Rail recovery
Coronavirus has undone decades of steadily rising passenger numbers. ANTHONY LAMBERT looks at how public confidence and demand could be restored, and at what practical and policy changes that might entail
After Coronavirus caused passenger numbers to plummet, how can public confidence in rail be restored?
COVID-19 has destroyed 25 years of almost continuous growth in passenger numbers on Britain’s railways, thanks to the Government’s success in persuading us not to use public transport.
The challenge of restoring confidence in the use of trains and thereby rebuilding passenger numbers is hard to overstate, not least because the virus has changed far more than our attitudes to health and the way we travel.
The insistent government instruction to use public transport only if absolutely necessary and there is no alternative has created a climate of fear that will be hard to undo. As one train driver put it during the height of the lockdown: “We’ve got more staff than passengers.”
While the messaging was necessary to ensure the safety of staff and passengers during the crisis, Her Majesty’s Chief
Inspector of Railways Ian Prosser CBE now thinks that “we have fallen into the trap of fear without assessing the real risk following mitigating controls. Research by DB suggests that the highest incidence of infection [outside hospitals/care homes] was within the home, compared with 0.1% on public transport. Moreover, trains are dramatically safer than roads - 25 times safer.”
Prior to the tragic events at Stonehaven last month, no passenger had died on the railway since 2007. In that time, 25,675 people have been killed on UK roads and 314,491 seriously injured.
“It is important that the governments, rail regulator and the industry work together to educate the public and put the real risks in context and make them more comfortable using trains again,” says Prosser.
Chris Pownall, of consultancy SYSTRA, stresses how quickly public opinion changes: “People have changed behaviour very quickly and if you don’t do something to encourage them to change back very quickly, those attitudes and behaviour become more ingrained.”
Passenger numbers may not return to anything like former levels until there is a vaccine. And even then, the virus will have changed patterns of demand for travel.
A survey conducted by SYSTRA in June suggests that only 28% of office workers want to return to five days a week in the office, while 39% of people will use public transport less after all of the COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted.
Tellingly, that figure rises to 62% for London but is as low as 25% in the South West, perhaps reflecting perceptions of the risk of infection through the levels of crowding on trains.
Most alarmingly, 30% of people will not revert to using the same amount of public transport even if a vaccine becomes available.
Companies, too, are thinking differently. As the chief executive of Barclays commented: “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.” Twitter is not alone in allowing its 5,000 employees to work from home permanently.
But speculation that city centres are doomed can be overdone. The limitations of online meetings have been discovered, while many junior staff rely on an office setting to learn. As Mike Goggin, of Steer, observes: “Agglomeration economics are likely to remain valid, besides the attractions of urban living for cultural, culinary and educational amenities.”
Like many crises, Coronavirus is expected to act as a catalyst to existing trends, principally the decline in rush-hour commuting as fewer people work in offices five days a week. Season ticket sales were already at 31% of journeys compared with 48% a decade ago.
The increase in teleconferencing is likely to reduce business travel, although train travel is expected to rebound more quickly than flying (at least for business travellers) because of rail’s city centre stations reducing the number of different transport modes and potential contact with the virus. There is also evidence of a revival of Sleeper trains, which travellers see as a safer option than flying.
Two types of response will be needed to rebuild railway (and government) balance sheets: those within the control of the railway industry; and those that depend on government policy and action.
Most alarmingly, 30% of people will not revert to using the same amount of public transport even if a vaccine becomes available.
Marketing campaigns
Train operating companies (TOCs) will have little influence on new patterns of work, but some commuters will need tempting out of their cars.
Discretionary travel is the market that will require the most effort to re-establish - and there should be willing allies who are equally anxious to revive economic activity with two-for-one offers at tourist attractions. In
France, SNCF has teamed up with Régions de France for its campaign to encourage people to holiday at home.
“We need a vigorous marketing campaign and slashed prices to tempt people back to try the product, because many of us have become non-users,” says Transport Focus Chief Executive Anthony Smith.
“People telling others that they think the railway has done all it can to create a reassuring environment can create a virtuous circle.”
It looks as though TOCs will be operating under Emergency Measures Agreements (EMAs) for at least another 18 months from September, so it is imperative that within that time TOCs are incentivised to spend heavily on marketing to win back passengers.
A new framework for fares
Fares reform has been on the agenda for years, and the crisis is certain to accelerate the need both for the long-demanded simplification and for fares that reflect new patterns of travel. Top of the list must be flexible season tickets and carnets, but also needed is the freedom to apply dynamic pricing.
Following the Rail Delivery Group’s February report on Easier fares for all, RDG Chief Strategy Officer Andy Bagnall states: “We are working with the DfT on ways to be more flexible.”
“But we need fundamental reform of the regulatory system to remove the straitjacket of peak and off-peak, which can make shoulder peak trains horribly overcrowded. Graduated fares on long distance, and using pay-asyou-go smart technology with the certainty of a price cap for commuters would help us make better use of capacity and increase overall journeys. The 1995 Ticketing Settlement Agreement prevents that approach.”
Long-distance passengers have had to get used to booking ahead during the pandemic, but Smith does not want that to become the norm. We mustn’t lose the ‘turn up and go’ attribute of the railway in the long term,” he insists.
It is important that the governments, rail regulator and the industry work together to educate the public and put the real risks in context and make them more comfortable using trains again.
Ian Prosser CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Railways
Capacity and reliability
The reduction in passenger services following the start of lockdown on March 23 led to significant and predictable improvements in punctuality - within a week a previously unimaginable Public Performance Measure score of 100% was achieved.
Since the mid-1990s, passenger growth has meant Network Rail constantly playing ‘catch-up’ as it struggled to provide additional capacity. And there is little doubt we have been ‘sweating’ the assets at the expense of reliability.
Reducing train path utilisation so that we use no more than 75% of theoretical capacity provides greater resilience, so a fall in passenger demand may allow some trimming of the timetable.
Equally “flattened peaks may help the railways re-gear the way rush-hours are managed”, says Goggin.
And on some routes where freight has been squeezed out during peak hours, that may release some welcome paths.
Since punctuality/reliability dwarfs other drivers of passenger satisfaction in Transport Focus surveys, a significant improvement will help win back passengers.
It may call into question the usual answer to rising passenger demand on regional and local routes, which is to run more short trains rather than simply lengthening them.
“We might move to a Swiss-style railway, with fewer and longer trains that help reduce the cost of the peaks and improve performance,” Smith muses.
Rethinking trains
HS2 Ltd Chief Executive Mark Thurston suggested that trains may have to be redesigned to cope with a persistent Coronavirus.
That idea was roundly rejected by Christian Wolmar ( RAIL 907) - not only because social distancing and an effective railway are incompatible, but because he says that “social distancing cannot become a permanent concept. Life would simply be intolerable.”
A vaccine or combination of vaccines will hopefully obviate any need for distancing, but if commuting levels fall and the peaks are smoothed out, thought might be given to returning to a more generous 2+2 seating from the current 2+3 in many suburban trains.
More pertinent is the need to think about the quality of trains. As car design and ambience have improved, train design has deteriorated.
New trains have been broadly criticised for their interrogation-centre lighting, ironing board seats, inadequate provision for luggage, insufficient or total lack of toilets, preponderance of airline seating, and too many seats badly aligned with windows.
To attract people out of their cars, the railway has to inject some style and flair into lacklustre designs at the first refurbishment.
Whole journey thinking
The railway industry has become much better at recognising that journeys are made from door-to-door, rather than station entrance to station exit. Information on connecting modes has improved, and Network Rail’s
Design Council Think Station Report ( June 2020) calls for priority to be given to sustainable connecting modes.
Exceptionally good cycle parking facilities have been created at stations such as Cambridge and Brookwood, with Department for Transport funding for 27 more in the pipeline. The Government’s £ 2 billion cycling initiative announced on July 28 is sure to include segregated bike routes to some stations. Active travel has shot up the agenda during the crisis, because the reaction to COVID-19 is more severe in those who are overweight or obese.
Walking or cycling to the station contributes to the 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week recommended by chief medical officers.
In India, cycling has boomed because “everyone is obsessed with boosting their immunity to ward off the virus, and exercise is seen as vital”. Not even London can match the Delhi metro, where bikes and e-bikes are available at 250 of the 285 metro stations.
Making railways the backbone of travel must entail a different approach to planning. Instead of locking car dependence into new housing developments, railway stations should be seen as primary development hubs.
Many countries and conurbations realise that the future lies in creating attractive, multi-purpose and largely car-free spaces around public transport hubs. By capturing the rising property values from the synergies of good place-making, public investment can be funded by commercial gain through such mechanisms as business rate supplements, workplace parking levies and developer contributions.
Whether any of this becomes part of the Prime Minister’s call to “build, build, build” remains to be seen, but there are no signs of progressive thinking.
Air matters
The By Train or Plane? report published by UBS in April found that Coronavirus had made consumers and governments “more climate aware”, owing to the dramatic improvements in air quality during lockdown. Over half a dozen of France’s major cities turned green in the country’s municipal elections in June, with cities such as Lyon and Bordeaux expected to adopt designs for cleaner and greener cities.
Air pollution has increased the number and severity of COVID-19 infections, according to health experts, besides the 40,000 annual deaths in the UK that are attributable to outdoor air pollution.
As Professor Jonathan Grigg, of Queen Mary University of London, said: “Preventing
To attract people out of their cars, the railway has to inject some style and flair into lacklustre designs at the first refurbishment.
the most polluting traffic from re-emerging onto our roads should therefore be part of COVID-19 policy.”
We have to move away from the idea that it is an inalienable right to pollute by driving wherever and whenever we want, when the consequence is people dying. Rail is the only mode of transport that has reduced emissions while increasing passenger volumes, albeit with huge scope for further decarbonisation and reductions in nitrogen oxide through electrification.
There is a danger that the move towards electric cars will create within governments a sense of “job done”. As a Government
Office for Science report says: “Non-exhaust particulate matter emissions (e.g. tyre wear, brake wear and road dust resuspension) account for approximately 50%-60% of the vehicle emissions that contribute to poor air quality.”
Electric vehicles will do nothing to reduce those emissions, nor to reduce congestion and tyre noise.
A stop to subsidising pollution
An objective study of transport taxation would conclude that it was intended to encourage pollution.
Aviation, the most polluting mode, pays no tax on its fuel nor VAT on tickets.
Fuel duty for motorists has been frozen for a decade, depriving the Exchequer of about £ 9bn a year (over ten years, that is almost enough money to build HS2, even at the higher estimates). Between 1980 and 2014, the real cost of private motoring fell by around 14%, while bus and rail fares rose by 58% and 63% respectively.
Major reform of transport taxation cannot be postponed because the Treasury will have to find a replacement for the £ 28bn a year it collects in fuel duty as we transition from petrol and diesel cars to electric.
Other than water, road space is the only commodity that is not charged for according to usage, so this is surely the moment to start to implement road-user charging according to the user-pays and polluter-pays principles.
These are urged on governments and EU policymakers by the Community of European Railways (CER) and infrastructure companies, as a way of funding clean, low-carbon transport as we rebuild our economies.
Pressure from vested interests has discouraged governments everywhere from recovering the external costs imposed by road transport, in terms of pollution, crashes, noise and congestion. The craven reluctance to address these issues has gone on for at least three decades, stoking up the next big crisis - climate change.
Road-user charges would help to level the playing field between road and rail and encourage people to think about the best mode to use for each journey, rather than what is (for many) the default choice of the car.
The catastrophic levels of borrowing created by Coronavirus will make it imperative to raise taxes and find new sources of revenue. It is common sense to devise ones that go beyond raising revenue and which also work towards a range of societal objectives.
Will it be a missed opportunity?
Coronavirus has accelerated trends and made a reality of the previously unthinkable. Such maelstroms can be a catalyst for positive change, given enlightened thinking and political courage.
Senior leaders, including Greater
Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, have urged that we ‘build back greener’, while the European Union sees “a boost for rail travel and clean mobility in our cities and regions” as part of the recovery plan.
Even the president of the AA, Edmund King, has questioned the wisdom of the £ 27bn roads programme, which would increase traffic and pollution.
Complementary measures designed to make rail “the backbone of modality” (as the Director General of the International Union of Railways recently put it) rely on taking a holistic view of transport, the environment and health, in order to produce a response that pays more than lip service to modal shift.
The win-win policies outlined would benefit the Treasury, improve the health and wellbeing of citizens (and so relieve pressure on the NHS and reduce its costs), and make our urban areas more attractive and our streets friendlier places, as well as addressing the next most pressing challenge of our times - climate change.
The global costs and impacts of climate change will make Coronavirus look like a walk in the park. Will the Government have the courage to press forward with such radical but wholly beneficial measures?
The writer would like to thank Andy Bagnall, Robert Crawford, Mike Goggin, Marion Gourlay, Libor Lochman, Niall McGourty, Jon Peters, Chris Pownall, Ian Prosser, Anthony Smith and Hollie Taylor for their help with this article.
Rail is the only mode of transport that has reduced emissions while increasing passenger volumes, albeit with huge scope for further decarbonisation and reductions in nitrogen oxide through electrification.