Clever websites only make the market dumber

A month ago I wanted to travel to Bath for a 60th birthday party. From Kent, this either involves a Tube journey to Paddington or traversing the south-western stretch of the M25, where — in the rare moments you are not in stationary traffic — you have the even worse experience of driving over 10,000 misaligned slabs of ribbed concrete.

But deep in my hippocampus, I remembered seeing a train to Bath on the departures board at Waterloo. This would let me travel from Seven-oaks to Waterloo East, avoiding the Tube. I looked online, but the website denied all knowledge of such trains. It told me to take the Underground to Paddington and board there.

Following a hunch, I searched Waterloo to Bath via Salisbury. Suddenly there they were — several daily direct trains from Waterloo to Bristol via Bath with First Class Advance tickets selling for bizarrely low prices. Yes, the route is slower than via Paddington, but it is cheap, easy, scenic and WiFi-enabled. The algorithm cares for none of this, of course. It shows the fastest journey and that’s that. It buries the Waterloo to Exeter trains for the same reason.

In the same way, French rail websites always make you travel via Paris whereas the smart money changes trains at Lille. True, you might have to wait for an hour at Lille Flandres station, but who cares when there is a bar called Le Palais de la Bière? (I much admire the Flemish approach to gastronomy, which rests on the much neglected insight that, provided you offer good chips and beer, nobody gives a shit about anything else.)

Taken at a simple level, this story contains a handy travel tip. But I think it poses a more fundamental question.