On Jan 6, 7:57*am, Paul G wrote:
Off-peak free travel
would mean that more services would be required, at a cost, and someone
would have to pick up that cost.

Agreed 100% with the stuff I snipped about the impossibility of
offering on-peak free travel. But off-peak free travel seems like
something that could be beneficial.

The vast majority of the railway's cost is fixed and capital-based do
deal with peak hour demand. Once you've got a Tube line and a fleet of
trains able to run the peak-hour service, the marginal cost of running
them the rest of the time (subject to decent maintenance windows) is a
very small part of total spending.

So if you could encourage people to shift a certain proportion of peak
journeys onto off-peak by offering free travel, thereby reducing the
need for new trains and new lines, it's quite possible that the
savings you'd get from delaying major capital projects would outweigh
the small cost of running extra services during the off-peak.

For this to work, a significant proportion of the new off-peak
journeys would have to be displaced on-peak journeys. It also ignores
political concerns like perceived fairness (given the rancour seen
against schoolkids for having the temerity to not have to pay on
buses, it's likely that such a plan would make the commuting
population /very/ grumpy indeed) and antisocial behaviour (enforcing
fare collection tends to reduce levels of bad behaviour).

But, unlike the abolition of peak hour fares, it's something whose
benefits are worth investigating in more depth.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org