Which UK cities?
A London year travel pass costs £2,568, so public transport is hardly cheaper either, plus it’s a whole lot less convenient. Unless you enjoy spending all of your time in an urban group think bubble with the only option is to use public transport to travel to more of the same.
London is cheaper to move around by public transport than many other British cities.
A bus or tram journey is £1.45 regardless of distance, but in Manchester a tram journey is over £3, in Birmingham over £2, in Edinburgh £1.50.
London's tickets are also much better integrated -- only a couple of express train services to airports have special fares, and they all have non-express, cheaper alternatives.
And an annual season train pass into London can be £3-5K. Not cheap either, in fact several months' rent.
I do wonder whether people feel trapped. You get paid a lot working in the City, but you have to spend a lot, too. You can try your luck elsewhere, but it's hard to think of where exactly, and you know for a fact there's this huge network that's the big city.
I used to spend close to £3k a year on petrol commuting, I then need to pay insurance, MOT and road tax on top of that to run a car. All of that is ignoring the £14/day congestion charge (that’s another £3.5k/year for those in the back).
The annual london travel card is much cheaper than operating a car. Not to mention public transport is london is an order of magnitude faster than car for most intra-city journeys.
The fares for outer zones on the Tube are deliberately expensive as a way to reduce demand. There are explicit discounts for avoiding Zone 1 to ease congestion.
So whilst there probably do exist people spending 200 GBP a month on transport on minimum wage, it's not really intended, more of an ephemeral state whilst someone finds a job closer to home.
Funnily enough, London's public transport is actually pretty _cheap_ when compared with e.g. intercity rail. It's only expensive when compared with other countries, and I think it's difficult to compare due to London's high CoL in general and the age of the network.
The walk-up prices for trains are basically robbery. If it's outside of the Oyster zone, you're either driving, booking it well in advance, or it's a business trip so you take the hit anyway.
The gap between the UK and the rest of Europe on this is crazy. For TfL services in London alone, a monthly season ticket is ~£250 per month. The rest of the UK has generally got much worse transport than London and even there you might pay £600 per year for a bus pass for a restricted local area.
Seems pretty normal depending upon the type of transport covered. If I bought monthly passes to commute into Boston from my house, I'd be something like $600/month between commuter rail, commuter rail parking, and subway/bus. Driving to subway parking (which fills up by 7 something) would still cost something $100/month plus about $10/day for parking. Commuting into most big cities in the West isn't cheap even if you use public transportation.
Annually my train season ticket costs just over half what my mortgage costs! And I'm talking repayment not endowment here. So while public transport may be convenient, it's certainly not cheap here in England.
Yup. I lived in London for a year and pretty much just traveled by train the whole time. I feel like I missed out on a lot of cool trips around the city because train tickets were absurdly expensive.
For information for my 70 mile commute to London my season ticket (not a pass ) is over $500 a Month plus another 70$ for bus/taxis to get to the station
Not really, anywhere that's convenient to London has basically the same prices as London. If you do end up saving money it's because you're taking one of those awkward 90minute+ journeys.
Average cost of owning a car in the UK is more than that, especially in London where there is limited land
And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.
Don't know much about other stuff but from what I experienced in England (London area especially), the public transport is unbelievably expensive. I went there for 2 weeks and maybe the biggest part of my expenses was spent on trains/buses/the tube. Especially trains.
This from the point of view of a tourist, though. I guess English citizens have some preferences/reductions?
Spoken like someone who has never commuted on the tube... Season tickets for any London public transport are eyewateringly expensive, and you get to stand in a sweat-box for the pleasure.
Folks prefer to live centrally to minimise their tube-time, although it's always been a mystery to me as to why virtually nobody lives in the City, apart from classic chickens and eggs arguments re: services (it's a graveyard at night and weekend).
There is no cheap within an hour of the city. There is no space within an hour of the city - just endless very expensive suburbia.
It depends on where you are. Public transit in London, for example, is amazing. The longest wait for a train at my local station (Zone 2) was around 12 minutes off peak. Night buses take over for the tube late at night. They'll take you where you need to go, albeit a little slowly. A yearly pass costs £1216 (Zone 1-2). Good luck getting insurance and petrol for much less than that.
There's an argument to be made that public transportation isn't available because poor and middle class people can afford cars.
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