Ticketing in the UK is complicated and controversial. A Which? report has found that customers struggle to understand the conditions attached to many rail tickets, particularly those bought in advance. This often leads to passengers boarding the wrong train and having to pay again, usually at a far more expensive rate. Illustrating another point of contention, Paul Clifton (page 15) points out that the cost of some tickets, per mile, on some sections of the Great Western route into London, is almost double those on nearby South West Trains. But do passengers in the West Country get a service twice as good as their neighbours a little further south? Most would argue that they don't. Some anomalies are the result of a historic rationale that no longer applies, such as fares being raised when better rolling stock was introduced, but then never adj usted when other routes got their own improvements. Complicated conditions - particularly on advance fares - are usually an attempt to draw passengers off full trains onto empty ones. But this does result in absurd situations, such as having to get off an Intercity train that is bound for your destination station, in order to get onto a series of local services so as to arrive at the same destination on a route that satisfies your ticket conditions. Cheap advanced fares do serve a purpose, but do they need to be so complicated?
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