Ridiculous price to use my local track!

UnbelievableRiduc wrote:

£4 for a one off session! What's the prices in your local area?

Is £4 reasonable?

Keeps the riff raff out.

I would absolutely pay that if it kept it all the waddling lane hogs. You're lucky.

Do they have any volume discount? 10 sessions for £30...that sort of thing? But if it meant guaranteed access and fewer baby carriages in lane 1, I'd be all in.

UnbelievableRiduc wrote:

£4 for a one off session! What's the prices in your local area?

Is £4 reasonable?

FREE ! America is great.

Go early and climb the fence.

There is a track nearby who charges 4€ (5 bucks). Apparently because they are in some huge debt and somehow think of themselves as some Mecca of running. Maybe 5 people use a track in a month so I can only wonder.

More often than not you're even forced to remove 4 football goals by yourself from the inside lane because the soccer guys are too important to put them back inside the field after practice. Don''t even get me started on the empty water bottles.

That said, any public facility paid by taxes/public funds should have some free or at least a very low cost. 4 dollars is stretching it too much.

Reason they aren't free is that there's always the a***ole who ruins it for the rest, hence those prices. (They don't put the hurdles where they were before, they litter, leave water fountain running after drinking water...)

I would never willingly run around a track but if I did, I could go to our local track any time and run around it as many times as I wanted free of charge. I don't get charged to run on the cross country course by the track either.

£5.50 in Edinburgh

If you lived in the USA you could go to school board meetings and demand that the track funded by your taxes be available to everyone for free. The meetings are long and boring, mostly endless testimony from parents about lunches and class sizes. But if you show up and say you will vote AGAINST their next bond measure if the track isn't free, they'll listen. Half their bond measures fail and losing funding is their ever-present nightmare, so the tactic works; the one caveat is if the track is free, it has to replaced sooner with your tax money, and that ain't cheap.

Too bad you don't live in America, land of the free. Where do they put tracks in England?

£4.45 for me. Although they do season tickets for £80 or so I think.

Local council set the prices since they normally run them.

I normally train at Tooting which is £4.30 at the moment (Wandsworth, Tory council). No discount for runners of the home club.

But sometimes I use Ladywell, which is not only much cheaper anyway, but does a discounted rate for Kent 1st or 2nd claim members of £1.55. And it's a softer surface.

I know that if our school budget fails (NY State) the district has to charge for facilities use. I don't know if that means the track- but the fields as far as non-school sports, etc

Expensive Track wrote:

£5.50 in Edinburgh

£3.50 in East Lothian

swifttaylorgrande wrote:

Do they have any volume discount? 10 sessions for £30...that sort of thing? But if it meant guaranteed access and fewer baby carriages in lane 1, I'd be all in.

It's £16 a month which is ok but but I'd rather not pay for a full month in advance

UnbelievableRiduc wrote:

£4 for a one off session! What's the prices in your local area?

Is £4 reasonable?

Sounds like an incredible risk free deal to me. How does that compare to the cost of land, construction, maintenance, repairing, replacing and insuring?

Europeans pay to run around in circles? Sad! Here in America we have these things called "high schools" and "community colleges" where anyone can run for free as long as a school practice or meet is not in progress.

swifttaylorgrande wrote:

Do they have any volume discount? 10 sessions for £30...that sort of thing? But if it meant guaranteed access and fewer baby carriages in lane 1, I'd be all in.

This

This never happens in the states, but I've heard of friends who traveled to Europe and ran into this issue. I don't imagine that it does keep out people who aren't serious runners, though I never found that to be a problem.

malmo wrote:

UnbelievableRiduc wrote:

£4 for a one off session! What's the prices in your local area?

Is £4 reasonable?

Sounds like an incredible risk free deal to me. How does that compare to the cost of land, construction, maintenance, repairing, replacing and insuring?

Because you can't just run around a field or down the road for free? The idiocy of runners need to run around a track at a certain prescribed time because they think that is the only way they will improve is comical.