Commuting 'not coming back': Harper

[Tetchytyke]

You keep saying 'growing revenue' but that isn't relevant if you are growing costs faster.

What is interesting is that many of the cuts are not to peak-time trains, though, they are cuts to off-peak and weekend service provision. If we are starting from the point that “commuting is dead” and that the growth will come from social and non-essential travel, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive (read: stupid) to slash away at off-peak and weekend provision.

The simple truth is that with every service cut the train becomes a less tempting proposition. As above, Bradford Forster Square is losing about 40% of its services. Faced with 2tph becoming 1tph, people will move to the car, and so you end up in a cycle where revenue drops with every service cut. The net impact: no massive savings, but a useless public transport network.

It’s the same elsewhere, the Cornish Main Line losing half its trains, XC is still running 50% of its pre-Covid timetable, and so revenue is down. Even driving on the A30 and A38 is preferable to waiting two hours for an overcrowded 5-car IET. Oddly the TOCs, like LNER, who are back to a full timetable haven’t seen the same drop in revenue. It’s almost as though there’s a link between frequency and people’s desire to travel by train.

We’re rapidly heading back to the mid-80s where the cost-cutting demand from the government was so high that BR seriously considered single-tracking the Calder Valley line, and actually did single the Chiltern line north of Princes Risborough. And how much did that cost to fix?

 

[Ken H]

It is a covid argument because you and others are making statements about the value of and justification of the covid spending. Its also not particularly relevant as covid spending applied to the whole population and economy - £2bn is never trivial, but particularly not when it applies to a small corner of government spending ( its an awful lot when compared to the net government support to the railway of £7bn in 2018-19)

You keep saying 'growing revenue' but that isn't relevant if you are growing costs faster.

You need to grow revenue by:-
Getting more bums on seats on trains. Better marketing needed. But not at times when the trains are full already
Getting more revenue from existing passengers. Less generous discounts, not selling cheap advances for trains likely to be full of passengers paying higher fares
Upselling/cross selling. Encouraging people to upgrade to first class (Say what first class offers, with pix, on ticket websites). Selling them other stuff (add ons) when selling tickets - Insurance, hotels, meal vouchers, attraction/theatre tickets, branded tee-shirts etc. You could probably get a 3rd party to offer the add ons, just take a small cut.
No more trains needed. Just more revenue.

 

[Meerkat]

What is interesting is that many of the cuts are not to peak-time trains, though, they are cuts to off-peak and weekend service provision. If we are starting from the point that “commuting is dead” and that the growth will come from social and non-essential travel, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive (read: stupid) to slash away at off-peak and weekend provision.

Is that due to concentrating resources on the peak? It was always said that the off peak was done at marginal cost with stock and people who had to be there for the peak, and then sold off cheap to fill it.
I don't know where the line is in terms of 'peak is relatively expensive to price people onto off peak' or 'off peak is cheap as its there anyway so fill it'. If its more the latter but they can actually save costs then off peak fares might need to increase to pay for it.

 

[philosopher]

What is interesting is that many of the cuts are not to peak-time trains, though, they are cuts to off-peak and weekend service provision. If we are starting from the point that “commuting is dead” and that the growth will come from social and non-essential travel, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive (read: stupid) to slash away at off-peak and weekend provision.

The simple truth is that with every service cut the train becomes a less tempting proposition. As above, Bradford Forster Square is losing about 40% of its services. Faced with 2tph becoming 1tph, people will move to the car, and so you end up in a cycle where revenue drops with every service cut. The net impact: no massive savings, but a useless public transport network.

It’s the same elsewhere, the Cornish Main Line losing half its trains, XC is still running 50% of its pre-Covid timetable, and so revenue is down. Even driving on the A30 and A38 is preferable to waiting two hours for an overcrowded 5-car IET. Oddly the TOCs, like LNER, who are back to a full timetable haven’t seen the same drop in revenue. It’s almost as though there’s a link between frequency and people’s desire to travel by train.

We’re rapidly heading back to the mid-80s where the cost-cutting demand from the government was so high that BR seriously considered single-tracking the Calder Valley line, and actually did single the Chiltern line north of Princes Risborough. And how much did that cost to fix?

This is what most irritates me about the cuts. I would perfectly understand if train operators were cutting peak time services as those time periods are where numbers have recovered the least. But in general to me it seems they have been quick to restore peak time services but have cut off peak and weekend frequencies. Take Chiltern between London and Birmingham for example. The weekday peaks are largely back to 2019 frequencies, with the odd service not restored, but Saturday and Sundays are mostly only once an hour.

It almost seems as if railway operators are desperately hoping peak time commuters will return to 2019 levels while ignoring where future rail growth is likely to come from. Given the cost of commuting, commuters are unlikely to return unless told to by their employer, which is outside the railway industry control. However leisure journeys are still be made, probably on a par with 2019 levels and so are easier to win back to the railways. Restricting off-peak and Saturday frequencies just risks putting leisure passengers off due to overcrowded trains and poor frequencies.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

What is interesting is that many of the cuts are not to peak-time trains, though, they are cuts to off-peak and weekend service provision. If we are starting from the point that “commuting is dead” and that the growth will come from social and non-essential travel, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive (read: stupid) to slash away at off-peak and weekend provision.

The simple truth is that with every service cut the train becomes a less tempting proposition. As above, Bradford Forster Square is losing about 40% of its services. Faced with 2tph becoming 1tph, people will move to the car, and so you end up in a cycle where revenue drops with every service cut. The net impact: no massive savings, but a useless public transport network.

It’s the same elsewhere, the Cornish Main Line losing half its trains, XC is still running 50% of its pre-Covid timetable, and so revenue is down. Even driving on the A30 and A38 is preferable to waiting two hours for an overcrowded 5-car IET. Oddly the TOCs, like LNER, who are back to a full timetable haven’t seen the same drop in revenue. It’s almost as though there’s a link between frequency and people’s desire to travel by train.

We’re rapidly heading back to the mid-80s where the cost-cutting demand from the government was so high that BR seriously considered single-tracking the Calder Valley line, and actually did single the Chiltern line north of Princes Risborough. And how much did that cost to fix?

As @Bald Rick says above in response to my question service changes are proposed by TOCs to achieve savings in govt support costs so one would expect them to seek to maximise savings without further eroding revenue otherwise the spiral of decline will continue.

I believe part of the issue is support to the railway was already creeping up pre covid with several operators burning through parent support guarantees that would have forced them out of business like VTEC so in long run subsidies were going to rise. Collapsing all the franchises just created a cliff edge and perhaps what is needed now is a better understanding of what sort of railway the country wants/needs and how much that will cost but that will fall to Labour now as this lot wont change course.

 

[Starmill]

I'm sorry, but if it's costs are being counted towards the national railway budget, so should it's revenue. Anything else is politically motivated book cooking.

Strictly, TfL are 'on the hook' for London Overground and TfL Rail revenue and Merseytravel for Merseyrail's, and not, as with the 14 other English contracts, the DfT. If they do better than planned then TfL or Mersytravel get to decide what to spend the extra money on, if they do worse than planned TfL and Merseyrail have to make up the difference. Obviously both Merseytravel and TfL have some bridging funding in place which has been previously agreed with DfT.

 

[43066]

It is a covid argument because you and others are making statements about the value of and justification of the covid spending.

I’ve explained what the purpose of the comparison was above.

Its also not particularly relevant as covid spending applied to the whole population and economy

As does railway spending - as we have established many times railway subsidy is on average “profitable” as it leads to net economic benefits which benefit everybody, not just railway users. Each £1 spent generates something like £2 .

£2bn is never trivial, but particularly not when it applies to a small corner of government spending ( its an awful lot when compared to the net government support to the railway of £7bn in 2018-19)

£2bn is pretty trivial if you look at government spending (as noted above, it’s a mere 10% the annual ongoing cost of Covid financing). £2bn now is also less than £2bn in 2018 due to the rate of inflation.

On the other hand the cost of the disputes to the wider economy has also equalled or exceeded £2bn by some measures, and indeed the government has admitted the costs outweigh the cost of settling, yet you seemed happy enough with the government’s approach there.

You keep saying 'growing revenue' but that isn't relevant if you are growing costs faster.

You continue to simplistically view the railway as a profit and loss making business like a corner shop.

As we have seen on the relevant thread, the nature of the railway’s cost base is such that it’s difficult to make meaningful savings. By taking an axe to services to secure small short term savings you can easily end up driving passengers and revenue away which is the current government’s approach, in pursuit of some arbitrary “acceptable” level of subsidy.

Meanwhile the same government spent £5bn over the last tax year on a fuel duty cut for motorists, and duty is frozen again this year which AIUI will cost largely the same again.

The rail industry (as a whole; there are of course many exceptions) is not working very hard to win people back.

I don’t think anyone could credibly disagree with that, but unfortunately much of the blame for that lies with the government and the current agenda of budget freezes and service cuts, irrespective of demand. For example not allowing better flexibility with ticketing, cutting usable services, the IR situation on TPE etc.

If covid spending isn't relevant to this discussion, why do they keep trotting out the money they spent keeping trains running in lockdown as a justification for cuts ?

Good point! I think it’s clear that that particular poster is ideologically opposed to any form of railway subsidy, and will only ever parrot the government’s line and dogmatically argue in favour of reducing it.

 

[MikeWM]

And of course the cuts aren't just to actual timetabled services, but apply to the 'short-notice' cancellations too.

For example, the previously rather popular weekdays 1821 Stansted to Birmingham XC service is still in the timetable, but has only run four times in the last 8 weeks, ie. 10% of the time.

 

[squizzler]

the journey was reasonably agreeable. There’s only two seats on a 700 which meet that criteria for me, you can probably guess which ones, I was fortunate enough to get one.

I don't disagree that the railways can improve the customer experience, but if I could only have a "reasonably agreeable" journey on two seats in a train that must have over 500 places to sit, then to paraphrase the cliched breakup line; it's not you (the railway), its me.

There’s an awful lot of conjecture on this thread. Some facts from the last full 4 weekly financial period, which did not involve any strikes and head better weather than the comparative period in 2019 (I can’t link the source, you’ll have to trust me, and may choose not to…)

1) revenue was still below 90%
2) journeys were between 90-100%
3) yield per journey is lower, despite the fare rise of 15% compound since 2019
4) business revenue is around a third of what it was
5) commuting revenue is under 90%, but numbers under 70%, a huge yield increase due to people swapping from seasons to anytime tickets
6) leisure revenue is over 100% (but not much)
7) all of the comparisons are in absolute £

Finally, as I keep writing, the Elizabeth line is a significant factor in all this. It lifts journey numbers by 15%, but revenue only by 3%, which also suppresses yield; without the additional Elizabeth Line passengers yield would be higher than in 2019, but not higher than the fare rises would imply. The biggest market segment affected is leisure.

I t the impression that @Bald Rick is bearish about the railways prospects, but I personally think these factoids point to the railway heading in an excellent direction:

• Office workers are (finally) paying their way and perhaps enjoying a less crowded travelling environment, thus getting value for money in their (admittedly less frequent) commuter.
• Leisure travellers are getting good value, perhaps they responding to pricing signals with advance tickets. This points to people getting more savvy and bodes well for how sales will respond to the overdue fares reform which will make much more use of dynamic single leg pricing on long distance trains.

So yes we need to keep marketing train travel and crack on with fares reform.

The reduction of capacity is of course a troubling trend, but of the trains not required for current services how many are being
withdrawn or scrapped?

As things stand a Labour government after the next election is a shoe-in. Roscos will naturally want to hang onto their trains if they think rail capacity will be given more priority under a labour government, is the shadow government giving the right signals? Naturally Labour will want to avoid the situation in 1997 where they blighted private sector investment by threatening nationalisation then not doing so, but discouraging the premature scrapping of trains can only be a good thing as it will facilitate quick wins after the election.

 

[BrianW]

Indeed, prior to the pandemic the summer services on the Aire & Wharfe lines, including from Bradford FS were always the busiest especially for leisure. Talking to people who have businesses in Ilkley last summer during the pervious round of cuts, they noted that there seemed to be a marked downturn in footfall compared even with summer 2021. They suspected that a reduction in services meant that walk-up passengers might have been unaware of the cuts and found themselves with long waits ahead & subsequently changed their plans on arriving at one of the stations along the lines.

My view here is that the Bradford FS services are seen as an easy target that will hopefully fly under the radar. Northern can report to DfT that they are making cost cuts, the DfT bean-counters are somewhat appeased and the complaints from us locals are easily watered down by the time they get to Westminster. The reality is though that it feels like they are simply suppressing demand, who knows maybe purposely. Maybe they don't want a summer surge in numbers of punters looking for a nice day out in the sun making it more difficult to permanently reduce service numbers should the need arise...

OK that might be a little tin-foil hattish, but it does increasingly feel like the rail industry / DfT are allowing some parts of the network to suffer a death by a thousand cuts, when really they should be going all out to try and encourage more punters back on.

Good to have reminders that commuting is not only a London-centered thing.
I note from Hansard that the (soft/ planted??) question to which the Secretary of State was replying was from the member for Harrogate & Knaresborough.
I also note that commuting is (was?) done to many places (Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Bristol, ...) and al services deserve serious review.
Agree totally about dangers of forecasting.
Beeching made observations about the 'cost' of holiday trains standing in sidings for weeks. Bude, Padstow, etc withered ...

 

[SussexSeagull]

Admittedly the delivery of it took time but I really can't see how anyone can frame the opening of Crossrail as anything more than a complete success. It goes to show what happened when you invest in public transport and not tinker round the edges.

 

[ThameslinkUser]

On the West Coastway the Peak London services are now dead but the cuts have been made to the local services (eg Brighton to West Worthing) which has extended the journey time on Brighton To Southampton Services and resulted in overcrowding.

I’d love to know what trains you are travelling on! From the 0550 to the 0950, by Hove, it’s a usually a struggle to find a seat!

 

[Meerkat]

As does railway spending - as we have established many times railway subsidy is on average “profitable” as it leads to net economic benefits which benefit everybody, not just railway users. Each £1 spent generates something like £2 .

I don't think that has been established at all, and certainly not for marginal subsidy rather than the base system.

£2bn is pretty trivial if you look at government spending

It certainly isnt trivial in terms of railway spending, and if £2bn is knocking about you still need to justify that the railway can deliver more than Defence, Health, Social Security, Education etc etc.
Also - if you offered the railway £2bn I imagine they would suggest better things to do with it than a general service subsidy.

the government has admitted the costs outweigh the cost of settling,

Not the wider whole system costs of settling. And settling what - the initial demands of the RMT?

Back to the specific topic, if commuting revenue is not coming back are you proposing this extra £2bn pa forever?

 

[kristiang85]

People are still commuting. What's changed, on my route anyway, is that more flexibility from employers means employees travel in on the first off peak train to save costs (which is what I do, and the 10-car train this morning was absolutely rammed).

I'm not going to pay twice the price to see if the peak trains are quieter, but I think what Harper really meant is 'the days of fleecing commuters are over as they are getting more savvy and flexible'.

 

[Bantamzen]

I am more cynical, and assume that the DfT will attempt to blame WYPTE and, by extension, Tracey Brabin.

This could also be a driver sadly.

Especially as the one service that is a genuine duplication that could be removed without too much pain- the Forster Square-Leeds service- is not being cut at all.

I think the Bradford FS - Leeds services remain untouched simply because of the issues it might cause potentially having to stop the Skipton - Leeds services at Apperley Bridge & Kirkstall Forge. But in all honesty the triangles have worked fine for many years in equal service patterns, so honestly why change them. Last summer when the Bradford FS were first cut to 1tph, it fell apart quite a few times because if (for example) a service coming down from Ilkley to Bradford ran late, Northern no longer had the option of stopping it short at Shipley to start its next service onto Leeds or Skipton. As a result more services got canned and units dumped at Bradford FS, which in turn left it short of space at times. Not to mention of course for punters waiting for a canned service it meant an hour's wait for the next one. I ended up walking or catching a bus home for the last leg of my commute a fair few times thanks to a loss of flexibility as a result.

 

[47421]

as discussed earlier the issue is not really commuting, where revenue is back up at ~90%, but business travel, where revenue has flatlined at ~35%, leaving an annual revenue shortfall of over GBP1billion

 

[notverydeep]

The Elizabeth line was 1 in 6 of ALL rail journeys in the last 3 months. It is a huge factor, not to be understimated.

Being slightly pedantic, the Elizabeth line was 1 in 6 of all 'National' Rail journeys, as it was still exceeded by each of the Central, District, Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines. On the basis of numbers of journeys, London Underground exceeds the entire National Rail network, while the of course latter has many more passenger kilometres...

 

[Horizon22]

Being slightly pedantic, the Elizabeth line was 1 in 6 of all 'National' Rail journeys, as it was still exceeded by each of the Central, District, Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines. On the basis of numbers of journeys, London Underground exceeds the entire National Rail network, while the of course latter has many more passenger kilometres...

I wouldn’t consider them “rail” but “Underground” but not worth splitting hairs over.

Of course that is true although public transport is much more successful in urban, dense locations.

 

[bramling]

This is what most irritates me about the cuts. I would perfectly understand if train operators were cutting peak time services as those time periods are where numbers have recovered the least. But in general to me it seems they have been quick to restore peak time services but have cut off peak and weekend frequencies. Take Chiltern between London and Birmingham for example. The weekday peaks are largely back to 2019 frequencies, with the odd service not restored, but Saturday and Sundays are mostly only once an hour.

It almost seems as if railway operators are desperately hoping peak time commuters will return to 2019 levels while ignoring where future rail growth is likely to come from. Given the cost of commuting, commuters are unlikely to return unless told to by their employer, which is outside the railway industry control. However leisure journeys are still be made, probably on a par with 2019 levels and so are easier to win back to the railways. Restricting off-peak and Saturday frequencies just risks putting leisure passengers off due to overcrowded trains and poor frequencies.

Where is the supply of weekday leisure journeys? Allegedly most of the population are still in some form of work during the weekday midday periods, so apart from the pensioner market (which we can probably assume already use trains to at least some extent) what does that leave as low-lying fruit?

 

[Krokodil]

Or that the Elizabeth line circumstances (a metro/regional/suburban new railway through the heart of London) doesn't reflect much of the rest of the railway in the country presently. That or it's boosting the finances of TfL, not the DfT.

Yes, only Liverpool benefits from an equivalent of an RER line through the city. What that tells me though is not that we should start cutting services in other cities, we should instead be investing in better infrastructure and services to match what London has.

Yes, the DfT set each TOC a cost budget target figure and asked them for options to meet it. The DfT then have to make their choices.

Has the DfT also set revenue targets or are they fixated on the fool's errand of trying to cut their way to to profitability?

yes the less frequent service (affecting multiple operators, but especially XC up here) and the appalling reliability (particularly in respect of TPE here), when combined with sky high fares, are indeed very offputting. The rail industry (as a whole; there are of course many exceptions) is not working very hard to win people back.

It's a bit difficult when you've got both arms tied behind your back.

Is that due to concentrating resources on the peak? It was always said that the off peak was done at marginal cost with stock and people who had to be there for the peak, and then sold off cheap to fill it.

If Off Peak is done using marginal resources from the peak, then the answer to a drop in peak custom is surely to cut peak trains, which just reduces the amount of stock sitting idle in sidings between the peaks.

 

[Starmill]

Has the DfT also set revenue targets or are they fixated on the fool's errand of trying to cut their way to to profitability?

They're not trying to bring subsidy down to zero.

 

[Horizon22]

Yes, only Liverpool benefits from an equivalent of an RER line through the city. What that tells me though is not that we should start cutting services in other cities, we should instead be investing in better infrastructure and services to match what London has.

Definitely. Leeds & Manchester are high up that list although the latter does have trams at least.

 

[Ken H]

Definitely. Leeds & Manchester are high up that list although the latter does have trams at least.

Manchester was a 'nearly with Picc-Vic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picc-Vic_tunnel. Leeds had a plan for a tram tunnel 20 years earlier. That was never built either.

Picc-Vic was a proposed, and later cancelled, underground railway designed in the early 1970s with the purpose of connecting two major mainline railway termini in Manchester city centre, England. The name Picc-Vic was a contraction of the two station names, Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria. The proposal envisaged the construction of an underground rail tunnel across Manchester city centre. The scheme was abandoned in 1977 during its proposal stages due to excessive costs, and that the scheme still retained two large and expensive-to-maintain terminal stations in Manchester; other similar sized cities had reduced their terminals to one.

In 1992, the Metrolink system opened and linked both stations via tram, negating the requirement for a direct rail connection to an extent. In 2017, the Ordsall Chord became operational; an overground railway scheme directly linking Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria in a comparable fashion to Picc-Vic.[2]

 

[Krokodil]

They're not trying to bring subsidy down to zero.

That wasn't quite what I meant (though I can see that it read that way). The question was whether they were just cutting to rebalance revenue/expenditure or whether they were taking a holistic approach that remembered that you will just cut your way out of business.

Definitely. Leeds & Manchester are high up that list although the latter does have trams at least.

Suburban rail services in Manchester are particularly appalling with many stations getting only 1TPH. I've no experience of Leeds (only ever passed through there with XC or TPE).

 

[railfan99]

If I may ask you locals, is the Weekend First upgrade regarded as a success in attracting passengers who might otherwise drive, or stay at home?

If it's at least reasonably successful, is this confined to the long distance operators Avanti WC, GWR and LNER?

Does it fill seats that would otherwise be vacant?

 

[WAO]

The point made in #226 is very relevant. Commuting at 90% will be by season ticket, heavily discounted in the SE compared to peak fares. Business travel at 35% would be at peak fares, hence, perhaps, the loss of revenue and the regrettable need for cuts.

WAO

 

[Class 170101]

In terms of passengers in London @Bald Rick how many are actually new to the railways overall and how many have just switched from tube to Crossrail?

 

[Bald Rick]

If covid spending isn't relevant to this discussion, why do they keep trotting out the money they spent keeping trains running in lockdown as a justification for cuts ?

I’ve never seen that argument.

I t the impression that @Bald Rick is bearish about the railways prospects,

not at all. I’m very positive about the railway’s prospects. As long as it concentrates what it’s good at, which is moving large numbers of people or freight, or moving smaller numbers of people over long distance at high speeds.

The point made in #226 is very relevant. Commuting at 90% will be by season ticket, heavily discounted in the SE compared to peak fares. Business travel at 35% would be at peak fares, hence, perhaps, the loss of revenue and the regrettable need for cuts.

WAO

Commuting is now mostly not by season ticket. Which is why revenue is less than 90%, but passenger numbers somewhat less than 70%.

 

[yorksrob]

I’ve never seen that argument.




not at all. I’m very positive about the railway’s prospects. As long as it concentrates what it’s good at, which is moving large numbers of people or freight, or moving smaller numbers of people over long distance at high speeds.

You haven't been listening to the same announcements that I have then.

The railway needs to concentrate on delivering a decent service over the passenger network.

 

[James H]

I thought this was interesting from a recent Southeastern press release - I imagine pre-covid there was a much higher proportion of annual seasons.

Types of ticket season sold (%)

Type of Season ticket	% of total
Weekly	74.4%
Flexi	6.6%
Monthly+	17.9%
91-359 days	0.2%
Annual	0.9%
Total	100.0%

*Data above from Southeastern season ticket sales (01/03/2022 to 28/02/2023)