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Originally Posted by Crawford
That's a normal commute. One hour, each way, is pretty close to standard in large metropolitan centers.
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Not really, otherwise it would be more than 1-in-7, but lengthy commutes are becoming a more regular occurrence in the UK.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm not talking about commuting from Frankfurt to Paris, but the portion of that line running in France has the fastest rail speeds in Europe. Reims to Paris is 40 minutes. Why, then, aren't there masses of supercommuters, given that Paris is expensive, NE France is cheap, and trains are fast and cheap?
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The LGV Est is most certainly fast, but speed isn’t everything as discussed earlier in the thread. I couldn’t find data on the number of people commuting from Reims on the TGV Est – where the journey time to Paris is 45mins – but I suspect an issue could be the low (just seven direct TGV trains to Paris each day) and erratic frequencies.
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Originally Posted by Jonesy55
The model of low-cost airlines offering very cheap fares to people booking far enough in advance is one the UK long distance rail operators already use, you can get from Birmingham to London or vice versa for under £10 if you book ahead and take an off-peak service, the extra capacity from HS2 might well make more of those fares available but if you are commuting daily then booking individual tickets for each day is not practical. The monthly/annual season ticket passes will also need to be cheap if commuting from long distance is going to be a big thing.
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I suspect that there will be a season ticket offering, otherwise I can’t see HS2 getting close to being used by up to 600,000 passengers a day as Sir Higgins wants the line to manage.