The commuter rebellion
MANY former commuters seem to be singing “I don’t want to go to work on a train in the rain” to adapt on old pop -song parody.
It seems increasingly clear that the Covid lockdowns have made something snap in many five-day-aweek train commuters minds.
They have discovered they can do much of their job from home.
They have saved serious money on not buying season tickets.
Above all they have been spared the difficult local roads to the station, the fight for a car park place, and ticket, and the lottery of getting a seat on the train.
All that strain and worry has gone out of life.
On that busy office day will the train come on time?
On the morning when you need to meet the boss, will your train be delayed by leaves on the line or the late arrival of the train in front?
Will you get drenched walking from the station to the office?
Going home might you have one of those nightmare journeys when you are stuck in a stationary train for too long, ringing home to apologise and say you haven’t a clue when you will make it back.
Many commuters with all too many memories of late and cancelled trains, an absence of seats and a dearth of reliable information about what has gone wrong suddenly see the chance to duck out of many of those journeys and opt for a different working life.
It looks as if many offices will be adapted for hybrid working with many more people logging in remotely.
Employers who may prefer more to come and work in the office will decide that to keep some of the best talent they need to be flexible.
They will decide to downsize their floor space to get a property saving out of the change.
All this will knock a big hole in railway revenues. I will look at what government should do with the trains in a later post.
The commuter revolt is the result of poor and expensive services over many past years.
The long road to COP 26
This week the government announced its support for hydrogen as a transport fuel, and as a way of heating our homes.
It said that it thought the hydrogen sector could create an additional 9,000 jobs by 2030.
The UK economy has 31 million jobs, so the limited ambition for hydrogen this decade only sees an increase of 0.03% in employment, if these hydrogen jobs are all additional.
It contrasts with the current 1,000,000 vacancies the job market sports. It implies pessimism about the speed of expansion and take up of this new wonder fuel.
These jobs would add just 0.9% to the total available if they are extra jobs.
Hydrogen has obvious advantages over some of the other proposed technologies.
Heat pumps for homes would be much dearer and less effective than adapting our current gas boilers to run on 100% hydrogen instead of natural gas. Batteries cannot offer sufficient power relative to weight for heavy trucks and other large vehicles.
The intermediate plan is to see if they can introduce 20% hydrogen into our current natural gas.
That at least has the advantage that we can keep our current boilers.
I never saw how it could be green to make us dump our gas boilers long before they have worn out, given the amount of energy it would take to replace them with Heat pumps.
The energy policy priority I am urging is to secure the construction of some more electricity capacity before thinking of new ways to use more electrical power directly, or indirectly via hydrogen. Producing green hydrogen will take a lot of renewable power.
I am also pressing to make
COP 26 about China, Germany and other large producers of
CO2 to catch up with the closures and changes the UK has already pushed through in the name of net zero.