This seems the perfect setup for malicious compliance of arbitrary RTO policies.

* You may very well be more productive on a quiet train than a noisy office

* Inconsistent WiFi coverage could let you focus on work instead of video conferencing meetings

* Arriving late means you don’t have to stay long - not your fault the train was delayed, after all!

Your employer gets the badge data showing you technically showed up, you have the receipts on why you were late, and you get a partial or full refund on the delayed train fare for good measure.

The UK train system is a dire, expensive mess. Attempting to avoid getting directly political here, but I strongly believe it’s one of the lowest hanging fruit a political party could act on to curry favour with the electorate.

Would be amazing to see this productised à la the way split ticketing works.

As a North American who travels in the UK multiple times per year, I really need you to elaborate. My experience has been nothing less than amazing, in comparison to the complete lack of rail options at home.

Low bar? British people tend to compare with rail travel experienced on holidays in places like France. Those systems do seem to be better (I do not have recent experience myself) and this then feeds the usual British tendency to take a rosy tinted view of the rest of the world and pessimism about the UK.

It also varies a lot in different places. Costs vary with types of tickets, who you are, and whether you have various discounts.

Local train services are very weak where I live (Cheshire) so while I can get to major cities quite easily its difficult to travel between towns in the county on trains (or buses).

If you travel in and around the South East, inc. London the service is pretty good, regular although still very very expensive.

In the north though it’s a mixed bag, frequently delayed, huge underinvestment, expensive etc.

Note that when an English person says the north, they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about the north of England, not the north of the UK even if everyone else is talking about the UK.

America has much more serious problems with rail, but the UK experience still isn't great. The broad root cause is that back in the day we had the genius idea of paying multiple private companies to run trains on shared lines. We set up metrics to measure their performance that, bluntly, do not work. They underinvest and when there's any sign they're not making money, they hand the contract back. All in all, we get all the disadvantages of a nationalised system with all the disadvantages of a privatised system with a couple of original problems thrown in for good measure.

But the train near my house still runs.

The infrastructure privatisation was reversed a long time ago, and most of the delays, in my experience, are due to problems with tracks.

The biggest problems recently (for me) have been strikes and inadequate services. The rot really goes back to pre-privatisation (it was not great in the 1990s) and arguably started with the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, based on the decision not to subsidise rail in the face of increasing road use.

Where I live, in the US, the income from light rail fair payers is a laughably small portion of the operating budget, so all rides are effectively discounted by 90%+. The fares really only exist to keep homeless people from sheltering on the trains, but they do that anyway, without a ticket.

Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

> Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

City streets and roads are paid for through property taxes, so they are subsidized 100%.

You could say the same about rail infrastructure, but you cannot use private vehicles there (legally).

You actually can, but the hassle is expensive. You have to coordinate it with the railroad and the controller and you have to provide a locomotive and an engineer and on and on and on, but you can do it.

Gas taxes and toll revenue account for about 1/3 of road infrastructure spend these days. This is significantly less than years past as the fixed gas tax hasn't kept up with inflation or adjusted upwards enough to match efficiency gains.

I was careful to say "city road & street" because those aren't generally subsidized by gas taxes, usually only inter-city roads and highways are.

Find this curious. Surely factoring in the cost of tax and insurance greatly increases the cost of the used car? I'm based in Europe so perhaps things are radically different in the US.

The difference is that in America we have politicians who cultivate a fear of cities, public transportation, and not owning a bigger car than you need.

> Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

Cars are even more heavily subsidized, maybe?

I know people who have done this, but in my mind this is not simply slightly less ethical, is is active fraud.

Reminds me of the "Chase Infinite Money Glitch" micro fad from last year. Turns out fraud really is pathway to many forms of free goods the law would consider illegal.

Wonder how many people wound up getting hit with check fraud charges off of that...

Your mind is correct.

You could do, but might be caught as 2 were in 2016

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/commuters-ordered-to-repa...