A simple question with a very complicated answer, and I'm not even sure that the premis of the quesion starts at the right place!

Personally I have never - ever - had a 9 to 5 job. I have had 0830-1700, 0800-1600, 0800-1630, 0845-1715, 0845-1645 and 24 hour 3-shift working. And I'm not even going to try to list the various working day lengths I had when self-employed!. OK I accept that this is a bit of a pedantic point, but I have long thought that this 9 to 5 idea is something of a general press construct, much thw same as every passenger on a train is a commuter, even at 1500 on a Sunday afternoon.

On the wider issue, the human species has had artificial light for thousands of years with (going backwards in time) gas lighting, oil lamps and candles. The lack of daylight didn't stop mill owners operating 12 hour shifts in the 19th century, for example, and daylight is a pretty useless commodity if you are working down a pit!

Perhaos a wider,and more important issue in the long run, is that if "the peak" ceases to exist in its current form, where is the justicication for restricting reduced rate travel until after 0930 on Mondays to Fridays?

All of France was full of oddities (compared to the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) road network) which have only recently been put right (by "recently" I mean in the last 20 or 30 years) It was all  very well havinng national rules of the road that varied from everybody else's in the old days, but when driving became more international and not everybody knew of or understood the rules (or indeed the reasons for them) there was bound to be trouble.

The things I know about that the French have abandonede in favour of more international ways of doing things (albeit grudgingly in some cases are:

• Traffic entering a roundabout having priority over traffic already on it (that used to cause gridlock in a short space of time)
  
  Priority to the right, meaning that you could be rattling along happily when suddenly a wagon load of straw would appear out of nowhere in front of you
  
  Yellow headlamps

Yes. If it was to g=have an Eastern Coach Works body then that was where it was off to.

Living in south Bristol between 1964 and 1970, these chassis movements were a very common sight.

I suspect that Car Dealer magazine has a point, but not perhaps as straightforward a one they think they have.

Firstly, and speaking as one who had to drive around London for a number of years in connection with Surveying contracts (it ain’t that easy to take a ladder on the underground or on a bus...), I am aware that driving around London is murder, especially the closer you get to inner London. The traffic is horrendous, overall average speeds are often little faster than walking, and parking charges were horrendous even 10 years ago, let alone now, and that was if of course you managed to find a parking space in the first place.

I suspect that the majority of London commuters, and those in other large urban areas, have few realistic alternatives to using public transport. I suspect the situation may hinge on how many people continue with home working in years to come. That in itself may substantially reduce inner city commuting, but it will do so not by increasing car usage, but by reducing the number of journeys made.

I think a transfer back to private cars might be seen more in rural and urban areas where it is more feasible. I am in fact an example myself. I have three uncles in the Gloucester and Cheltenham areas, two in their 80s and the other a mere lad of 71. When the lockdown is over it is my intention to go and see all three.

However...

One lives in Gloucester (Coney Hill) on the south east side of the city and 2 miles from Gloucester station. One lives in Innsworth, 3 miles from Gloucester and 6 miles from Cheltenham. The third lives in the back of beyond at Kilcot, near Newent. It is possible to get a bus from Gloucester to Newent and to within a mile of his house, but the way the timetable works means the hourly bus out of Gloucester leaves 6 minutes before the trains from Swindon arrive.

In all three cases, whilst I have used public transport to get there in recent years, it actually takes longer than driving, That normally doesn’t bother me, but now I am seriously wondering whether I want to sit on a train for that long with other, even socially-distanced people, and I don’t know where they’ve been...

I might be trying to talk SWMBO^▸ (She Who Must Be Obeyed) into a bit of chauffeuring for some time to come. I wonder how many other people are beginning to think the same way? 

With a Leeds/ Bradford accent like that, at least one of 'em should be called Eli...

Responding to Liskeard Rich first, this scenario had crossed my mind too. Genuine question because I don't know the answer - how are the restrictions being enforced? Are BTP^▸ (British Transport Police) patrolling stations and/or trains challenging people? Is anybody else doing it and, if they are, what powers do they have to physically prevent anyone from travelling? Theoretically at least there might be nothing that is actually stopping people doing just that.

Moving on to Graham's points, perhaps we could do with an inout from TonyK here 

I think it could be argued that there is a major difference between a railcard and a rover and indeed a season ticket. When a railcard is purchased it is simply a document that entitles you to travel at reduced rates. It is not a permit to travel in itself.

In the case of a rover or a season ticket, the actual payment is for a ticket to travel. I would think that a much better case could be made for a refund in those circumstances because you have paid for a permit to travel that you are now being prevented from using.

As an aside, after I posted some extreme travel examples yesterday I thought about how much I would actually have used that railcard in the last four weeks. There was the monthly retired railway staff meeting in Bristol that was cancelled, I would have gone to Bath for shopping, probably have made two visits to Gloucester to see two octogenarian uncles, and most likely a longer trip or two towards London to walk somewhere different, or even just to get a KFC in Praed Street if I had become cheesed off enough with the weather! And all of that, except the cancelled meeting, can still be done when the lockdown is over.

Going back even further to 1968, when the LMR had a new toy in the shape of the recently-introduced WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line) electrics, what is now Chiltern territory north of Princes Risborough had a dire service.

Princes Risborough to Bicester North at 1637 and 1901 (SX) only on weekdays, 0953, 1753 and 2123 on Sunays.
High Wycombe to Bicester North at 0855, 1055, 1353, 1622, 1809 and 1848 (SX) on weekdays, 0937, 1534, 1738 and 2100 on Sundays.

And that was your lot!

I don’t actually disagree with anything you say; I was responding to a query implied in jonneyw’s post about whether one could fail to cover the cost of a railcard with the journeys that are made. My contention was that if somebody uses the railway so little that they make a notional loss on buying a railcard, then perhaps they shouldn’t bother buying one in the first place.

However your post, and other words that have reached my ears and eyes these past few days, begin to make me wonder whether people are concentrating on the right things at the moment.

I heard on the news that Admiral Insurance is to give a £25 refund to motorists on their premiums because car use is restricted. The first question I heard about this was someone with a multi-car policy, wanting to know if the refund was per car or per policy. On another forum I read of a campaign being started to get a rebate on Vehicle Excise duty for the same reasons. On here we have rumblings about getting a refund on a railcard because the services can’t be used. You will see a pattern emerging.

Railcards, VED and car insurance all run on the same basic principle. You pay a sum of money and that entitles you to do something that ths wh have not paid cannot legally do. That “something” is normally unlimited. A salesman doing 80,000 miles per year and a vicar’s wife who only uses her car on a Sunday morning to get parishioners to church, will pay exactly the same level of VED if they have identical cars. Is that fair? Should the vicar’s wife pay less? Perhaps, perhaps not – the vicar’s wife could use her car more if she wanted to but she chooses not to. Not only is that her choice, but it is difficult to see how you could make the system any fairer unless road pricing was introduced, a move that would be almost guaranteed to lose a government the next election of they ever tried it.

And so it is with railcards. I agreed to pay £70 back in 2018 and in consideration for that the railway allows me to travel at two-thirds of the normal fare. I could go to London twice every day for three years if I wanted to, or I could only use my railcard for a fortnightly trip to Bath. I still just pay the same £70 to get the discounted fare. That choice is entirely mine and mine alone (subject to bank balance, of course..).

A quick calculation, dividing the cost of the railcard by the number of days in three years, gives a cost of 6.39269 pence per day if no leap years are involved, and 6.38686 pence per day if there is a leap year in that period. On that basis, as we have been in lockdown for 4 weeks the railway currently “owes me” the princely sum of £1.79.

At a time when over 5000 people a week are still dying from this virus I for one am not going to get too concerned about being “swindled” out of less than two quid. And besides, when all this is over I can go back to going to London twice a day for a third off – and sod the vicar’s wife...

We had lots of things in those days they haven't got today. Rickets, Diptheria, Hitler...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2AcJSkUw6M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2AcJSkUw6M

When you think about it, if someone is anywhere near a regular rail user then it is pretty difficult to be out of pocket. I bought my last 3-year Senior Railcard in June 2018 for £70.00, and after £210 worth of full fare travel I was winning. With an annal £30 railcard less than £100 worth of full fare travel would show a saving - for me, 3 trips to London would  do that. My spreadsheet that nerds like me keep about such things tells me that my £70.00 investment has saved me over £900 so far and it's still got 14 months to run.

Of course, should you have happened to have bought a 14-day all line rover at last years prices (as I did), that would have been a saving of £272.05 in one fell swoop (£523.95 as opposed to £796.00). But even without porcjases like that I would still be well in pocket.

Not the summer of 1970 but the Spring or thereabouts, for some reason now lost in the depths of time I took myself off to Keynsham (that's K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M for my older readers ) to take some shots of everyday railway life at the time. Here are a couple of examples, the first of which would be no good at all in a location quiz!



Here is one of the daily "Frys train" waiting to get back on the main line. The area upon which it is standing is of course now the station car park:


There are plenty of shots of mine from the greater Bristol area in the 60s and 70s here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/93122458@N08/albums/72157652309656301

There are many potential problems with introducing compulsory reservations, and most of them would result in traffic switching from rail to  road, so I fail to see how they would be to anyone's long term advanrage. Just off the top of my head, here are a few that immediately spring to mind:

. It is all very well saying "compulsory reservation on inter city trains," but the way the railway currently functions is to serve intermediate stations which essentially turn these trains into local services.

The Paddington to Bristol services, for example, normally call at Reading, Didcot, Swindon, Chippenham, Bath and Bristol. Whilst you could say that London to Bath and Bristol, and possibly Swindon, is an “inter-city” journey, that description could hardly be applied to a ticket from Reading to Didcot, or Chippenham to Bath. So immediately the question arises “what are you going to do about that?” You could introduce “set down only” services on the route, but then you would need another set of local trains to cater for the traffic between the intermediate stops. This doesn’t sound like good business sense to me.

And of course the Paddington to Bristol service is only one of many. Plymouth bound services are calling at Exeter, Newton Abbot and Totnes; WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line) services stop at Lancaster, Preston, Wigan and Warrington; Midland Main line services call at Market Harborough, Leicester, East Midlands Parkway and Nottingham. And so on (and the less said about XC^▸ (Cross Country Trains (franchise)) services on the NE/SW route the better...).

Secondly, prior reservation is not always possible. If you are swanning off on holiday from Heathrow to Florida (just to take one example) what guarantee have you that your return flight will be on time, if indeed it runs at all?  You have none so, unless the railways are going to revise their refund policy and give refunds just because people don’t turn up for their booked service (and I can’t see them wanting to do that any time soon), the net result could be a lot of empty seats on inter-city trains and a lot of extra trade for long term parking providers at Heathrow.

 Similar considerations would apply to people going to interviews or business meetings where the length of time that they will be there cannot be predicted beforehand. And exactly the same principle would apply to people using “inter-city” trains to tootle off from Chippenham to Bath, or from Neath to Swansea, or from Chesterfield to Sheffield for shopping or general leisure trips. Do you always know in advance how long that is going to take you, especially if you had an ex-wife like mine who could wander a shopping precinct for four hours trying to find a pair of shoes and still come back empty-handed... More potential car journeys, methinks.

As I used to say frequently during my working life: “Have a good idea by all means, but think through the implications of that idea before you introduce it.”

Sorry about the three-day delay in responding to this, but I have been trying to find an old website which gives examples of crap cycle lanes and I've now found it.

As a former car driver and cyclist (I can't do either now because of my eyesight) I am well aware that what might look to a non-cycling driver from behind the driving wheel as a "perfectly good cycle lane," often fails to live up to that description when you actually use the bloody thing. Leaving to one side potholes, stupidly-placed bollards and the like, some of the pitfalls that "perfectly good cycle lanes" suffer from include:

* A "cyclists dismount" and a "give way" sign at each and every minor road crossing
* Cycle lanes that abruptly stop where you really need them (eg hazardous points)
* Short cycle lane that lead nowhere (see the link below which includes an example of a cycle lane that is shorter than a cycle...)

Enjoy - click the double arrows at the top to go back through the "Cycle Facility of the Month" graphics.

http://wcc.crankfoot.xyz/facility-of-the-month/March2019.htm

"You'll be needing an All House Rover for that Sir"

But Our Glorious Leaders hve said that if it is on sale in a shop that is allowed to stay open, you can buy it.

Hands not knowing what the other is doing spring to mind, as does my old mother's favourite saying - "clear as mud"