Memorandum from CTC (TPT 38)
The CTC has since 1878 provided a voice for
cyclists in shaping transport policy and provision, and today
represents some 70,000 members and affiliates mostly based in
the UK. The use of the bicycle as transport, and its value as
a complementary mode to public transport are key areas in which
CTC and its members press for recognition and implementation of
policy and projects. The nature of cycling as a self-propelled
mode of transport, means that for longer distances it is regularly
combined with public transport to provide a flexible personal
transport solution, delivering a door-to-door journey by filling
the "gaps" between stopping points of public transport
services to unite a coherent and complete trip with minimal time
lost waiting for onward travel.
We wish to provide evidence relating to the
Committee's questions 1 and 2—Integrated ticketing:
1. Is ticketing sufficiently integrated across
different modes of transport and between different geographical
areas?
2. Does the Government have an adequate strategy
for developing the integration of ticketing systems?
Journeys integrating cycling with rail, bus,
coach, ferry, and air travel have a variety of purposes. Some
take place daily as part of a regular commuting trip, and others
to take passengers with their cycles to a location for a cycling
holiday. All such travellers seek a guarantee that the journey
they planned to make will be delivered, and in many cases penalties
of missed connections to onward travel, late arrival for appointments,
or even simply a tiresome wait without a certainty of the service
on which they will travel will place a value to the cyclist of
making a reservation for a place for their cycle, in exactly the
same way that they would reserve a seat, or a sleeper berth. Thus
for many the ability to get a reservation and ticket for their
cycle, which guarantees the journey as planned is a vital part
of booking a ticket. When passengers with cycles often top 10%
of the total passenger count on a train, and 50% of the passengers
on a rural bus service, the need to accommodate them in the ticketing
system—if only to garner knowledge of the actual use, is
an important way to understand and support the delivery of effective
intermodal integration.
As highlighted to the Committee Inquiry on Access
to Transport for Disabled Persons, there is a further aspect to
cycle use—that of being a mobility aid. Cycles can provide
independent personal mobility to those who are prevented from
holding a driving licence for various reasons, and it can also
deliver pain-free mobility for those who cannot walk a great distance
with a greater range and flexibility than a wheelchair, noting
that some wheelchair users also use specialist tricycles which
can be used over longer distances and rougher terrain, but obviously
are bespoke to their users, and not appropriate for inter-urban
travel, where use of trains and buses may be appropriate.
AIR
Much of the feedback on this will be duplicated
by the response to the Committee's Inquiry into Passengers' Experience
of Air Travel. Sufficient possibly to note here that there is
immense variation in the information provided and service delivered
for passengers wishing to travel with a cycle. Many of the budget
airlines have charges greater than the passenger fare for carrying
a cycle, but will not guarantee which flight they will carry the
cycle on. One group wishing to travel with Flybe from Southampton
to Shannon were to be charged £12 per bike per flight but
advised that they might have to wait from the first flight of
the day until the last with no guarantee of all getting taken
on to the same flight—they decided to spend their money
on a ferry trip to France and support local hotels & restaurants
in Brittany rather than Galway. The ability to book online with
a guarantee that your appearance with a cycle is expected is a
feature of the easyJet website which gets praised widely by both
individuals and tour organisers, but few others will offer a proper
reservation.
COACH
Many parts of the UK cannot be reached by rail
and thus for all but the most dogged and fit cyclists who will
cycle where they cannot get to by train, there are alternatives
in using other forms of public transport or increasing the volume
of private car traffic, The latter especially ironic where this
is to scenic destinations. The coach can provide a suitable means
for travelling over long distances and roads, where traffic conditions
may be unpleasant or potentially hazardous, and in some cases
this may be the only direct route available.
National Express provide what for most potential
passengers is the sole source of long distance coach travel, in
England and Wales, and Scottish Citylink mirrors this in Scotland.
CTC has worked with both companies and a number of the less well
known independent operators, and major groups providing less well
known services (eg Oxford-Cambridge, Exeter-Okehampton-Bude) often
filling in where former rail lines have been severed.
National Express conditions are generally accepted
as a base-line where cycles which are folded or packed down and
contained in a purpose-made bag or case will be carried "if
space is available" This is clearly an unsatisfactory position,
as the passenger's ticket is normally booked to travel on a specified
service, and the assurance that their cycle is carried depends
entirely on the judgement of the driver. We have seen one regular
user denied his holiday of a lifetime when the packed bike was
refused from the coach conveying him to the airport, and another
suffering DVT and almost dying (in the same month as another passenger
actually died after her trip) through a very unsatisfactory performance
in accepting his bike on a journey from Cardiff to London. Tourism,
and access to parts of the UK not served by rail, for those not
able to simply drive themselves and their bikes to the area, and
to this end the provision of ticketing guarantees to carry the
bicycle, with provision that it is if necessary prepared to be
loaded as luggage are something we believe will make it possible
for many to avoid the need to use cars to get around with their
cycles.
Regional Express coach services tend to be more
flexible, with less use of underfloor hold space, and we understand
that some services are carrying as many as 8 bikes to popular
areas, and not require the cycles to be packed—appropriate
given the shorter duration of the journey. Ticketing which assures
the user and makes the carrier aware of the traffic are needed.
National Express, like Virgin Trainline have
a small inertia surcharge—travel insurance for 99p (£1)
on the fares being deducted—the purchaser has to be aware
of this to avoid paying a cumulative charge on their tickets (charge
for each ticket sold).
FERRY
The big problems reported for this mode of travel
in ticketing are generally related to a discriminatory regime
for on-line booking of tickets. Several operators fail to show
a category for booking cycles—Stena especially fails to
have this for their UK services, whilst the same on-line booking
template has a category for cycles on their Scandinavian routes.
The irony is compounded by the fact that the main service which
fails to have a cycle category for on-line booking is Harwich
to Hoek van Holland which is an important sea-bridge on the North
Sea Cycle Route.
Even with the online facility, many operators
set the bicycle up as a vehicle, and this category can only be
booked as one unit per booking, making it necessary to make separate
online bookings for each member of a family or small group, making
it very difficult to secure a cabin for the party to travel together.
Several operators do not make it clear that passengers with cycles
attract a higher fare than foot passengers, or alternatively that
cyclists SHOULD book as foot passengers, and then notify the operator
that they will be bringing bikes. One such failing lost P&O
around £800-worth of business and disappointed a group who
had been taking the annual autumn fares offer for the previous
8 years. Whilst the Committee has stated that they will not be
considering fares we feel that here, more than for air travel,
the disparity of paying as much as the passenger fare—occasionally
more—to carry a bike onto a ferry where it is often not
afforded any special or space consuming accommodation, and has
no weight penalty (as it may do on an aircraft) is a point to
be recorded.
BUS
A vast potential to place almost every household
in the UK within easy reach of an hourly daytime bus service exists
by exploiting the option of getting the passenger to the bus rather
than the costly exercise of getting the bus to the passenger with
an attractive frequency of service and direct, fast journeys.
There are a few bike carrying service bus routes, but almost no
measures to monitor the take-up of cycle carriage—or to
guarantee journeys. For frequent services, and with the typical
length of a local bus route there is less need to travel on a
specific journey, but for longer rural routes with arduous gradients
etc an assured journey perhaps with pre-booking will be more important.
The position with buses has yet to mature and develop in the respects
considered.
One detail of bus ticket purchase is that no
longer is the fare stages matrix and tariff on display when you
board a bus, and unlike a shop of restaurant you are frequently
unable to see a display of the fare being charged This makes the
idea of a bike fare a high fraud risk as passengers might not
spot their passenger ticket being rung in as a bike.
RAIL
Possibly the main area from which we get feedback
from the cycling community, and primarily because there is serious
discrimination against passengers who want tio take a bike on
a train, and avail themselves of the full range of ticketing services.
Up to September 2004, the Trainline provided the facility to book
a cycle reservation when you booked your seat and travel ticket.
This was—with great protest withdrawn and we were promised
a return of the facility in December 2004. The total collapse
of the booking system had a major impact on the ability to reliably
travel with a cycle, with delegates to an international conference
in Dublin unable to make bookings just days before they were due
to travel. We note with a degree of ire that the disappearance
of cycle reservation facilities online was accompanied by the
appearance of online car hire and hotel booking facilities on
the rail ticket booking service.
GNER working with CTC has restored a booking
service online, albeit a big fiddle—you book the tickets
on-line, 24 hours in advance, and their booking service calls
you back to discuss and confirm the reservations being made. Because
of the difficulties in making bookings CTC is very upset that
some operators try to enforce a compulsory bookings service, although
for Virgin & GNER it would appear that you can normally make
a booking immediately prior to the arrival of the train you want
to board, and communications with the train managers is good enough
to ensure you are expected and doors are opened (see later).
We have had ridiculous suggestions by call centre
staff obviously totally ignorant of UK geography. A passenger
north of Inverness was advised that he had to go to Dunbar, Berwick,
Edinburgh or Glasgow to collect tickets for a cycle reservation
for his trip—to Stirling. Passengers boarding a train at
Tenby, heading back to London, were told thay should have gone
to Swansea to make a reservation for their bikes in order to board
the train. Fortunately train staff have an ethos set in running
the railway rather than observing such crazy arrangements.
CTC believes that cycle reservations should
be treated like seat and berth reservations. If the space is available
when the train arrives then you can book it, and with on train
staff now easily linked to online facilities, booking with a phone
call shortly before a train arrives will ensure that you are expected,
told where to stand on the platform and doors are unlocked if
required.
I did witness one particularly unsavoury incident
when a passenger with a printed off confirmation of his booking,
was unable to collect his tickets (the booking office hours had
changed, and the fast ticket machine was not working). The overnight
train was initially delayed when the conductor refused to sell
the tickets the man had evidence of booking, and he agreed to
stump up considerably more on his credit card. The conductor was
very sloppy in filling out the counterfoil, and the passenger,
who worked for a bank, demanded that it was correctly filled out.
The police were called again at Motherwell and eventually the
passenger was escorted off the train and dumped in the centre
of a place he did not know at 1.00 am. The incident was witnessed
by several people in the seated coach including the son of Hounslow's
MP! As a result of this totally unwarranted abuse of a passenger
we were an hour late at Carstairs, delaying the start of engineering
work, and leaving all passengers very displeased with the staff
behaviour.
Only a threat to safety of those on or around
the train, or serious disturbance/damage will occur, should the
train not run to timetable. Poor protocol on such issues has famously
backfired on the operator—in an example of cyclists being
refused access on to trains after the London to Brighton ride
in 2004, by hired in "heavies" leading to a near riot
at Brighton when passengers with valid tickets were refused access
to catch the trains to Southampton and the West, and the initiative
of around 30 cyclists in boarding at Preston Park , safely on
a near empty train, but with the train crew refusing to move it
, blocked all services for 90 minutes—a pig headed management
attitude eliciting the passenger behaviour it deserved as a result.
RAIL—OVERCHARGING
BY INERTIA
On the Virgin Trainline and some other models
of this template some selections appear highlighted by a yellow
bar—reading the small print reveals that you have to opt
out of paying a first class upgrade rather than opting in—and
only checking the total payment being taken on a credit or debit
card. This is an undesirable side of this website, and the fare
initially "rung up" has to be the basic fare, and any
optional fare supplements such as first class upgrades and travel
insurance should—for all web-based selling, be offered purchases
as opt-in rather than opt-out.
The web based booking system also fails to have
a show every fare option, as noted elsewhere.
NEED FOR
SHOWING OF
REAL TIMETABLES—NOT
EXTRACTS SELECTED
BY THE
SYSTEM
A journey frequently undertaken is that from
Glasgow to the East Midlands and options to alight at Rugby, Coventry,
Nuneaton or even changing trains at Birmingham or Crewe, mean
that selecting a train is not a crude A to B choice but an area
generic one, in much the same way that A Glasgow to South Yorkshire
trip could use trains to Leeds, Doncaster or Sheffield and arrange
collection or taxi as appropriate to check the options without
access to Table 26 requires repeated enquiries with detail changes.
This was pointed out to the team interviewing about the NRS upgrade.
Similar problems also occur with the flow chart
design for the voice recognition system. If it misunderstands
a station name it became fixated on that name for the rest of
the call, and only by terminating the call can you try to get
the system to let you correct it. Nowhere does the voice activated
system designers seem to have thought their system is fallible,
and added in the option of saying "stop", "back"
or "operator" to get out of a loop or one stage back
in the menu.
FISH NOR
FOWL—THE
BREAK BETWEEN
BOOKING YOUR
TICKET AND
BOOKING YOUR
BIKE
Dr Bogus Zaba, a regular user of Virgin services,
always books his bike from Warrington B Q as he changes trains
en route, and in so doing benefits form being a regular customer
with staff used to carrying out the transaction, although he reports
that recently the booking process has been less smooth. His experience
on train was also soured by an incident at Preston where staff
refused to open the door and let him board with his cycle, even
with a reservation
The experience of call centres—especially
National Rail—is of staff with a geographic, and horairial
illiteracy dependent solely on what they read on screen—I
have had reports of the denial that trains run to Wick, or a service
runs from Fort William to London the latter to staff who were
due to work on the train, who strongly advised otherwise. The
inaptitude extends to being unable to book cycles, one Chesterfield
traveller booking to get to the ferry at Harwich had no success
with National Rail, Midland Main Line, and Virgin, until fortunate
enough to land with ONE's call centre in Norwich.
Gareth Griffith's experience in Solihull where
he has to travel to only two stations capable of making cycle
reservations (where is the commitment to selling any ticket from
any ticket office?) Birmingham New Street, and Birmingham International,
parallels a TV producer living in rural Warwickshire who used
to spend around £3,000/year travelling with their bike down
to Euston and enjoying a ride of under 15 minutes to the London
studios instead of a miserable and long ride on public transport.
With on-line booking he simply went to the ticket machine and
collected the full set of tickets for a fully predictable journey
sequence (like Dr Zaba knowing he can make his reservation in
the connection time at Warrington). However at New Street, the
uncertainty of queuing time to get served nudge the balance and
now £3,000 worth of business has gone to driving down the
M40.
Chris Juden, CTC Technical Officer—possibly
typical of those who used to enjoy optional use of off-peak trains—has
had, after half a century, to finally buy a car, and reckons this
is linked to the withdrawal of around £1,000/year per rider
of optional ticket sales from an increasing population of fit,
retired riders who have the flexibility to catch off-peak trains,
if only the system would accommodate them by guaranteeing their
journey itinerary.
The system also generates a huge pile of tickets—sometimes
of all shapes & sizes, one member sent in details of the 16
tickets required for a journey the length of the UK.
RAIL—FAILURE
TO OFFER
ALL RELEVANT
FARES AND
ROUTES
The template for National Rail has options for
cheapest fare and general but NOT all fares available. As examples
of how the poor algorithms and lack of easy access to timetables
as published in the printed all stations timetable (book—and
well secreted on-line pdf down-loadable pages on Network Rail
website) there are often routes and fares revealed only when the
purchaser knows how to force the system to sell them.
Example Glasgow to Leeds—absolute cheapest
fare—Virgin Value Glasgow to Carlisle and then second fare
Carlisle to Leeds via Edinburgh (7 hours!) other fares offered
(saver at approximately £70) but the low cost fare (approximately
£37) via Appleby on shortest route with shortest journey
times (but poor connections) only appears when you force a via
Appleby option.
Example Glasgow to Gatwick—Use of the
now to be dropped Cross Country services to Gatwick and Brighton
avoiding London would probably have been higher if the service
had actually been offered to enquirers—even trying simple
nudges like travel via Reading failed to break the lock-out (route
suggested was back to Paddington and cross to Victoria, despite
direct trains from Reading Plats 1-4a. For the journey—passing
through London on a weekday between 16.00 hours and 17.00 hours
with two 5-year old children, a pensioner and luggage for a 4-week
holiday was something to avoid, with a lot of testing and trying
to fool the system it eventually coughed up the journey wanted
and allowed the tickets to be booked with the seat reservations.
The algorithms are also apt to offer ridiculous
solutions. A couple returning from Wick to Wilmslow contacted
CTC over the 37 hour suggested trip with several changes of train
and long waits, when the journey could be done with just three
trains in around 12 hours, and one long wait, and train could
be cut out by cycling from Crewe to Wilmslow when the overnight
train from Inverness arrived, another couple were not advised
to use the "rival" South Western main line from Exeter
when the bad route offered from Penzance to Bournemouth—via
Bristol! was disrupted and they were left to hire a car to get
home, when a shorter journey option was to either catch trains
to get to Southampton via Salisbury or Basingstoke, or to use
their cycle to ride between stations at Yeovil, or Yeovil Junction
to Dorchester South—after all they had just ridden over
800 miles to Penzance, and would surely be up to such a short
connecting ride.
The disappearance of the All Stations printed
timetable will reduce the ability to find these options, and we
really need to have access to the ability to construct our own
travel itineraries, either by having this timetable fully downloadable,
or available for on-line access.
A WAY FORWARD—MAKE
THE LOCAL
STATION PART
OF CALL
CENTRE NETWORK
AND EXTEND
OPENING HOURS
One cycling holiday organiser, now sadly dead,
used to book all his tickets with Fort William Station, and in
doing so, a) boosted income for the station b) employed staff
during idle periods between trains—helping to keep the booking
office open and pay for staffing. He in turn got excellent service,
from staff well versed in railway geography and best fares available.
With the ability to run a single call centre
desk at any location, it would make a highly sensible move to
use the highly experienced staff at many stations who work just
a half-shift, selling tickets and providing information at a small
local station. They would be switched in to the call centre when
the demand for immediate service on the station itself had abated,
and then take call centre enquiries and ticket sales, with local
counter activity taking the next place in the call queue. There
are many wins here—call centre staff with accurate and close-up
railway knowledge, local stations with staff presence to sell
tickets and provide a facility than no CCTV system can. This might
be introduced as a pilot scheme with a couple of operators on
a couple of lines that have a large number of limited hours opening
stations, or a high community rail input, the system could than
be fine tuned and tested to establish the stations where the idea
works to best effect.
March 2007
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