House prices in London are stupid, and so, too, are rent prices. The average wage in London is approximately £24k per annum, but to afford somewhere half decent in most places, you’re looking at paying at the very least a quarter of your monthly income on rent alone (nearer half depending on how below average you earn), excluding bills, internet, cider from a Samuel Smith bar on a Friday and the countless amount of birthday pots you have to fill in the office – not to mention your round of “Friday treats”.

For many, the option to live in London is just not there, and commuting to the capital to work is the only option available. Yet anybody watching BBC lunchtime news on Monday the 15^th of August will have learnt – possibly for the first time – that they are rich anyway and so it is justified that train fares will be hiked up by on average 8% by January 2012.

Already the daily commute to work is, as Le Corbusier put it, a surplus labour, reducing one’s free time, but with rises, it gets worse than just being extra work. It should count as an increasing loss of earnings.

One commenter on the BBC website put it: “These ticket prices are already making me wonder whether I can afford to make all of my journeys without making sacrifices somewhere else.”

Guy Debord, the Situationist thinker and pissed map reader, said in his thesis on traffic: “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.” At the moment, the best we can ask for – and I myself commute a fair bit to my place of work – is half a sticky seat with an elbow in your ear and a laptop in your mouth. For travel as pleasure to be even close to being a tenable goal we need the following things as standard:

• Air con
• Leg room
• A seat, or a partial refund if no seat is available
• One sanitation booth per carriage
• A request for all carriages to be “quiet”
• An end to weird, screechy noises to tell you the doors can be opened

For train travel to be pure pleasure, and a joy to pay through the nose for, the following needs to be met (note to Philip Hammond, see this as your benchmark):

• Luxury leather seats
• A cap on the amount of people who can board, and a person available to write notes to employers explaining why you are so late
• A string band
• A mini-bar subsidised by way of an extra stealth tax on motorists – £1 on every time a motorist is a “dick” (criteria for this to be published at a later date)
• Second-class travel to be outlawed
• A button to exterminate mobile phone users or people with loud music

Until these demands are met, I for one will be joining the Campaign for Better Transport’s Fair Fares Now initiative. Join me!