APPENDIX 15
Memorandum submitted by Mr Simon Norton
To my mind the rail network has two vital functions
to perform:
(a) To provide reasonably priced and affordable
travel for people without access to cars.
(b) To provide competitive travel for people
who do have access to cars so as to reduce the burden of congestion
and pollution on the roads.
At present neither of these goals is being adequately
fulfilled.
The worst problems are probably those relating
to early morning trains out of London on Mondays to Fridays. Similar
problems, albeit to a lesser degree, affect other parts of the
country.
As early morning trains out of London are against
the peak flow, capacity problems are rare. Yet there are relatively
few destinations to which day returns or Saver tickets are valid,
and none to which one can use Network Railcards. The tickets one
can use, Standard Open tickets, are prohibitively expensive.
The result of this is to encourage people who
have access to cars to brave—and thereby contribute to—the
peak-time traffic jams on the roads. Essentially the only people
who are likely to use trains at these times are season ticket
holders (who get sufficient discount on the standard fares to
make the journey competitive in price) and those who can charge
the cost of their journey to an expense account.
For people without access to cars, the only
recourse is to postpone the start of their trip until the end
of the so-called peak period. But in many cases this will essentially
destroy the purpose of their trip in that by the time they reach
their destination they will no longer have time for a full day
out. This may be for one of the following reasons:
(a) Early darkness—this applies especially
during the winter when we use GMT. Darkness can strike at 5pm
or earlier, even in the south of England. To give an illustration,
during the Christmas-New Year period in 2004-05 (when many people
take holidays thus reducing still further crowding pressure on
trains), I made a day trip to the South Downs using the first
available off-peak train from Kings Cross Thameslink (the most
convenient railhead for where I was staying in London). Yet darkness
struck before I finished my intended walk, so I had to leave the
South Downs Way and walk about 2 miles on a minor but (at least
during the evening peak) heavily trafficked road. The bus stop
I reached was on a route for which I hadn't prepared myself by
picking up a timetable, and there was no timetable displayed at
the bus stop, so I just had to wait and hope that a bus turned
up without too much delay.
(b) Connections with buses—many rural
bus routes are infrequent and can't be used at all if one doesn't
get to the railhead early enough.
(c) Inability to get home after the trip.
Londoners may have a round the clock bus service but those living
in many smaller towns (and even cities) in the surrounding region
certainly don't.
Nor is weekend travel always a solution. Many
rural bus routes don't run at weekends; trains often start very
late; and engineering work may considerably extend journey times.
All these problems primarily affect Sunday travel but may affect
Saturdays as well.
There are also many cases where even Saver tickets
are too expensive. Fitting four people in a car is usually cheaper
than going by train, even though a car with four people causes
as much congestion and pollution as a single occupancy car. Only
when the party contains a child do family railcards offer a possible
solution to this problem.
The Inter-City train operators have touted advance
booking fares as a solution to this problem, and their efficacy
is included in the terms of reference of this inquiry. However,
there are many journeys for which they are completely unsuitable.
For example, there are weather dependent trips
(especially day trips). If one is doing a trip which requires
a country walk, the enjoyment of the trip is completely spoilt
if it's raining heavily. (Parenthetically, if one is induced by
the fare system to pre-book a non-refundable ticket with the intention
of writing off the trip if heavy rain is forecast, then the seat
which one's booked is unavailable to other rail passengers.)
Another problem is estimating journey times.
Even if one has already worked out one's itinerary it can be difficult
to estimate accurately how long one needs to visit a particular
tourist attraction or to do a particular country walk. These days
with internet timetables it is generally possible to plan an itinerary
involving rural buses, but this involves more research than I
would expect the average person to be willing to undertake. And
it is unfair to expect people to sustain a heavy financial loss
if a given connection fails to materialise (for one thing, internet
timetables aren't always accurate) or to include excessive amounts
of slack in their schedules to allow for contingencies.
A third problem is the need to allow sufficient
time for postal delivery of tickets where one is unable to make
one's booking at a staffed rail station.
There are other ways in which the advance booking
system is not very user friendly. When I book an air ticket I
normally have a "hold" option which enables me to confirm
any plans contingent on acceptance of a given schedule before
committing myself. In the USA Amtrak also offers this option for
rail travel, but in my experience, UK rail operators don't—they
require immediate payment for a ticket.
Another effect of this is that those who book
over the Internet have to divulge their credit card numbers over
the Internet, with consequent security problems.
An unrelated issue is that while Inter-City
train operators may offer very good value tickets for journeys
using only their own trains, the savings often evaporate for those
who require connecting trains. As an example, during the first
half of 2005 (which is the period for which I have the relevant
fares manual available), the cheapest return fare from London
to Leeds was £19 (Standard Class Off Peak), as compared with
a Saver fare of 68-90. The SCOP fares are set at three levels
which are strictly quota limited, so that one is likely to end
up paying significantly more than £19 (I don't know exactly
how much the other two levels are). By contrast, for Cambridge
to Leeds the corresponding fares are £29 and 55-40, so if
one can't get the cheapest fare the saving is likely to be much
less. The Saver fares are roughly distance related—Cambridge
is about 30 miles nearer to Leeds by rail than London—but
the SCOP fares clearly aren't. I may add that Cambridge is only
16 miles from the route from London to Leeds—but trains
don't stop at the relevant stations (Huntingdon or St Neots),
so it doesn't help to reach these stations by bus and continue
by train.
Let me conclude this letter by making a list
of recommendations. Most but not all of them relate to points
which I have discussed above.
1. Train operators should be required to
make day return and Saver tickets, with railcard discounts where
appropriate, available on all trains which don't have an overcrowding
problem. They should also be required to make special efforts
to ensure that passengers have an early morning option (ie before
the peak starts), or, in appropriate cases, to procure a bus service
linking principal stations on the relevant route on which rail
tickets, including day returns and Savers, would be accepted.
2. A National Railcard should be introduced
as soon as possible. A few years ago I think it was the Transport
Committee who came up with this recommendation. What has happened
to it? I believe that the best way to implement this would be
to offer a range of regional railcards (including the current
Network Railcard) for about £20, covering overlapping regions
of Britain, together with a national railcard which would cost
about £100. The national railcard would give a discount of
34% on all walk-on tickets for all trains except those which had
a proven overcrowding problem, plus all buses that run as part
of the rail network.
3. The National Routeing Guide should be
redesigned. I would recommend that this be done by a consultant
with a track record of concern for passenger needs, such as Barry
Doe (columnist in Rail magazine and author of the web-based "Doe's
Directory of Bus & Rail Timetables, Websites and Enquiry Offices"
(http://www.barrydoe.co.uk). Among the requirements should be
the inclusion of rail link buses as part of the rail network for
ticketing purposes, so that one could, for example, travel from
Cambridge to Penrith on a Saver ticket out via Leeds and back
by bus from Milton Keynes (several years ago I actually made this
journey and discovered that I could have got home an hour and
a half earlier if I had been able to do this).
4. There should be discussion about the
desirability of new kinds of ticket. One example which I would
like to see would be a through ticket covering a return rail journey
from London (or other station) to the countryside plus unlimited
bus travel within one's target area, possibly with return from
a different railhead on a different route. I would hope that this
would help to regenerate the rural bus network in areas such as
the Home Counties.
5. We should combine with our European partners
to offer cheaper and more easily available through ticketing between
Britain and Continental Europe. With a simple zonal system such
as that currently in operation for journeys to Ireland (and described
by Barry Doe in Rail magazine issue 519 August 3-16), it should
be possible for any staffed ticket office to issue a ticket to
anywhere in Continental Europe. For this type of journey, improving
the availability and competitivity of rail tickets would impact
more on air travel than on road travel, but the former causes
at least as much pollution per distance travelled.
6. Whether or not Network Rail can in normal
circumstances confirm final timetables 12 weeks in advance, situations
are bound to arise when this is impractical. (For example, this
would apply to any journey involving the Chiltern Railways network
following the recent Gerrards Cross tunnel collapse.) So there
should be provision so that, when exact timetables are unavailable
for whatever reason, train operators would accept bookings for
given journeys on the basis of "first departure from station
X after time Y" or "last arrival at station X before
time Y", for which they would use provisional advance timetables.
If they had difficulty allocating enough seats when the final
timings are available, then they would solve this problem by upgrading
some of their pre-booked tickets to Savers at no extra cost to
the relevant passenger.
7. Train operators should be required to
publish their normal quotas for advance booking tickets for each
timetabled train (which would help people to make preliminary
plans before they got round to making an actual booking).
8. Train operators should be required to
provide a "hold" option which would give passengers
a limited period to confirm a provisional booking before being
required to make a final payment. When they made a provisional
booking, they would be given a booking reference (as I believe
happens now). They could then confirm this booking, quoting the
booking reference and their credit card number, either through
the Internet, by telephone or at a staffed station. (It should
be possible to automate the confirmation of bookings by push button
telephones, which would reduce the cost to the operator.)
9. All advance booking fares should be independent
of the method of booking.
10. The transport finance system should
be reorganised to incorporate multi-modal corridor partnerships
which would include cheaper fares for rail passengers on a given
corridor, extra seats on trains (where necessary), and the abandonment
or scaling down of schemes aimed at increasing road capacity on
the same corridor. This may or may not work out cheaper for the
Treasury, but I am sure that it would offer a net benefit to society
when the following were factored in:
(a) Cost savings to existing rail passengers.
(b) The pollution costs of extra road traffic.
(c) The congestion costs of extra road traffic
in areas other than the site of the putative road capacity increase.
Train operators would be required to participate
in such schemes on a "revenue neutral" basis, ie that
they would be subsidised only for the difference between the loss
of fares from existing rail passengers and what they would get
from new ones. Furthermore, rail capacity improvements would be
expected to form part of such partnership agreements. It is completely
counter-productive to expect longer trains to be financed by higher
fares from passengers rather than increased passenger volume!
11. The regulation of fares should not be
on the basis that some fares are "regulated" whereas
others—which seem to be a large majority of those actually
used by people other than season ticket holders—are "unregulated".
Rather the regulation should be on the basis of the whole "basket"
of walk-on fares not incorporating premium products (such as first
class travel). There should be a target that every year rail fares
should become more competitive by at least 1% as against motoring
costs.
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