• Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

Passenger Rail Usage Q4 2017/18

Status
Not open for further replies.
Starmill

Starmill

Veteran Member
Joined
18 May 2012
Messages
23,392
Location
Bolton
I am surprised there is no discussion of this already but having hunted high and low for it there doesn't seem to be anything so I thought I'd start a new thread.

PDF at orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/28013/passenger-rail-usage-2017-18-q4.pdf

Key point is a 9.2% fall in journeys made on 'season tickets'.

One key thing to bear in mind here is that a 7 Day Travelcard on Oyster would have been counted as a Season Ticket, but Weekly Capping on Contactless is often now the same price and is not counted as a season.

For the first time in nearly a decade, the total number of franchised rail passenger journeys in Great Britain fell slightly. Passenger revenue continued to grow at 2.3%, a historically low rate.

Franchised long-distance journeys are at a record high of 145 million a year which is still growing.
 
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

Z

zoneking

Member
Joined
3 Jul 2009
Messages
269
Dare I say it - this could be good news, if it means that fares come down, including season ticket fares. Disastrous figures for SWR, the strikes should be called off. These figures don't take into account the new timetable fiasco, so expect to see them lower still. The business model of ever increasing fares needs to change - the customers are not buying it.
 
yorksrob

yorksrob

Veteran Member
Joined
6 Aug 2009
Messages
39,011
Location
Yorks
Yes. The Government policy of pushing fares ever higher in order to rebalance the proportion of costs paid by the taxpayer and farepayers towards farepayers has clearly run its course and needs to be changed.

Perhaps the fact that seasons are in decline will mean less stress on the railway at peak times when additional capacity is harder to come by.
 
SamYeager

SamYeager

Member
Joined
20 Mar 2014
Messages
339
Whilst one swallow doesn't make a summer I wonder how long it will be before DfT starts floating the idea of cutting back on any (expensive) plans to relieve capacity issues? Somewhat ironic that the largest growth in passengers kilometres was at VTEC. :)

I have to laugh at those hoping for fare decreases. A freeze or lower than usual increase is the best that can be hoped for IMHO.
 
Gareth Marston

Gareth Marston

Established Member
Joined
26 Jun 2010
Messages
6,231
Location
Newtown Montgomeryshire
I've been waiting for this. The first part of March we lost about half a weeks revenue becusse of the snow yet we ended up roughly the same compared with Q4 16/17. Half a weeks revenue is roughly 4% of a quarter so it wiped out our growth.

Replicate that around UK and factor it in then the quarter wasn't that bad except @ GTR & SWR.
 
D

daccer

Member
Joined
11 Feb 2009
Messages
371
Possible silver linings in these numbers;

income from passengers is still up so Govt will be happy!
Drop in season tickets suggests less peak time commuting in SE which is an area that suffers from capacity constraints anyway.
Increases in other ticket type sales suggest yield management is working to fill spare capacity (esp advances).
If there is latent demand that is being choked off the 1000,s of new carriages coming into service should allow for growth to restart plus sparks effect (if real).
Maybe its all b**s and we just reached a plateau.
 
W

WatcherZero

Established Member
Joined
25 Feb 2010
Messages
10,272
Regional was up by 1.4% and Long Distance by 1.9% while LSE was down by 1.3%, factor in the snow, strikes and its not bad.
 
B

Bertie the bus

Established Member
Joined
15 Aug 2014
Messages
2,791
WatcherZero said:
Regional was up by 1.4% and Long Distance by 1.9% while LSE was down by 1.3%, factor in the snow, strikes and its not bad.
Click to expand...
There were strikes last year so there isn't anything to factor in. You are also quoting the annual figures. It's only the last two quarters where numbers have really started to fall and some of the falls this quarter are dramatic. Bad weather definitely doesn't account for it.
 
T

The Planner

Veteran Member
Joined
15 Apr 2008
Messages
15,963
They should try and split it out on days of the week, would be interesting to see the drop off on a Friday as working from home must be on the rise there.
 
deltic

deltic

Established Member
Joined
8 Feb 2010
Messages
3,224
The Planner said:
They should try and split it out on days of the week, would be interesting to see the drop off on a Friday as working from home must be on the rise there.
Click to expand...
Yes there is a concern that Crossrail 2 is now needed only to address a Tuesday morning peak problem. A slight exaggeration but certainly changing working patterns is starting to have major implications for future schemes.
 
yorksrob

yorksrob

Veteran Member
Joined
6 Aug 2009
Messages
39,011
Location
Yorks
Perhaps this change will encourage a move away from the mega projects and towards more incremental improvements, such as longer trains, extensions to the network and the increase in the day for passenger operations. The things the public actually wants.
 
7

700007

Established Member
Joined
6 May 2017
Messages
1,195
Location
Near a bunch of sheds that aren't 66s.
South Western Railway has seen less passengers due to strike, adverse weather and on some routes a consistently poorer service than previously. These passengers have either seeker alternative operators (such as Southern) that usually offer cheaper (albeit slower) fares. It is also worth noting that National Express is making a killing in their business with the highest ever profits recorded for the last financial year, and they offer dirt cheap prices to places like Southampton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and Poole.

Also another factor I think that could have impacted passenger revenue is since South West Trains left, is the lack of sales or special offers and also that Megatrain for obvious reasons, as a Stagecoach company, was discontinued on the South Western franchise network. Megatrain used to offer very cheap tickets, sometimes as low as £1.
 
Gareth Marston

Gareth Marston

Established Member
Joined
26 Jun 2010
Messages
6,231
Location
Newtown Montgomeryshire
The Planner said:
They should try and split it out on days of the week, would be interesting to see the drop off on a Friday as working from home must be on the rise there.
Click to expand...

The general assertion that everybody is now starting to work from home or remotely is unproven. There are 3 TOC's primarily seeing decline all of which have a very large identifiable factor at play. Other TOC's even in the South East are seeing growth. As I said at Newtown the snow disruption we estimate cost us 4% of the quarters figures. London TOC's were also effected by it - if we hadn't had the "beast form the east" the overall figure would have been growth even across London & SE albeit not at rates seen in previous years.

Whether there's shifts occurring within the overall mix of what type/when people travel is the interesting question. We know GTR & Northerns Q1 figures will be trashed by the timetable fiasco but SWR should be "back to normal". That will be the key set of figures to look at next release.
 
Gareth Marston

Gareth Marston

Established Member
Joined
26 Jun 2010
Messages
6,231
Location
Newtown Montgomeryshire
yorksrob said:
Perhaps this change will encourage a move away from the mega projects and towards more incremental improvements, such as longer trains, extensions to the network and the increase in the day for passenger operations. The things the public actually wants.
Click to expand...

Its was all very much George Osborne behind the drive to go for big Infrastructure projects - he thought it would stimulate the economy and help chums in construction.
 
A

absolutelymilk

Established Member
Joined
18 Jul 2015
Messages
1,243
Also a minor issue but Easter was slightly earlier this year, meaning Easter Friday was in Q4 2017/18 rather than Q1 2018/19. If travel on this day was reduced by nearly half, that's about a 0.5% reduction in the quarter without any snow impact.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Top