to be a direct swap in of current revenues with additionally required taxes as there are projects that are very costly that could be redirected and any successful mode shift away from cars would also carry a net positive economic effect on the whole treasury.

Potentially in the short term what could help is a 'sunk-cost' ticket similar to the bahnpass where you still pay but do so yearly and get access to any trip anywhere. It makes it more competitive with cars which have massive sunk cost effects which make every trip seem cheaper.

No. Trains go from nowhere near where I live to nowhere near where I want to go, except in rare circumstances like if I stay in London for a few days. I did go through a phase of being dependent on (non-London) trains and hated every minute.

So for me it'd be yet more tax with no benefit.

Absolutely.

I would of course. But even with trains and public transport being as expensive as it is it still over crowded and you will rarely get a seat for commuter routes. If it's free that's going to get even worse. Unless they put more trains on which will cost more which the 1% probably won't cover

Yup. I’m cool with paying more tax for better services.

I never use trains, so no. I live in a part of the country where public transport doesn’t work. I’d still have to drive to a station, pay through the nose for parking and then end up nowhere near where I need to be, and probably already late.

Possibly depends where you live, but if you work in London then fuck yeah that's worth it, what a bargain, a year's worth of travel for 4 months worth of cost

I wouldn't go for "free", that would lead to a lot of abuse of it. We only have so much capacity right now. A 90%+ discount on current prices, definitely.

I rarely use the trains right now, mostly down to costs. It's so much cheaper to drive.

im not from uk so peanut gallery here. On the one side I would love something like this in my city. Paying to ingress is a significant delay in both ingress and egress to the station and if it was free such that you could just have open access it would be really handy. The other side to me is when things are free like this you have the problem of bad behavior. Its kinda good to have a capacity to get your privileges suspended for bad behavior. If you do that though you will still need the pass and gate type of thing which eliminates that ingess/egress thing I started with. I also have to say that where I am from the public transit is subsidized such that its a good value and the real value is in free transfers so once you pay at the start you don't pay more as you go bus to train to bus and that is really powerful. We have both exterior and interior bike racks at stations and the interior ones are nice in that someone who wants to steal your bike has to pay to get on and more importantly its hard to run off because of the ingress/egress limitations. So anyway I appreciate anyone who listened to this peanut.