The key messages regarding transport, namely "essential travel only" and "private good, public bad", will have to continue for much of 2021. It will take years to reverse this trend as these messages will have become ingrained. A return to public transport use is only likely to occur where there are incentives to use it, namely for long distance inter-city journeys and in urban areas where there is road congestion. Therefore, in addition to cutting excess peak frequencies, cuts should be focussed on lightly used branch lines and secondary routes in rural areas, which is why I suggested that the DfT could consider retrieving the Serpell report and reconsidering it. Cutting routes in Scotland and Wales in particular, even if unpopular, is unlikely to lose many seats for the Tories.
The problem is that it wouldn't take much of an increase in traffic to highlight how bad an idea using the private car is.
However, even if overall use stays low if you're not going into work very much the cost of each mile you travel increases significantly. Many costs (such as insurance, a service, MOT, VED) are fixed regardless of if you do 1 mile or 10,000 miles (OK servicing can increase above that but then will be fixed until the next threshold), even purchase costs are broadly fixed (the cost of a 1 year old car with 10,000 miles on the clock isn't double that of one with 20,000 miles).
As such if you work one day a week driving 15 miles each way rather than 5 days a week, your annual milage falls by 5,400 miles, but your cost savings wouldn't fall to 2/6ths, rather they're likely to fall to 4/6ths, but that means your milage costs have doubled.
It's where those with one car will likely to carry on justifying the ownership of that car, however those with more than one car may well reduce the number of cars. However in doing so it could result in then using rail for some of their other travel.
Having said that, there maybe a few who then decide (probably over time) that it would make sense not to own a car at all, which may then decide to use rail for their travel to work.
You need the economy to rediscover reasons to travel - commuting to a location that’s not your home to work, travel to have face to face contact with others, to have an experience (culture, entertainment, etc).
You can maintain frequencies and cut prices. But if London and the south east are in pseudo Tier 4 until June 2021, then people won’t return. So thats next years income blown like this. By then the short term need to save money on everything but infrastructure will be the mantra. That will see jobs cut in rail occupations and budgets.
A friend who works in Canary Wharf has moved to Norwich from the Essex suburbs. Only needing now to go in to the office once or twice a week. He plans to drive rather than sit on a train. Not sure I understand why he sees that as a better option, but it is an attitude and response I have heard from others.
I'd have thought that the parking and congestion charges would be quite significant on such a journey.
You bet. Plenty of people will have experienced the great British weather. This is (partly) what killed off the domestic tourism market in the first place. Only die-hards (like me!) do UK holidays.
A lot of people would have been forced to stay in the UK this year and with a fairly good summer it could remind people of how the UK can be nice.
If course, of there's still requirements to wear masks on aircraft that'd going to put people off. Likewise with fewer flights available, there's a good chance that overseas holidays could be more expensive. That's before there's any rules (such as requiring Covid-19 tests and/or needing to have had the vaccine) which impact on the attractiveness of travelling.
The DfT could dig out the Serpell report and implement it.
Other than rail use has grown by a significant amount since then.
Since privatisation is doubled (so from 100 to 200) so a 20% fall in use would bring us back to a level still much higher than at privatisation (so from 200 down to 160).
I think Ian Walmsley said the most sensible thing that I think the DFT may have reminded the treasury. They need to look very long into the future, probably 2022, as to where rail travel will be and how many people will be expected to travel. As Ian says if you stop services on a line completely, it does not take very long for the line to fall into disrepair. How much would it then cost to get the line operational again to a sufficiently good standard to get passengers traveling again? The costs of running a service with very few passengers may be cheaper than closing it to then payout to repair it in the future plus crew retraining etc etc. One thing the rail industry does need to do is take this opportunity to make trains more comfortable. Get rid of ironing board seats etc and get trains to a good standard.
Indeed. The largest falls are likely to be seen on the very busy lines into London and may see almost none on those quiet branch lines which would transitionally be at risk of closure.
The key thing to me is that vital regional services which already have services of one train an hour or less, should not see reductions. Reductions should be made on routes with frequent services, but for which the justification for that frequency has fallen away.
Going to twice an hour on Manchester/Birmingham - London is an example where this is sensible. Thinning out some Thameslink core frequency might be another.
Indeed see above.
