There is an analogous situation for railway passengers in the UK, although it
is somewhat less insidious because it doesn't involve insurance. There, the
"full standard-class fare" is defined as the most flexible single-journey
ticket
that doesn't actually confer first-class privileges.
Almost all
passengers actually buy one of the many types of discounted
ticket, ranging
from off-peak tickets for shoppers and tourists, through
season tickets for
commuters who normally use peak-hour trains, to advance
tickets which can often
be several times cheaper than the standard fare but
need to be bought several
days in advance, airline style. Then there's the fact
that tickets restricted
to a single route or a single train operator can be much
cheaper than those
permitting a range of routes and operators. It's a rather
complex
system.
That complexity does however tend to trip people up, which is where
the
analogy comes in. It often happens that a confused traveller gets on the
wrong train after having bought an Advance ticket, which only permits travel
on a specific train at a specific time. An unsympathetic ticket inspector can
then treat them as travelling without a valid ticket, and charge them the "full
standard-class fare" described above. And if they don't have the means to
pay
that there and then, they're in *real* trouble. All this can be triggered by
a
simple mistake such as arriving at the station at the correct time, seeing a
train in the platform bound for the correct destination, and not realising that
this is the previous, late-running train!
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