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I believe this data is based on ticket sales. In the UK you can buy a ticket from Cambridge to Norwich where you can get a direct train or you can change at El

I believe this data is based on ticket sales. In the UK you can buy a ticket from Cambridge to Norwich where you can get a direct train or you can change at Ely, depending on what time of day you use the ticket. But the ticket sales data can't tell if you changed at Ely or not. So presumably this visualisation draws cambridge-to-norwich tickets on the shortest route, without trying to figure out or show if they go via Ely.

tialaramex 3y ago
The UK sales data (if that's what they have) actually can tell you the route in some cases. This is in fact a bad thing, so let's explain... Britain has repeatedly elected Conservative Party ("Tory") governments, the Tories have an ideological preference for the Free Market, regardless of whether that makes any sense. So, instead of a single nationally owned and likely unprofitable railway industry, it is divided into a lot of separate elements that in theory could be profitable but in fact take enormous subsidies to keep around, for our purposes we care about just one of those elements, the Rail Franchises, a whole lot of separate companies which undertake to provide passenger journeys on set routes and employ staff to operate trains, provide custom services, hire the rolling stock and so on. Originally these Franchises were supposed to compete for passengers. But if they provide unrelated routes obviously that's not much "competition". A route from Leeds to Glasgow isn't in any meaningful sense "competing" with a route from Salisbury to Cambridge. So OK, what if they're competing only where the endpoints are the same? Well, the immediate problem is that the customers don't want to buy a ticket for "Bob's Railway" they want a ticket from one place to another and couldn't give a shit who provides that journey. So the franchises "fixed" this by creating special tickets with weird rules. For example instead of a "Bob's Railway" ticket you make a ticket which requires passengers to travel via Tinyton, a small town nobody cares about but which is served only by Bob's Railway. Do the trains stop in Tinyton? Technically yes they do, but you'd barely know it, this is mostly just a way to satisfy the requirement that "Via Tinyton" means "Only use Bob's Railway" and so Bob's Railway can claim 100% of revenue for these tickets. That revenue doesn't actually matter any more, for a few years now the government just takes all revenue and pays the franchises whatever they want instead - but the pretence of competition must remain, because you know, "Free Market". The result is that tickets are needlessly complicated or incredibly expensive or both, indeed if you're not using software or a specialist human to help plan your journey you will probably pay far more than you should and you might have a terrible journey anyway. The Tories love to say somehow the "Free Market" is going to fix this, but of course the correct fix is ideologically impossible for them, "Take the railways back into public ownership" is at once cheaper, more practical, and completely unthinkable thanks to ideology.
- CWIZO 3y ago
  But there are tickets that are only valid for certain providers?
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    That's true, to do that they use a different hack and we can actually (very expensively) route those too. These tickets are valid only on a particular service (and connections), since the franchises run the services they can sell tickets for services they run. Example from a journey I made near Xmas: 0908 from Bingley to Leeds (Northern Rail) 0945 from Leeds to Kings Cross (LNER) 1309 from Waterloo towards home (SWR) The three franchises get 100% of their part of these routes, and I'm notionally forbidden from, say, getting on an XC to zigzag South and avoid London altogether instead.
- lstamour 3y ago
  That sums up the complexity better than I ever could, but as a tourist visiting London it was relatively painless to tap my Apple Watch and pay by contactless credit card when I got on and when I got off, as long as you’re travelling through supported stops within the city region. This generally included any routes to and from London airports. Comparing the process in London to that of, say, Paris, it is night and day better with London’s system. Yes, trips might cost more than a flat rate, but you don’t need to have a special card - contactless payments are charged at the same rates as an Oyster card would get charged, including discounts if you take multiple trips in a day. Compare to Paris where it’s a flat rate, but you can’t get a normal ticket because your anonymous card is somehow designed only for tourist pricing. Let’s not even bother with how long the lines can be to buy said card. I’ll take a system where you tap on and tap off any day of the week over a flat rate system that doesn’t support easy contactless payment at the same rates as everybody else. I should clarify though - this only applies to any travel by train that you can do from stations that have contactless to stations that also have contactless. Anywhere else, you’re expected to tap off and pay a normal fare for the rest of your travel to an unsupported station by buying it from a website. And while it is unusual to have such complexity, I should mention that rail travel between countries often has similar complexity - I bought a ticket once from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, but got on a train operated by a different company and had to buy a second ticket - the trains left at the same time to and from the same stations but from two different operators. The confusing part is that the train ticket I needed to buy wasn’t available from a Denmark regional train travel ticket kiosk, it was timed ticket you had to buy in advance from a website as the train’s origins was in Sweden rather than Denmark. (And the Denmark station didn’t have Swedish kiosks.) I guess what I’m saying is that trains can make airlines look efficient, at least when it comes to buying and handling tickets. ;-) Edit: I should also mention if I got any of this wrong, I’m actually from North America and about all I can say in response is “at least you have (express, high speed) trains,” as I look at our preference for highways and buses and how most rail in North America is for cargo...

tialaramex 3y ago

The UK sales data (if that's what they have) actually can tell you the route in some cases. This is in fact a bad thing, so let's explain... Britain has repeatedly elected Conservative Party ("Tory") governments, the Tories have an ideological preference for the Free Market, regardless of whether that makes any sense. So, instead of a single nationally owned and likely unprofitable railway industry, it is divided into a lot of separate elements that in theory could be profitable but in fact take enormous subsidies to keep around, for our purposes we care about just one of those elements, the Rail Franchises, a whole lot of separate companies which undertake to provide passenger journeys on set routes and employ staff to operate trains, provide custom services, hire the rolling stock and so on. Originally these Franchises were supposed to compete for passengers. But if they provide unrelated routes obviously that's not much "competition". A route from Leeds to Glasgow isn't in any meaningful sense "competing" with a route from Salisbury to Cambridge. So OK, what if they're competing only where the endpoints are the same? Well, the immediate problem is that the customers don't want to buy a ticket for "Bob's Railway" they want a ticket from one place to another and couldn't give a shit who provides that journey. So the franchises "fixed" this by creating special tickets with weird rules. For example instead of a "Bob's Railway" ticket you make a ticket which requires passengers to travel via Tinyton, a small town nobody cares about but which is served only by Bob's Railway. Do the trains stop in Tinyton? Technically yes they do, but you'd barely know it, this is mostly just a way to satisfy the requirement that "Via Tinyton" means "Only use Bob's Railway" and so Bob's Railway can claim 100% of revenue for these tickets. That revenue doesn't actually matter any more, for a few years now the government just takes all revenue and pays the franchises whatever they want instead - but the pretence of competition must remain, because you know, "Free Market". The result is that tickets are needlessly complicated or incredibly expensive or both, indeed if you're not using software or a specialist human to help plan your journey you will probably pay far more than you should and you might have a terrible journey anyway. The Tories love to say somehow the "Free Market" is going to fix this, but of course the correct fix is ideologically impossible for them, "Take the railways back into public ownership" is at once cheaper, more practical, and completely unthinkable thanks to ideology.

CWIZO 3y ago
But there are tickets that are only valid for certain providers?
- tialaramex 3y ago
  That's true, to do that they use a different hack and we can actually (very expensively) route those too. These tickets are valid only on a particular service (and connections), since the franchises run the services they can sell tickets for services they run. Example from a journey I made near Xmas: 0908 from Bingley to Leeds (Northern Rail) 0945 from Leeds to Kings Cross (LNER) 1309 from Waterloo towards home (SWR) The three franchises get 100% of their part of these routes, and I'm notionally forbidden from, say, getting on an XC to zigzag South and avoid London altogether instead.
lstamour 3y ago
That sums up the complexity better than I ever could, but as a tourist visiting London it was relatively painless to tap my Apple Watch and pay by contactless credit card when I got on and when I got off, as long as you’re travelling through supported stops within the city region. This generally included any routes to and from London airports. Comparing the process in London to that of, say, Paris, it is night and day better with London’s system. Yes, trips might cost more than a flat rate, but you don’t need to have a special card - contactless payments are charged at the same rates as an Oyster card would get charged, including discounts if you take multiple trips in a day. Compare to Paris where it’s a flat rate, but you can’t get a normal ticket because your anonymous card is somehow designed only for tourist pricing. Let’s not even bother with how long the lines can be to buy said card. I’ll take a system where you tap on and tap off any day of the week over a flat rate system that doesn’t support easy contactless payment at the same rates as everybody else. I should clarify though - this only applies to any travel by train that you can do from stations that have contactless to stations that also have contactless. Anywhere else, you’re expected to tap off and pay a normal fare for the rest of your travel to an unsupported station by buying it from a website. And while it is unusual to have such complexity, I should mention that rail travel between countries often has similar complexity - I bought a ticket once from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, but got on a train operated by a different company and had to buy a second ticket - the trains left at the same time to and from the same stations but from two different operators. The confusing part is that the train ticket I needed to buy wasn’t available from a Denmark regional train travel ticket kiosk, it was timed ticket you had to buy in advance from a website as the train’s origins was in Sweden rather than Denmark. (And the Denmark station didn’t have Swedish kiosks.) I guess what I’m saying is that trains can make airlines look efficient, at least when it comes to buying and handling tickets. ;-) Edit: I should also mention if I got any of this wrong, I’m actually from North America and about all I can say in response is “at least you have (express, high speed) trains,” as I look at our preference for highways and buses and how most rail in North America is for cargo...