Railway strategy is heading for the sidings

I concede that it would be disingenuous to describe the events of the past two years as a “perturbation”, but I am somewhat taken aback that after years of soul searching, reports and strategising about how we will manage the growth in use of public transport that we are now in full handbrake-turn mode and looking to ‘make savings’ and ‘reduce services’.

Headlines are popping up such as ‘Rail employers and unions agree to talks over £2bn of cuts and job losses’, ‘Rail industry is seeking thousands of redundancies across Great Britain after falls in passengers due to Covid’ and ‘Train operators have been told to find ways to cut hundreds of millions of pounds from railway operating costs next year’.

Only two years ago Network Rail was claiming that rail travel had doubled in the past twenty years and the government set aside £500m to reverse many of the Beeching cuts made 50 years ago which reduced the rail network by a third.

One interesting piece of research regarding the Beeching cuts by economists at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE shows why. The 20% of places most exposed to rail cuts between 1950 and 1980s (some of which occurred before the Beeching report) have seen 24 percentage points less population growth than the 20% least exposed. There has also been a brain drain of young and skilled workers, and an ageing of the population. To every action there is a reaction.

OUR VIABILITY IS REDUCED BY PRIVATE CAR USAGE So why should this industry be concerned about what is happening to rail? Well, because our prosperity is directly linked to modal shift. Fewer services and certainly lessreliable services on the rails pushes people to travel by car. Car drivers don’t need cabs. It is almost as linear as that.

Improved public transport increases the realisable market that is available to the cab industry. It wasn’t long ago that I used to write about billions spent on roads and millions spent on public transport to evidence my view of governments’ (all of them) seriousness in stimulating modal shift.

Two years ago, we appeared to be entering a golden period of public transport being taken seriously and at last some strategic thinking starting to appear. I don’t want to be disingenuous so let’s be moderate here – as soon as the upward trend flattened and then went into reverse, the money appeared to dry up. The agenda has quickly changed and we are now spending our energy on savings, redundancies and cutbacks. Quickly reversing any concept of building up capacity and with it greening up travel.

NO CRYSTAL BALLS Dealing with the here and now has obvious disadvantages when increasing capacity is a long-term project. No one can guarantee that in the years to come we will see the rail travel records of 2018 and 2019 being broken but we do know many things that don’t need a crystal ball. People have always and likely will always travel (Read Niblett and Beuret’s book – ‘Why travel?’) so capacity will be needed.

Reversing the Beeching cuts was a good policy based on the idea that if you don’t have a station near where you live but you do have a car, you are more likely to complete your journey in your car – so build back the stations.

Travel will recover due to a number of tangible and intangible reasons; road pricing, safety, environmental considerations, comfort, convenience and cost. During this period, in effect a pause for breath, isn’t it the time to build out capacity, to eradicate bottlenecks, to link services and reduce journey times?

While it is hard to justify trains full of fresh air trundling around the countryside, it does not seem hard to justify delivering projects that will increase capacity at a time when the least number of people will be adversely impacted.

DR BEECHING – MUCH MALIGNED Dr Beeching has been judged harshly and I would argue unfairly by history. He carried out his master’s bidding, albeit forlornly. Fundamentally The Beeching Report was an attempt to save money. It paved the way for an exodus from rail to private car and the billions that were needed to provide the road space for that shift. So the whole project savings were dubious at best.

In this century, we face very different challenges, most notably the need to live cleaner lives and be less impactful on the environment. Even relatively modest commuter trains(6 carriages) carry around 1,300 passengers. That’s a lot of cars off of the road. Many of them will take a cab or two at the other end of their journey. Who says rail doesn’t matter?

Dr Michael Galvin

www.mobilityservices limited.com