Rethinking our business cases
BEFORE the Coronavirus pandemic the Transport for London (TfL) network carried five million passengers a day, with a significant number of projects carried out by TfL based on assessments of passenger demand forecasting and modelling.
These assessed how that daily figure of five million would increase, and how the network would address congestion and capacity issues. Business cases led to investment decisions and capital spend that aimed to improve journey times and bring social benefits.
COVID-19 threw these into ambiguity. How can the same business case be built if the demand data is uncertain and the traditional tools to analyse the demand are no longer applicable?
Following the easing of lockdown measures in May, a number of procedures have been brought in to give staff and passengers confidence to use public transport.
One includes the intensive application of Travel Demand Management (TDM) tools, similar to those adopted during the London 2012 Olympics - 77% of Londoners made changes to travel behaviours in response to the TDM programme during the event.
Another is Restarting the Railway, an industry initiative supporting transport bodies to instigate safe systems as passengers being to travel again. As we work through these, the industry must use this crisis to look at the best examples of change to our working and living patterns as we reopen, recover and reimagine our transport infrastructure.
Numerous factors will influence passengers’ attitudes to commuting:
■ Tolerance for crowding. We expect that many people will have a lower tolerance threshold for being packed into stations and trains and will opt for long-term shifts to cycling and walking. These modes do not generate meaningful revenue for TfL - the business case to invest in them alone is a harder one to build.
An assessment of zones that can be covered by foot, bike or bus can be used to demonstrate that change to inner-London journey patterns can be encouraged. This shift would also benefit from a significant improvement to destination facilities to support active mode employee commuters.
■ Passenger confidence. Passengers need to return to rail travel to return a meaningful operating revenue. By adopting a passengerfocused approach to build confidence, we can create unobstructed, inviting spaces where passengers have clear lines of sight, a sense of space and simple intuitive wayfinding.
■ Information on demand. TDM will no longer just focus around peaks, events, or during closures to the network. As passengers move to being more flexible, choosing space and perceived safety over speed, there is increased need for real-time, accessible, responsive and personalised TDM tools that not only ‘Reduces’, ‘Reroutes’, ‘Retimes’ and ‘Re-modes’ decision making, it also ‘Reeducates’ and ‘Rethinks’ end-to-end journeys.
■ Changing habits. With people working remotely, many businesses are exploring models to focus on smaller collaboration spaces rather than full office occupancy, respecting and enforcing social distancing requirements in the short term.
■ Demand forecasting. Using Railplan evaluates potential flow at each station node for peak weekday periods. The standard approach works on modelling by passengers’ use of Railplan (public transport prediction model )and journey time savings, which then informs station upgrade investment decisions. COVID introduces other criteria affecting capital spend - the maintaining of social distance measures and still catering for high demand.
We are seeing a generational shift in how people use public transport, with existing tools and approaches to developing transport infrastructure business cases no longer applicable.
The Institution of Civil Engineers has issued a Green Paper, COVID-19 and the new normal for infrastructure systems, calling on the industry to pick up on a number of lessons including ‘Reframing approaches to connectivity’ and ‘Designing infrastructure networks to accommodate uncertainty’.
Through our ‘Reopen, Recover, Re-imagine’ model, Atkins is planning a staged response. The industry has an opportunity to change investment planning and concentrate on sustainable, passenger-focused, agile and affordable transport solutions. R