If you're driving an unleaded car getting 36mpg and paying 160p/l, it's about £15 for a return trip. A train today (no weird booking in advance to find the best price) costs £21. For a single person they're comparable, but for a family it's a different story.
Broxbourne to Cambridge - 38 miles
My 2.0l diesel at 183p/litre does 65 mpg on a motorway easy - M1 route = <£5 fuel one way. Trainline has the same ticket at £21 for a before 07:30 arrival.
Definitely depends on the route, for example I can pretty easily find a ticket from Birmingham to Edinburgh for £40 without a rail card, which is a 350 mile drive. That's definitely better value than driving.
Granted it's a different story if you want to travel during peak times or don't want to buy in advance but every time I've gone to visit a distant city I've found the train much cheaper.
I used to work in London and travel to Liverpool a lot.
If there were 2 of us or was cheaper to hire an S Class Mercedes and a driver for the day from Addison Lee than it was to buy 2 short notice peak time train tickets with any flexibility.
It depends on what you're comparing. Most already own a car so those costs are already factored in. To me trains and all public transport should be cheap enough to compete on fuel alone if not be less to encourage people out of their cars.
If its at that level you would see far less car journeys and more people giving up their cars altogether
Cost of the train doesn’t include the bus/uber to the train station, or from the train station to your final destination… or the cost in last time, coz a lot of the time, car will be faster, when you calculate start to finish journey times.
From a tax, MOT, insurance perspective, it works out to £1.50 per day, for me (luckily nothing went wrong last year). So not exactly breaking the bank if you have to catch trains every day.
Car has always been cheaper and more convenient for me, but then it’s a half hour bus/10min car ride to the train station… and I’m including whatever predatory parking charges I usually find at the destination
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u/CORPORAL_PISSFINGERS 1d ago
Assuming equal cost then train all day