I'm excited!

I swear this has been teased for the past 15 years. I'd love a reliable tram network but I'm sceptical it'll actually happen.

Wow, that's messed up.

Also, kudos to Bristol Live for some good journalism.

Some would argue that the profit is better spent in reinvestment. However the average profit margin for franchises was around 2%. Since the end of franchising in 2020, operators have been paid a flat fee by government. This amounts to around £150m p.a, but total government spending on rail is around £50bn p.a so it’s not going to make a big difference. The savings would include redundancies for duplicated roles at management level, but that would be somewhat mitigated by the unions being able to focus on one set of negotiations.

Fares are priced to a number of factors. A particularly important one is to price peak tickets high enough to moderate demand on the busiest routes. Lowering prices would require more capacity, and that’s hugely expensive and disruptive, and for some bottlenecks such as the Welwyn viaduct it simply isn’t feasible. So new routes need to be built, but that hasn’t gone well lately either.

It’s mostly an ideological exercise.

So of I can't travel for less money what the fuck is the point?

What's the improvement this is going to bring? Surely cost of travel should be the single biggest win here.

Prices have been set by government since 2020, and prior to that government set prices for 40% of journeys.

If I can go from Bristol to London for £15 then I will celebrate this.

A hardly feel that losing your job at a particular hospital is a sufficient retaliation for unnecessarily cutting into 200 different people.