Hippoclides

Interesting figures, thanks. But I think the inclusion of maintenance costs (which is quite sensible) makes boating look very uncompetitive with bricks'n'mortar. How many people actually plan, let alone set aside, a maintenance budget when living in a house? I know I haven't, and if I add up everything I've paid up for when it happened, it's probably come to at least as much as maintaining a boat...

Really? Last time I checked, Tingdene marinas were cheaper than BWML. They don't do residential moorings though. I don't know how they compare in the rest of the country but BWML's marinas in the SE don't seem very cost-competitive.

I was quite interested in "Kittle" when it appeared on the market but then realised the actual boating experience would involve standing in the kitchen and fiddling with a tiny joystick. Which just doesn't seem like much fun. Still, looks like someone has now made an offer: New'n'used boats

Assuming this is serious, I think any available investment is going to flow into nuclear, wind and solar power generation (probably in that order) before anyone gets serious about horse-drawn narrowboats again. By the time that happens, our "civilisation" would already have collapsed. Best way to get investment into the canal system, whether we like it or not, is probably going to be talking up the leisure and tourism roles.

Exactly. With no reserves the market rate will be exactly that, not an arbitrary value decided by BW based on what they would like to receive, loosely informed by conditions during an economic (and boating) boom. The current system of reserve prices is preventing the market deciding a value for the moorings. It may be that there are a few moorings that are genuinely unwanted but it seems likely that most failed auctions would succeed if the prices were allowed to fall below reserve. This would at least secure some revenue for BW, rather than none, and deflect the criticism involved in setting reserve prices, let alone the criticism that administering a system of fixed prices or a waiting list would result in. Conversely, the system would still allow prices to rise in periods of high demand (as before the recent economic downturn), to BW's benefit, and therefore hopefully to the benefit of the waterways. If an auction failed a couple of times, BW would have evidence that a particular mooring was currently unwanted and it could be removed, if there really was an individual cost associated with maintaining it. The only obvious way a genuine open auction system could be manipulated would be by agreements among the potential buyers to keep bids low and, presumably, allocate moorings between themselves on some other basis than cost. Given the level of disagreement among even the sample of boaters on here, I think BW would be safe from that eventuality

Are there many on the UK waterways? Baboon spiders, blue belly snakes and bamsloons, that is. Not cats. Agree with you about the cats, though. Never trusted them.

The problem with that is that what BW believes the current going rate should be is in excess of what most potential buyers are willing to pay. Allowing BW to decide the price in this way would probably continue to result in vacant moorings. An open auction system is an excellent system for determining the market rate for moorings - but only if there is no reserve price.

Not in Brentford, perhaps, but Kent is another matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euscorpius_flavicaudis