What stations in the UK run 24/7?
Getting rid of a relatively small number of the worst paid staff on the railway will
Still save a significant chunk of money because people are still very expensive and ticket staff work 24/7.
certainly not £5 per ticket’s worth, and the very small overall savings will not get passed on to the customers anyway.
They almost certainly will be in one form or another. Even if the railroad keeps every dime the extra productivity in the economy you get from people not working as ticket staff will lead to improvements across the board.
NuPNuA@lemm.ee 11 months ago
mackwinston@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Ticket staff in the UK don’t work 24/7. I used to work at a very large railway station in the UK and the ticket office was only open for 12 hours a day and only fully staffed at peak times, and employed the lowest paid staff in the station. (I’m guessing because you talk of railroads and dimes you probably don’t live in the UK, we’d be talking about railways and pennies here). The proposal is not to remove ticket staff at major stations, but at the minor ones, and there just aren’t that many staff at all the minor stations put together. Allied with the penalty fare system and the general unreliability of the ticket machines, and neither ticket machines nor guards on trains taking cash any more, having the busier smaller stations unstaffed is going to take mobility away from the most vulnerable.
Many ticket machines are not fit for use either - some of the ones on GWR for instance (of which lamentably I have first hand experience) have some of the buttons so close together on the touch screen they are a challenge to operate even by a young person with perfect eyesight and eye/hand coordination.
The drop in the ocean saved won’t lead to any meaningful improvements.
bioemerl@kbin.social 11 months ago
That's still plenty of time. "It won't save much compared to...." Is almost always a bad argument. Savings are savings and labor is expensive.
The ticket machines not being up to the task is a reasonable argument though. I can't comment on that.
mackwinston@feddit.uk 11 months ago
They aren’t sitting there twiddling their thumbs for 12 hours, they are providing a service which evidently people value. “Savings are savings” is the kind of argument an accountant who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing would make.
bioemerl@kbin.social 11 months ago
We're talking about the cost a human being sitting around selling tickets to people. You can value that service all day long, but if the human being is wasting their life doing something a machine could do you're literally wasting human life.
If a job can be killed. Replace it. This isn't about money, money is a proxy for what actually matters. Time and resources.
Human potential far surpasses selling you tickets, and any human potential wasted in this way is a tragedy.