An Action for Rail report released earlier this week revealed the high cost of rail travel for UK commuters.
It found that commuters travelling between Luton and London St Pancras spent 14% of an average wage on a £387 monthly pass.
A monthly pass for a route of a similar length in France cost £61 (or 2.4% of the French average monthly wage), and £62 in Italy (equivalent to 3.1% of the average monthly wage).
A wider sample of rail passes for similar distances reveals a similar trend across a number of other European capitals: even in countries where monthly rail passes cost commuters more than the equivalent of £200, it still made up less than 8% of the average worker’s monthly earnings.
Workers travelling similar distances into Helsinki and Stockholm spend 6.5% of their monthly wage on commuting, while it costs Oslo’s workers 4% of their wages.
The only country in which the cost of train travel approaches that of the UK is Portugal, where low wages and high transport costs can see commuters spending more than 9% of their monthly wage on travel.
