Steve Chambers

There are new ways for the public to participate in railway planning

Public transport advocates have been calling for a railway that is more focussed on the experiences and needs of passengers. Passenger rail franchising is on the way out, but the details of how the replacement system might engage with passengers is unclear. For an organisation the size of the national railway network, is this even possible? And if it is, what would it look like?

Under the franchise system a consultation exercise took place when franchises were renewed or redrawn every couple of years. This was more of a stakeholder consultation than an exercise in understanding passenger desires, although organisations like Passenger Focus would often inform the debate with insights they had gathered from railway users.

In this regime the main feedback passengers gave to operators was by voting with the their feet. The growth in passenger demand, the journeys they made and the types of tickets they purchased formed the basis for understanding passenger need. But an approach like this lost a lot of detail about how passengers felt about their journeys. Of more concern, that approach erased experiences of, for example, blind or partially sighted passengers.

Some franchises sought to fill this gap by holding regular passenger panel focus groups. I participated in one of these for a time and it was held in good faith with a high degree of transparency. The flow of information went more in one direction than the other. Although feedback was actively sought, it was more an exercise in informing.

An argument against increased public participation in transport governance is that people will not come forward or will only come from particular groups, still leaving out the insights of people who have been excluded from participating in the past. This is quite simply a cop out. One of the basic rules of engagement and consultation is ‘go where the people are’. If a group you are interested in hearing from aren’t going to your focus group then find another way to engage, be it online, in person at stations, through social media or over the telephone. Get creative!

I’m concerned the change in governance from franchising might reduce the opportunities for public participation. We need to know what is proposed to replace the existing measures that, although lacking, were guaranteed by the franchise process and agreements.

The need for public engagement in the railway has never been greater. As the country recovers from the Coronavirus pandemic we might find ourselves with a transport network people are still nervous about using. We will only find a way to help these passengers back on the railway if we understand their needs and fears.

We have to recognise passenger flows have most likely changed forever. Through engagement with passengers we can learn how the need for mobility has altered. Moving from a rush-hour focussed transit network to more distributed demand is an opportunity for the railway. But we’ll need to understand the needs of passengers in order to adjust ticketing, stopping patterns and service levels.

A good starting point for engagement is to ask questions without being afraid of the answers. Too often in the past the way consultations are framed is with limited choices or a preferred answer in mind. And the conversation must include people who do not use the railway. This is more important that ever as traffic levels recover and exceed pre-COVID levels but railway patronage does not. The new and existing barriers to using the railway need to be understood.

To get the level of engagement needed to really understand the needs of passengers and get the best results you have to put more power in their hands. Having a hand in designing services is a far more compelling proposition than forming part of a focus group. This might sound like unworkable nonsense, but the railway already engages some communities at this kind of level through community rail partnerships.

The challenge for a reforming railway is, for consultation purposes, to divide the network up into small enough routes or areas so a relationship can form with passengers. It would be a mistake to make a centralised body responsible for passenger engagement unless it was adequately resourced to have local points of contact.

If this was done right, with passengers helping to produce the services themselves, we would not end up with long distance trains with uncomfortably hard seats or cycle storage that is woefully inadequate. We’d also discover passenger insights that right now we just don’t know about.

There is a lot of good practice in community engagement and enablement out there. It really is time for transport planning to become braver. This will only come from it being properly resourced with real power in the hands of people. Who do you trust more to make decisions? The centralised power of the Department for Transport or passengers working with operators?

---

This piece originally appeared in Rail Professional

Planning new homes around rail transport is not working

Working for Transport for New Homes, I co-authored the Garden Villages and Garden Towns: Visions and Reality report with Jenny Raggett. Transport for New Homes is a project of the Foundation for Integrated Transport that seeks to understand why new homes are being built around car dependence and not walking, cycling and public transport.

The report looks at the transport provision for new housing developments in England promoted as garden towns and garden villages. This distinction is an important one, as ‘garden community’ status is only given if a proposal meets government criteria set out in the Garden Community Prospectus. It also means that government funding can be unlocked to provide vital infrastructure, including rail transport.

Overwhelmingly we found the transport infrastructure unlocked by this status was major roads. We found very little on walking, cycling or public transport. Aspirations for mass rapid transit and other sustainable transport infrastructure was present in the visions and proposals, but the funding to make it happen just wasn’t there.

We believe the 20 garden towns and villages we looked at could create up to 200,000 car dependent households. In total more than fifty developments have now secured garden town or garden village status.

A number of visions for garden villages and garden towns touted better rail or mentioned that there was a small station nearby that could be made into a transport hub. Others wanted a station opened. A new light rail link was even suggested to provide for mass transit for a large garden development some miles from Reading.

Developers know that rail is very popular with potential residents of new homes. However, planning applications showed that developers and local authorities found the procedure for getting a new station or existing one approved that they kicked the plans into the long grass.

Another problem we found was that land offered up for development by landowners was too far from a station nearby. We found some were near or adjacent to operational railway lines, but are proposed too far from existing stations to make them useful for new residents.

Even those we found with a station were typically on the outskirts so the development could not be planned around a central railway hub. This meant that many homes were too far from the station to make walking to it a viable option. With the absence of safe cycle routes and a street layout that hindered direct utility walking we came to the conclusion the opportunity has been missed to design out car dependence in these new communities.

The situation was also disappointing for developments proposed near freight lines or former railway corridors that could be reopened. Despite all the talk of Reverse Beeching, we found that little progress had been made in providing new rail services to the new housing that was proposed.

Our research into the funding reinforced this. The Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) is meant to unlock new housing by providing missing infrastructure. We discovered the transport portion of approximately £1bn is being spent almost exclusively on new road buildings in the form of motorway junctions, bypasses and ring toads. Outside London, we found the entire rail spend from the HIF was used on a single station in Chelmsford.

The focus for our research was outside London, but we observed that in the capital something was happening to make rail and housing connect together. Examples of rail-led development are the perhaps well-known Barking Riverside on the new London Overground extension and the newer development at Beam Park being built around a new station on the Fenchurch Street line. In both cases the central location of the station is being exploited to create a vibrant centre with a square and mix of amenities, well integrated into the development.

The density of London means that rail spend will always come out better in a cost benefit analysis than elsewhere in England, but something more than that was happening here. The presence of Transport for London (TfL), an all-purpose transport authority with rail operation experience is missing elsewhere in the country and this clearly helped these rail developments along.

The governance of TfL is the Mayor of London, who is also land owner of these sites and the strategic planning authority of Greater London. This meant that these sites benefited from the secret sauce of the same entity being multiple actors in the development process. Quite simply there was the practical ability as well as the will to ensure housing was planned around and with railway infrastructure and services.

Back to outside London, we think the tentative attempts to get railway stations built has meant the new developments are completely out of sync with the timescales of railway planning. This has a cost because the new residents will become car dependent from day one of occupation of their new homes. It is difficult to attract rail commuters if the railway station is merely a speculative dot on a promotional map.

We also found an apparent lack of understanding of railway operation on the part of development promoters. The aspirations for new stations on lines that are already at capacity is unrealistic, especially for a new station serving a settlement of just a few thousand homes. Elsewhere the homes are being built on or near rural lines with very low frequencies or not on the route to the nearest major employment centre and will therefore have limited appeal for commuters.

The Government prospectus for garden towns and garden villages talks about new developments being transformative for communities. The only way this is going to happen for rail is if new or reopened lines, stations and services are planned very early in the development process and are in sync with railway infrastructure planning. Crucially, the money for these projects must be available from the outset. If the government was really committed to decarbonising transport we’d see every new housing development built around rail.

---

This piece originally appeared in Rail Professional

Like being back in the early days of smartphone apps

Transport for London has released TfL Go, a new journey planning app, to the Apple App Store. Android users must wait until Autumn. If this has an early days of smartphone apps feel about it, that is because this is the first journey planning app the organisation has released.

Misguidedly until now, TfL adopted a policy of allowing third parties to develop apps with free access to their timetable and train running data through an API connection.

This is how popular app Citymapper came into existence. Users of that app might look at the TfL offering in horror with the lacklustre user interface and paucity of features. Android users won’t be able to use the app at all for now.

TfL has clearly rushed this app into existence, but make no mistake this is a strategic move for the organisation.

I became aware of the limitations of the third-party model TfL had adopted when working at Living Streets and Campaign for Better Transport. Citymapper and other developers had little incentive to do things like prioritise active travel in their apps, especially if they hoped to monetise with tie-ins to shared mobility providers like Uber. Citymapper even started operating their own services in competition with TfL.

Tech companies are not good at partnership working and even worse at corporate social responsibility. I found the companies I approached quite simply had no interest in optimising their apps for public benefit such as improved health outcomes.

I came to the conclusion that either TfL and other transit operators must create their own app or pay the third-party developers to optimise to make improvements of public good, like having active travel displayed prominently within journey planning results. Essentially compete with Uber for advertising.

An alternative option would see TfL charge for access to the API, but there was little to suggest this would be attractive to developers. Furthermore, the most popular journey planner Citymapper has failed to find a sustainable model for its operations, so it is perhaps unsurprising that TfL has decided to start producing an app.

It might be quite jarring to see a mature organisation like TfL produce what is clearly an early iteration of an app, with many expected features missing. However, we have been given an indication of why it is right for the public authority to develop these apps. Accessibility has been identified as an early inclusion in the feature set. There was little to encourage third party apps to optimise for a subset of passengers in this way.

The sky is the limit for TfL now it has an app. We could see all sorts of novel improvements such as rewards for active travel journeys completed instead of by car or turn by turn walking directions with advisories about steps, elevations and other obstacles.

Journey planning also gives TfL complimentary data to what they collect from their fares and ticketing systems. It means they will not only know how passengers get from station A to station B, but where their destinations and origins are and what options they considered and discarded for that trip. This will help improve services and could help plan new ones.

We’re going to have to be patient with TfL as they make up for lost time, but the benefits to Londoners could be considerable in the fullness of time.

The new public body for active travel has a lot of potential

On 28 July 2020 the UK Government announced the creation of Active Travel England, a funding body for walking and cycling provision in England and also an inspectorate of the work of highways authorities. This formed part of the Gear Change: A bold vision for cycling and walking plans set out the same day.

The document endorses our findings. It notes that “developments often do little or nothing meaningful to enable cycling and walking. Sometimes they make cycling and walking provision worse”, and includes the welcome statement that “we expect sustainable transport issues to be considered from the earliest stages of plan-making and development proposals, so that opportunities to promote cycling and walking are pursued”.

Transport for New Homes welcomes the creation of Active Travel England to put these ambitions into practice, and in particular the powers it will have over the planning of new homes. It will be vital if the government is to release the potential of walking and cycling to achieve their transport decarbonisation plan.

We’ve been acting as an active travel inspectorate of sorts ourselves for the past few years with our many site visits to new housing developments. We’ve learned a lot from what we’ve found and have some tips about how to do things right.

---

The new body will be a statutory consultee for new developments over an as-yet unspecified volume of homes. Very large single applications are rare. When we looked at the garden village proposals we saw applications in the low thousands. And in the larger garden towns the area is divided into smaller developer areas, each with their own applications. The threshold needs to be set low enough to capture enough applications.

There is also the question of resources. The organisation has many functions and will need to be properly funded to deal with the volume of work anticipated. We’ll have some sense of how serious intentions are when the new National Cycling and Walking Commissioner is announced. They’ll need to be a true active travel advocate prepared to fight for the money and people required to do the job right.

Responding properly to planning applications takes time and expertise. The organisation will need to be properly funded and have the right skills to fulfil its town planning and transport planning role. The task of reviewing every highway authority annually is a substantial undertaking. Reviewing planning applications, as we’ve found, can eat up a lot of time.

There is concern about the weight Active Travel England consultee responses will be given. The planning authorities cannot ignore the rules of planning no matter what a consultee says. Planning rules are getting more light touch, with an expectation of further deregulation on the way. It would be a shame to set up an effectively powerless new body.

That said, the greatest power of Active Travel England could be its grant giving. We know from our recent report Garden Towns and Garden Villages: Visions and Reality that the number one thing holding up good active travel provision in new housing isn’t the planning system or stakeholder will. It is money. If Active Travel England can step in at the planning stage to fund active travel in new developments it could be transformative.

The plans for Active Travel England suggest it will have £2billion to give on walking and cycling grants. This sounds a lot, but will soon get used up. If you divide by the number of highways authorities it isn’t very much per area at all. The plans talk about further funding being available down the line. It would be transformative if some of that money was committed to new housing developments.

Perhaps one of the more interesting roles of Active Travel England is the envisaged role as a centre of excellence, providing both technical advice and expertise on stakeholder management. These are appropriate but resource heavy undertakings that will require a number of skilled practitioners within and perhaps outside Active Travel England. We’re available if they need a hand!

---

This piece originally appeared in the Transport for New Homes blog

High speed rail is an uncontroversial reality in much of the world

London is the terminus of a high-speed train service to Paris. The only time I have really been emphatically reminded of this is when visitors from the USA remark how wonderful it is to be able to visit the capital of another nation by train in a little over two hours. In America high-speed rail is located on a left/right culture war that means development is slow and proposals get cut back to the point of being useless. Opponents of high-speed rail in Texas have even tried to argue that a new railway plan is not a railway at all.

---

It is regrettable that the United Kingdom finds itself in seemingly similar but perhaps more confounding situation with respect to high-speed rail. But first of all, it is worth considering where there is consensus. The development of a national high-speed rail backbone for the UK was always going to take more than a single parliament to complete.

---

Rightly one parliament cannot bind another, so HS2 was conceived as a project built on cross-party political consensus. Once agreed, it has become a test of whether this country can do big infrastructure. By way of comparison, Crossrail is still not complete in 2020 and was featured in the Abercrombie Plan.

---

But not everyone is agreed high-speed rail is a good thing. One reason for this is the benefits of rail improvements are hard to communicate and even harder to imagine. The Thameslink Programme, for example, made busy stations more pleasant, journeys faster and increased frequencies. It can be hard to sum this up in catchy way that passengers understand.

---

Capacity is a popular catch-all for improvement. But people don’t really get to understand what increased capacity looks like until they use the service after the works are complete.

---

Hardly a new idea in railway marketing, but perhaps an effective one, is the use of headline journey times. ‘Norwich in 90 and Ipswich in 60’ was used to explain service improvements on the Great Eastern Main Line. This is a clear benefit that passengers can understand. It was perhaps a mistake, however, to focus on time benefits for new UK high-speed rail services. Focussing on time savings alone suggests that this is the main, perhaps only, benefit of the new railway.

---

Which brings us back to capacity, because that is in fact the main benefit, indeed reason, for developing a new north to south high-speed line. In the example of the Thameslink Programme the felt passenger benefits were innovations like being able to board a train at all at Kentish Town in the morning and at Elephant and Castle in the evening. It might seem underwhelming to make promises of this sort, but being able to board a train to get home instead of waiting for the next one is a big deal to passengers. HS2 has the potential to radically improve many commuter journeys around London, Birmingham and Manchester.

---

The anniversary of HS1 caused me to reflect on the benefits of that line. The Victoria-Orpington local service doubled in frequency overnight. I don’t remember that being explained as a benefit of high-speed rail, but it should have been. The challenge is communicating the benefit of HS2 comes in identifying all these kinds of local improvements. Be they in frequency, headline journey time improvements or by identifying particular journeys that will be transformed.

---

Realistically work on communicating the benefits of rail improvements will only get so far with the public. As much as it pains me to say it, they just don’t care that much about trains. Railways are a means to mobility for most passengers. However, something has gone very wrong somewhere if environmental groups believe a railway is not an environmental solution. It should not be difficult to find common ground in a climate emergency.

---

Somehow the United Kingdom has found itself in a similar situation to Texas, with the new railway conceived as not a railway at all. According to some campaigners it possesses none of the usual benefits associated with a railway at all. This is clearly nonsense but means high-speed rail finds itself with opposition, which focuses on counterintuitive arguments about the environment.

---

All campaigning is built around the desire to make things better, or at least not make things worse. In my work as a built environment campaigner I encounter two types of group, those that want to stop something from happening and those that want to see positive change occur. Typically, people don’t want a new noisy and polluting new road built near their homes, but do want to see improved local rail services and have mixed feelings about new supermarkets depending on the brand proposed.

---

So how has the new railway HS2 gathered a small group of vocal opponents? In think there are several reasons for this and none of them are new in campaigning terms. The first is the scale of the project makes it easier to attack as a whole. This is the reason road schemes are often promoted in smaller sections, to make it hard for an opposing coalition to form.

---

Another is that in a plan like HS2 many of the key benefits are not felt locally, which is why the regional improvements are more important to explain. Finally, there is the long timeframe for delivery, which makes it really hard for people to imagine themselves using and benefiting from the service at all.

---

What binds the apathy and opposition together is an inability to imagine a better future. High speed rail is an uncontroversial reality in many countries around the world. We even have some of it in England linking London with Paris, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting.

---

Perhaps Britain’s historic position as a leader in railway development now holds the country back. Whereas railway technology was once proudly exported around the world, now we are confronted with the dissonance of playing catch up. But putting off high speed rail for a generation won’t salve the discomfort of having fallen behind in the world.

---

The new high-speed railway line is being built in the here and now. It is a somewhat delayed achievement of political consensus building and technological ability. The challenge is to situate it in the proud history of railway development and the new aspirations for the kind of country the United Kingdom should become.

---

This piece originally appeared in Rail Professional.

New measures fail to solve their problems

Despite other people having misgivings about it, I was keen to see e-scooters regulated in England. I thought it was important to settle the matter of where they should be used. The road or the pavement? Despite being illegal on either they have been growing in popularity over the last year and used freely on both.

---

The Government has somehow managed to find itself in the unforgivable position of regulating them without settling this matter at all. Privately owned e-scooters are still effectively banned on the pavement and in the carriageway. Only shared mobility e-scooters will be allowed.

---

From 4 July the Government will put in place a framework to allow companies to offer shared mobility e-scooter schemes within a number of licensed local authority areas as part of an initial trial. Privately owned e-scooters are all still banned.

---

Even with the continued ban, the Government has given us some indication of how private e-scooters might be allowed on our streets at some point in the future. For that we can look at how the shared mobility schemes are being regulated. For the shared mobility e-scooters users must hold a full or provisional driving license, they cannot ride them on the pavement and they are limited to 15.5mph.

---

But what of the 50,000 people who bought an e-scooter in 2019? Are they going to leave them at home? Or hire from a company? Of course, they will continue to use their own e-scooter and the problem of their illegal use has not been fixed. Just as riding on the pavement is banned so is in the carriageway. There is little incentive to keep off the pavement.

---

And hire schemes will also make inroads into pavement space. If they are not properly regulated the e-scooters can be abandoned anywhere, blocking the way for pedestrians. Privately owned e-scooters are far more likely to be safely stored at home.

---

Safety is a big concern for e-scooters. The new government advice says wear a helmet but does not enforce it. Without going into the arguments about the efficacy of helmets, it is unlikely that someone hiring an e-scooter on impulse will be carrying a helmet. Private owners of e-scooters have even less incentive to comply.

---

It is mind boggling that government have managed to bring in measures that solve none of the problems e-scooters represent. Instead they have given more of our pavement over to private profit. Existing e-scooter riders will continue to break the law and will have no incentive to comply with the new rules because they do not apply to them.

We can be better

The virus pandemic has created new threats and opportunities but also put on hold some important work, including our response to climate change. Before the crisis I began exploring ways to make my environmental activism more inclusive.

From years of work as a campaigner I’d noticed that mainstream environmental activism was visibly white and the discourse it was having often referred to costs of environmental pollution and climate change falling disproportionately amongst BAME communities. But often these conversations sound as if people of colour were not there in the room with us. The reason for this I fear is because they often are not. An example is air pollution in London which affects the poorest and most diverse neighbourhoods more than the others. Repeatedly, and I know I’ve been guilty of this, we’ve failed to amplify the voices of those affected and instead refer to people as if they have no voice.

The Black Lives Matter protests brought all this back to the foreground of my thinking.

A mistake, to my mind, of environmental campaigning and its attempts to become more diverse, has been to tentatively invite black and minority ethnic people into the world of paid campaigning. I say tentatively as barriers to entry remain and the burden of potentially being the only person of colour within an organisation is draining and offputting. Far more work needs to be done to identify, connect with and include campaigners of colour.

But environmental activism has demonstrated it is capable of being inclusive. So much work has been done on gender balance and I’m constantly inspired by the high calabre of women in this sector who now occupy senior roles. This shows we are capable of being better and there is no excuse not to be for people of colour. And before anyone reads this the wrong way, I’m not saying there are no people of colour in mainstream environmental activism. What I’m saying is back when I had a desk to go to when I’d look up and around almost all the people I saw were white. You can’t claim to speak for people you do not include.

As I’ve found in other contexts, when you do not create spaces that are inclusive, the people you claim to want to include will organise without you and have their conversations elsewhere.

Last year I was introduced to The Advocacy Academy, a fellowship organisation for young people in Brixton. I’d hoped I might be able to offer the group some help and guidance on environmental activism. I was naïve and when I found out more about their work I saw that they really didn’t need my help. What I found were bright young activists already acutely aware of the environmental and transport inequality they were living with and taking compelling actions on their own.

I came away from meeting this group inspired and with new ideas in mind. How does mainstream (by which I really mean white) environmental activism connect with, celebrate and find synergy with powerful groups like this? And there will be other groups, I have no doubt about that. Because we incorrectly imagine that people of colour are not campaigning on environmental issues when they do not come forward to join white folks. But the truth is they have created their own spaces where they are unburdened by the limitations of white activism.

Reacting to the virus has diverted me from this, but now I’m ready to make my activism more inclusive and respectful of the work that happens in spaces I’m not part of.

What will emerge in response to COVID-19 is still uncertain and up for grabs

Rail franchising in Great Britain ended on 23rd March 2020 when Grant Shapps confirmed that the train operating company franchises would become direct management contracts. Although a response to a crisis, we have been moving towards this moment for some time and we are highly unlikely to go back.

---

Back in 1996 franchising was a radical departure from what had gone before it. After incremental reform over the years and through successive governments it has become unrecognisable from the original plan. Now it is certain to change further. But change is far more likely to be led by circumstances rather than a new radical and rational settlement, as was assumed would happen after the Williams Rail Review. What is decided in crisis could leave a long legacy.

---

The introduction of rail franchising was a relatively rare thing in British politics, a radical policy change, deliberated over time, and a significant departure from what had gone before. When it comes to policy, the United Kingdom is more used to disjointed incremental policy changes. Muddling through, as it is also known, is what has characterised rail policy for the last few years. Tinkering with franchise lengths, network geographies and other technicalities. Although you could argue that is exactly how it was intended to operate.

---

I once heard a spirited defence of franchising from a senior civil servant. It went something along the lines of how the rail industry is lucky to have built into the system the regular thorough reassessment of customer need, the opportunity to specify a new standard of service and put these out to tender. Although I have some sympathy for this view, I do wonder if there is another way to replicate these benefits of innovation in a business model that does not require, for example, the name and branding of train services to be changed every couple of years for no good reason.

---

Recently the Department for Transport seems to have fallen out of love with the franchising tendering process, instead we’ve seen direct awards to existing operators such as Southeastern and franchises such as Northern Trains taken back in house.

---

The COVID-19 crisis has forced the issue of reform. With significantly reduced passenger numbers combined with the need to keep the network running for keyworkers the franchising model no longer works. On 23rd March 2020 the franchises became direct management contracts with the revenue risks taken over by the state. In theory things will return to the status quo antebellum at a future date, but the idea of anything going back to normal is far from certain.

---

Judging from what has gone before we are very likely to see further muddling through in rail policy. If we are not careful this could become the new settlement. But it will have been devised away from the light of scrutiny and negotiation and instead made in the heat of crisis. What should a new system, devised at a difficult time, look like?

---

There are three things the Department for Transport can do to get through the crisis and come out the other end with a better system than before. They are devolving decision making to empower city regions, moving to a concession model of operation and fixing some of the worst problems of franchising.

---

Rail policy decision making is currently heavily centralised in the Department for Transport, right down to the type of padding on train seats. In order to release central capacity, the first change should be to devolve decision making for commuter networks to cities and regions. There is the not insignificant matter of rail geography and administrative geography rarely being aligned, but this can be fixed with a pragmatic approach to devolution. The model to do this on is already there in the successful concession model of London Overground.

---

The crisis robs us of the opportunity to have another radical reform of rail operation. The 1996 reform was years in the making with significant precursor changes happening under British Rail. This is not possible in the current circumstances as we have the pressing matter of operations needing to be put on a sustainable footing. The opportunity is there to convert the management contracts into concession model operations. There could be some quick and popular wins for passengers if this approach was followed.

---

The mess that has been made of smartcard ticketing could be corrected in an instant. The variously branded smartcards of each operator could be replaced with a single smartcard. They all use the same underlying ITSO technology, but journeys between franchise areas are often not permitted. On some networks only certain tickets are available and not the full range. One of the great legacies of the post-British Rail system was the continuation of an all-network integrated ticketing system into the privatisation era. But when smartcards were introduced this principle was broken. It is a failure of franchising and could be fixed immediately.

---

Which brings us on to the other review that has been sitting on a shelf in the DfT, the review of ticketing. This is a complex issue and worthy of separate dissection. But the opportunity now exists to impose a new settlement on operators. Grant Shapps should not shy away from this. One way to reduce his burden would be to give cities and regions control over fares policies in their areas, retaining only long distance and intercity. This would be consistent with devolving strategic rail governance.

---

With a recession on the horizon we now face the prospect of passenger numbers taking years to return to pre-crisis levels. It is too early to tell if we’ll see shifts to working from home and reduced all-week commuting. The end of franchising shows us that private operators are not prepared or able to absorb the risk of the unexpected. We now have the need and the opportunity to recast the system anew, decentralising governance where appropriate, fixing some of the worst problems of franchising, and retaining a role for private operators at least for now.

---

Change is likely to be of the muddling through kind rather than the radical and we should ensure it happens in the light of scrutiny for the benefit of passengers.

---

This piece originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Rail Professional.

When social distancing is not possible

The government two metre social distancing guidance is impossible to follow on public transport. Within a day of people returning to work this became apparent from images circulating on Twitter. In a city the size of London rationing of transit is the only way of ensuring anything close to compliance with the government guidelines. But I don’t think we’ll see rationaing any time soon, because it is difficult to implement, would be unpopular and will cause new problems.

---

There are three main ways transit could be rationed. They are price, delay and eligibility. Or a combination of these three. Government is already rationing very crudely by keeping workers who can work from home where they are. In theory the only workers on the transit network are those who cannot work from home and cannot complete the journey through active travel or by car.

---

Price is already used as a means to ration the Underground when it is at capacity. A peak journey costs more than off-peak, especially when coming in from the outer zones. We could adjust pricing to smooth out the demand. However, this might have the effect of simply impoverishing lower paid workers who have no choice when to travel.

---

We’d also have to revisit the concessions programme which discounts fares for the young and the elderly. These would not be popular moves. But is it really fair to discount the economically inactive and punishment price keyworkers at this time? No. It isn’t. And is unlikely to result in much change in demand anyway.

---

Delay has more potential as a rationing device, but is also far from perfect. Put simply we make people queue to get on the bus or train. This would require members of staff at busy bus stops to police it. I would not want the job of telling someone the bus is full. We’ve already seen transport workers spat at, who then went on to die of COVID-19.

---

Underground stations are used to demand management. But in normal times they simply close the ticket barriers and wait for the congestion at the station to pass. Ticket halls are no longer places where people can safely congregate, and the queues will need to be moved outside with staff to police them. Also leaving them open to abuse.

---

Most crucially for delay it is a crude method of controlling overcrowding within the train carriages. It would be quite a complex operation to anticipate more crowded trains coming down the line and prevent people reaching them. Queues are only really good for controlling station congestion.

---

Rationing by delay in this way also treats all transit users equally, but that could see a doctor or nurse wait much longer to access transport than somebody who just fancies a ride.

---

Which brings us on to the final method, eligibility. This would see journeys rationed by purpose. The keyworker would be treated differently to the person who just fancies a ride to another part of town. But to do this there would need to be some technology involved. Many travellers already have their Oyster card or contactless bank card linked to a Transport for London website account. This could be used to ration access to transit.

---

The problem, for Transport for London, is they will most likely not want to get into the business of assessing eligibility. It is not a completely unknown process for them. They already do this for concessionary passes, but things like age and student status is fairly clear cut. How do you define ‘keyworker’? How do you establish that the employer requires the employee at their workplace? It is a process that would be very difficult to administer.

---

And then once you have all this data, what do you do with it? Capacity will be lower than demand, so how do you decide who travels, and when?

---

Rationing by eligibility would be the only way to ensure social distancing on the Underground, but it will be difficult to implement, the results will be unpopular and who knows what new problems will spring up.