A train-trip to another part of the country is usually described by the British as follows. First, they’ll offer an anodyne and brief description of how lovely/nice/great/boozy their destination was. If they attended a football match, they might also add a sentence which hints at the scoreline (“shame about the result, that was never a pen”). Second, they embark on an impassioned moan about how much their train ticket cost, which concludes with a sorrowful sigh along the lines of “it would have been cheaper just to drive”. The most enraged might even suggest they should have flown, presumably forgetting about EasyJet’s long menu of hidden costs.
That’s just anecdote, however. So we wanted to test if it really is cheaper to drive than take a train in the UK. After all, owning a car is not cheap. There’s the upfront purchase cost, the maintenance, the insurance, the tax, the fuel cost, and parking fees. And the cost of a train-fare depends on the time you travel, your exact origin and destination, and whether you’re buying a single or return.
Helpfully, ATOC publish data for every single possible train trip you take in the UK, and the price of various types of fares on those trips (e.g. anytime single, returns, advanced singles etc). The dataset is designed for websites selling specific train tickets. So, as you’d expect, it takes a bit of manipulating to make it usable for analysis. But – unless you’re an avid data scientist – that doesn’t make for interesting content. So just check-out our GitHub profile if you’d like to see how we cleaned the dataset. We focus on our analysis on anytime singles. Advance and off-peak tickets are cheaper but cannot be used for spontaneous travel like a car. As there are thousands of stations, we then group stations into unitary authorities, and calculate the average train fare between each pair of unitary authorities. This just makes mapping the results a little easier.
Working-out how much it costs to drive between two unitary authorities is less precise. First we need a “cost per mile driven” estimate. But people drive different cars, which have very different upfront costs and fuel economy. And even exactly the same car can cost different amounts to maintain and insure (depending on the motoring-style and age of the driver). That means we had to make some simplifying assumptions. But we based our analysis on an average Vauxhall Cross driver – as this happens to be the UK’s most popular car. We assume they can get 125,000 miles out of the car, and spread the upfront cost and well as all typical ongoing costs over that mileage. This gives us an average “per mile” cost of 24p per mile. To that we add a 10p per mile fuel charge. Second, we need to know how many miles you’d need to drive to get from one unitary authority to another. It’d be possible to do this using the Google Map API, but there are 40000 unique unitary authority combinations – and we’d have to spend a decent chunk of money to download that data.
So instead we ran a few dozen example journeys between the geographical centres of two different unitary authorities. We calculated the “as-the-crow-flies” distance, and the google-maps “driving” distance. The latter was on average 1.2x greater than than the former. So for the charts above we calculate driving milage between Islington and the other Unitary Authorities as the as-the-crow-flies distance multiplied by 1.2. This method doesn’t really work if the crow happens to fly over water. For example, if your start-point was Exeter and your destination was Swansea, this method would assume you were somehow able to cross a wide-part of the Bristol Channel in a car. So in the chart below we chose Islington as our start-point, as most destinations can be reached from there pretty directly.
Anyway, here’s the results for Islington:
Take travelling to the North West as an example. An anytime single from Islington to Liverpool costs £176. All-in, a car journey would cost around £70. And that doesn’t even factor in:
- costs incurred by train passengers to get to and from train stations
- multiple passengers, which would make a car far, far cheaper
So, provided you have enough savings to make the initial purchase of a car, it is a far more economical way to travel around Great Britain (compared to train transport). But cars contribute around 10x more CO2 per passenger mile than trains. And the less wealth-off are far less likely to own a car. With a climate and cost of living crisis, this disparity between train and car costs is egregious.