Split Ticketing and the Preston Model
How to save money and enjoy the journey
L. was in France for a course this week and, as it was my birthday, we thought it might be fun to meet there when she finished. I could have flown directly from Glasgow to Paris for about £40, but the ethics of climate change demands I find a greener way of getting there. Besides, if you're on holiday anyway, why not take a bit of extra time and enjoy the journey rather than seeing it as a means to an end?
I worked out that an advanced ticket on the Eurostar to Paris cost as little as £39 and, if I went earlier via Leicester, I could spend a couple of days with my family. The only problem was that a single ticket to Leicester from Glasgow is £112.50, an outrageous amount compared to flying.
I've written previously about the trade-off mindset and the mental gymnastics people do to try and justify the high prices of train travel in the UK. Look at the replies to Andy Burnham's viral tweet to see pedants missing the point about the basic costs. However, when you compare the fast intercity networks in Spain or France and see how much they cost—even on the day—it seems incomprehensible that we pay so much in the UK.
Clearly, we need a unified rail network that doesn’t feel like it was designed by motorists. I like the Bring Back British Rail campaign so much that, to paraphrase Victor Kiam, I built the website. So much money is wasted on different branding systems, booking sites, uniforms, and profiteering.1 Nonetheless, I understand that we must live now rather than sitting around waiting for a utopian future.
The other day, I tweeted about saving over £80 through split ticketing and got to hang out in lovely Preston for an hour. A couple of friends asked how this was possible, so here is my guide to getting the the best out of the current system through split ticketing. There are split ticketing websites that do the work for you, but I find it more satisfying to do the work myself.
Split ticketing: the basics
1. Visit the National Rail website and type in your origin and destination stations. For this example, I tried to think of a random journey that someone might want to make and chose Sheffield to Cardiff, which is £116.30 for an off-peak single.
2. On the results page you see that you have to change stations once. If you click on the word ‘change(s)’, you can find out where you change.
3. Type this station as your destination and see how much it costs and if the operator has any advanced tickets available. There was and it costs £55.50!
4. Now look up remaining leg of the journey and see if you can save any money. For this one, because it is a short journey, there are no advanced tickets but it is only £13.20 and can be bought anytime.
5. Now go to one of the more usable franchise websites to buy your ticket (any will do), but I like the redesigned Scotrail site.
That's basically it, although you can experiment with different times, locations, connections and distances.2
I also like to experiment with the idea of spending an hour or two in the connecting station. What could be better after a long trip than to get lunch in Bristol?
The Preston Model
This split ticketing process brings me joy: the joy of the chase, of finding a bargain, and 'beating' the system. I know people who got similar joy from saving money on their energy bills—something that has led to a race to the bottom and the collapse of many companies.
At the same time, I know there are millions of people who would struggle to negotiate all these systems. They just want to buy a ticket. They may even go to the station ticket office to buy a ticket, where they will almost certainly be offered an expensive ticket.
Split ticketing is an example of neoliberalism in practice: turn everything into market, no matter how inappropriate, and then try to create artificial competition. The ideology of neoliberalism is that the market always produces the most efficient results and you must submit.
My first nine-to-five job was working for a company whose business was building software that helped public and private sector negotiate the EU procurement system. Under this system, public sector buyers would weigh different parts of a contract like price, quality, and ethics into how they made their decision. Often, in the public sector where buyers have no skin in the game, price would be the main factor. No thought was made of how these purchasing decisions fitted into the health of the wider society.
a holistic framework for integrating community, cooperative, and public assets into a mutually supporting system of local economic prosperity.
I have been to Preston a few times now, sometimes on the way to somehwere else, and have been impressed at how much less depressing it is compared to most towns in the UK. The high street is lively and pedestrianised, the cafes are friendly, the bars are hip, the roads are clean, and the walls aren't covered in graffiti. It is a pleasant place to spend the day. Most of all, though, the people have pride in their town. I wonder if this is the result of the Preston model: that sense of having a shared purpose, to be fully invested in where we live knowing that the worthies want to provide support.
Under the Preston Model, it is unlikely that split ticketing would exist. Long-term, though, prices would be lower as the money is spent improving the entire system. We are caught in a trap. Our current economic model provides make-up for flesh wounds and we need to let the body heal. The way to do this is to stop disconnceted short-termism and think about society as a whole.
Ironically, by state-owned railways from other countries.
There used to be some weird distance anomalies where you could buy a ticket from Glasgow to Perth and another from Perth to Dundee and save money, even though you stayed on the same direct train, but I couldn’t find these for this piece.