THERE was a bitter irony in reading the news that peak-time fares would be reintroduced on Scotland’s railways while being crammed into an overflowing peak-time train departing Glasgow Central.

As my eyes skimmed the paragraphs on how the service hadn’t seen the necessary uptick in passengers to justify keeping prices reasonable, train travel had never felt so glamorous.

And like any terminally online person, I shared my bitterly comical situation on Twitter, a place known for reasonable takes and definitely real and human personas behind accounts with more numbers in their name than they have posts hidden for inappropriate content.

Yet while sarcastically commenting on the Scottish Government’s line that not enough people had taken up the opportunity to switch from the quiet, controlled environment of their personal cars to a carriage so densely packed with people that it would be rude to think of them as strangers anymore, I was firmly put in my place by the comments on my tweet.

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Peak fares, it turns out, are a solution to the overcrowding on trains. Between being called a fud and a fanny for thinking that things should be marginally better for train users, it was patiently explained to me that the invisible hand of the market would effectively use peak fares to find the right balance between cost and commuter; that it would discourage travel at peak times and help naturally bring balance to the railways.

I’d never considered this before, obviously, being the raging leftist gender deviant communist that I am. And so, the next morning, eyes open to the world, I approached my boss to explain why I would no longer be coming into work at the scheduled opening time of the office.

The market, you see, had determined that it was better that I start work later in the day to help reduce the strain on public transport. Naturally, he was extremely reasonable, and immediately set my working hours back a few.

I, now a very smart transit economist, then proceeded to throw open my window to the world and shout down to the plebs below that a system that keeps poor people off the trains for the legroom benefit of the slightly less poor was in fact a very reasonable policy, and that price gouging was actually a market tactic to artificially lower demand for busy services which exist unconnected to any other particular need, such as getting to work for a specific time, or being able to travel significant distances at all.

This reminded me of the proposals to introduce surge pricing in supermarkets, where the price of water will skyrocket instantaneously on hot days. This will help reduce demand for products to ensure that they remain available for everyone – if by everyone, I mean those with more money to part with than the rest of us.

Water, as we all know, is a frivolous resource, and access to it should be determined solely on the principles of supply, demand, and profit margins.

Now some might say, Steph, that water and transport are both things we need, and will continue to need regardless of the whims of the market. This approach wholly decouples the product from the personal, working from the unfounded belief that capitalism and market forces naturally produce order and efficiency – even while we watch how the accumulation of our natural resources in the hands of private wealth-driven opportunists has flooded England’s waterways with faeces while investors asset strip public services for their own benefit.

And to that, I’d say you just don’t understand how markets work, silly.

In fact, everything you described is more likely to happen under socialism than capitalism, even though it is in fact happening under capitalism right now.

Liz Truss actually had some real insight into this and, I would like to stress once again, these are very smart and reasonable positions to hold. Looks like the grown-ups are back in the room.

It’s nice, isn’t it? The quiet.

Anyway, that’s why it’s fine a train ride from Glasgow to Edinburgh at “peak time” will soon cost more than £30 – more than it did before the temporary fare freeze came into effect. And if you don’t like it, there’s always the televised game that is trying to get a bus for even a short distance. What’s that behind door number three? Not the bus that was supposed to be there 20 minutes ago.

The market has shown us, without a doubt, that we need peak fares – especially since lowering them didn’t quite bring in the numbers we were hoping for. Sure, the rate of delayed trains never really improved past about one in three ScotRail services running behind schedule – and well over 12,000 trains were cancelled during the 2023-24 financial year...

And motorists might have been a little wary of giving up their cars in case, at the end of the year-long pilot, the Scottish Government let the prices jump back up once again, effectively trapping them into using an expensive public transport system that is notoriously late, often cancelled, and barely reaches anywhere outwith the most densely populated areas of Scotland.

But I’m sure none of that had anything to do with why the scheme was only able to achieve a “limited degree of success”.