Passenger Transport Networks

Passenger Transport Networks

49 Stonegate

YORK

YO1 8AW

01904 611187 /

19 March 2012

The Rt Hon Justine Greening MP

Secretary of State for Transport

Dear Secretary of State

A proposition arising from the Command Paper Reforming our Railways

You will, I imagine, be aware that there is a widespread view that the railway should be reunified and preferably renationalised[1]. You have chosen to pursue a different course, and insofar as you are averse to another organisational upheaval I am inclined to agree – having experienced too many in my 50-year association with the railway. However, your proposals are the fourth attempt to make the privatised structure work[2], and if it is to succeed where earlier attempts failed it needs measures with real force. You have outlined some, but I do not think they will be sufficient.

It seems to me that a principal reason for the loss of public confidence is that a sense of a national network no longer exists[3]. That is what needs to be rebuilt.

People experience a fragmented system in which each franchised company often appears to have no concern for the railway as a whole. This is evidenced, for example, in poor timetabling of connections between services[4], the apparently casual breaking of connections[5], expensive fares where more than one operator is involved[6] and the almost total absence of marketing of the network[7].

These things irritate travellers, however good individual services may be, and they lose potential custom. Moreover, unless attended to, they will undermine your admirable vision of creating a railway that will attract many more people to transfer from cars to trains[8].

The process of timetabling is divided between your Department, the Office of Rail Regulation, Network Rail and the train operators[9]. Almost everyone familiar with railways as a system recognises that this dispersal of responsibility leads to inefficient utilisation of capacity[10], needlessly slow timings[11], mediocre connectivity, lost opportunities for growth[12] and deficiencies in the planning of infrastructure enhancements[13].

In my judgment the Command Paper does not adequately address these matters. You plan to allow franchise holders more freedom to alter services. However, this measure may prove illusory because you intend (rightly) to protect the wider public interest[14] and because on most lines the fixed paths of other operators will impose constraints. Moreover, if franchisees attempt to degrade regular-interval services in the name of marginal economies they will encounter opposition, since it is generally understood that such patterns are an essential element of the competitive offer against the flexibility of the private car[15].

Other aspects of the timetabling issue have surfaced in recent months. Sir Roy McNulty considered it in the context of the need for a more devolved Network Rail to retain a central ‘Systems’ function that would include timetable construction. That acknowledged the benefits of a single ‘guiding mind’ if priorities in a congested network are to be established through proper analysis and coherent decision-making. Network Rail has endorsed this view[16].

Similarly, and in some cases counter-intuitively, several respondents to ORR’s consultation on the potential for increased on-rail competition rejected that suggestion on the grounds that it would probably lead to underutilisation of capacity. They went on to defend regular services and to present the idea of some form of centrally-planned timetable, by implication with services delivered under a concession arrangement[17].

Some critics of the HS2 plans emphasised the importance of achieving substantial improvements in speed and frequency on many non-London routes in order to increase the currently very low modal share held by rail, and in deciding to proceed with HS2 you have promised that investment elsewhere in the network will not be jeopardised. A more rational planning framework will help achieve that.

And finally there is the point I alluded to earlier about current perceptions. You applaud the marketing of spare seats, but the downside is that in the leisure market the companies appear to be stimulating trips that would not otherwise be made more effectively than they are attracting trips from cars. There is little evidence of a fundamental shift in attitudes toward rail being the mode of first choice for a wide range of journeys[18]. And that may be primarily due to want of a strongly branded and comprehensive national network which has been designed with a clear specification of standards. Such networks are commonplace in mainland Europe[19].

Here therefore is my proposition. Benchmarking is a valuable tool. I would like your Department to undertake a comparative study of practice elsewhere in Europe. In particular it should evaluate the practicality and revenue benefits of introducing to Britain the methodology of integrated timetable planning which has so successfully guided the development of the railway system in Switzerland since 1982 and which now has a horizon of 2040[20].

In parallel I believe that your Department should establish a National Timetabling Authority. This body would be charged with the construction of the timetable, in collaboration with all the interested parties and with a remit to balance all the requirements for paths (including freight) in the way best calculated to optimise the use of existing capacity and to guide its enhancement. In that way it would cut through all the anomalies and conflicts inherent in the current process and likely to be perpetuated in the absence of fresh thinking[21].

I am sure that you will give this proposition proper attention. I would of course be happy to elaborate on the argument (and I know that the Swiss Embassy in London would be pleased to facilitate helpful contacts).

This letter is addressed to you as the Minister responsible for railway policy, but because it involves the whole railway I am copying it to a number of other people, as listed below. I have also referenced and expanded my points in the attached notes.

Yours sincerely

Jonathan Tyler

A copy of this letter has been sent to:

The Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP, Minister of State for Transport

Norman Baker MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport

Mrs Louise Ellman MP, Chair of the House of Commons Transport Select Committee

Richard Price, Chief Executive of the Office of Rail Regulation

Sir David Higgins, Chief Executive of Network Rail

Michael Roberts, Chief Executive of the Association of Train Operating Companies

Anthony Smith, Chief Executive of Passenger Focus

David Middleton, Chief Executive of Transport Scotland

Geoff Inskip, Chair of the Passenger Transport Executive Group

Peter Hendy, Commissioner of Transport for London

And on a personal basis to a number of people in the railway industry whom I know to be concerned about the issues I address.

NOTES

[1] It is frequently expressed in newspaper columns, in on-line comments, in everyday exchanges and from time to time in formal opinion polls. One example was the vehemence of the reaction to proposals in the railway section of the Red Tape Challenge.

[2] The Railways Act 1993, the Transport Act 2000, the Railways Act 2005 and the new Command Paper Reforming our Railways : Putting the Customer First [Department for Transport (March 2012). Cm 8313].

[3] Obviously people will be little concerned about a national network for many local journeys. I am here discussing the substantial number of longer journeys that do involve more than one company, either as overlapping providers or for successive stages of the journey – and even more the travel that is not undertaken by rail because people find the system confusing and sometimes impenetrable.

[4] The national timetable is littered with disorganised connections. This is a direct consequence of the way it is planned (see also endnote 9), the absence of any authority with a clear responsibility for seeking good connectivity and the fact that connectivity barely registers on the agenda of each individual company (for perhaps understandable reasons as far as each is concerned). The way in which journey-planners work conceals the problem, and quirks in their algorithms can lead to absurd results. I have a dossier of examples.

[5] Operators now rarely hold their trains for late-running trains of other operators. On some occasions this is legitimate in the overall interest of the system, but on others it is done solely in order to protect performance targets. That is a perverse incentive at the customer’s expense. Broken connections involving last trains are particularly concerning, since passengers are transferred to taxis when they have paid to travel by train and operators face large taxi bills. There are signs of so great a loss of faith in connections that people are either not choosing rail or are being forced to allow unnecessary extra time for their journeys. The practice also fuels clamour for through trains, which in many cases will not be feasible or make for sensible use of capacity. The point was well made by Merseytravel in its submission to the ORR consultation on competition [see endnote 17]: “The disincentive to hold connecting services which is built into the industry's performance regime is a serious barrier to the growth of leisure travel; even regular passengers have learned to distrust any advertised connection, despite the much longer margins required between advertised connecting trains on the British network compared with other networks (standard margins Britain 5 minutes, Switzerland 2 minutes; Birmingham New Street 12 minutes, Bern HB 6 minutes, two large stations of similar size and layout).”

[6] Almost all the promotion of discounted advance tickets is directed at journeys within each company’s territory. Journey-planners do show some multi-operator discounts, but the more complicated the journey the less likely they are to be found. Canny customers can of course break their ticket purchases into sections to take advantage of each company’s offers, but this just adds to resentment at the complexity of the system (it also distorts the industry’s statistics because data on the demand between true origins and destinations is lost).

[7] There are few published maps of the whole network. Pocket timetables mostly give little information about connecting services (Virgin’s give more about the coach services they run than about the many local rail services linked to the West Coast Main Line). Some operator’s maps ignore other lines (the worst example is issued by TransPennine, purportedly to show links but these are merely described in meaningless text rather than shown graphically on the map). Given evidence of the limited public awareness of railway geography and the need to promulgate the quality of the railway offer this is difficult to defend. It is puzzling that ORR, under its duty to facilitate the making of journeys by more than one operator, has not taken action to insist on higher standards.

[8] The Command Paper summarises the commitment to the role of the railway in each market segment [¶1.7], states that the High Level Output Specification will aim to “improve rail services by enhancing the connectivity and capacity of our national rail network” [¶3.9] and emphasises its carbon-reducing strengths [¶4.84].

[9] The Department specifies requirements in detail in the Service Level Commitment for each franchise; ORR grants access rights (including those for open-access operators outside the franchise scheme) and may take decisions that delay or alter DfT specifications; Network Rail is charged with fitting all the diverse requirements together as best it can but has only limited authority to propose changes for more efficient utilisation of capacity or improved connectivity; and each company must retain staff to design its services and protect its interests, sometimes in confrontational circumstances. As the old phrase has it, this is no way to run a railway.

[10] The strength of a railway is its large capacity and its capability of speed with safety. Its weakness (compared with the separately-driven vehicles on a road) is that exploiting the strength requires the discipline of carefully relating each ‘path’ to all the other paths that may cause conflict or delay. Random independently-generated paths are unlikely to lead to the optimum mix of train-paths x train-sizes x load factors).

[11] There are two causes. One is the way in which timings are padded in order to massage performance statistics. The other is the process of sequentially letting franchises, which has the effect of locking each company’s timetable in turn so that each new timetable has to be fitted around what has gone before. This leads to sub-optimal outcomes such as the insertion of waiting time at junctions and stations. ‘Clean-sheet’ exercises starting from first principles have become rare, and desirable objectives become lost in messy compromises.

[12] Given all that is known about the attraction of fast timings (stressed of course in justification of HS2) and given the money disbursed on infrastructure works to accelerate trains or make them more reliable it is odd that so little attention is paid to securing minimum connectional times. From 2000 to 2003 the present author co-managed a project that demonstrated a significant potential gain in journeys, revenue and social benefit from introducing a coordinated timetable on the East Coast Main Line [see two papers at the European Transport Conference in Strasbourg: Tyler, J (2003). Designing a better timetable for Britain’s railway; and Wardman, M, Shires, J, Lythgoe, W and Tyler, J (2003). The benefits and demand impacts of regular train timetables; see also http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100203063442/http:/www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_science/documents/page/dft_science_033473.pdf (pp.34-35) for a summary of the project in the Future Integrated Transport Programme]. Subsequent exercises have indicated similar results, yet the 2011 timetable for the route, despite all the original aspirations and all the spin, is as deficient as ever in pattern and connectivity [for my account of the unhappy story of the recast and of developments in France, see: Modern Railways, November 2010, pp. 64-69].

[13] Designing infrastructure projects without well-defined plans for the timetable to be worked creates the risk of wasted expenditure or operational constraints or both. The costly rebuilding of Ashford International has never been matched by the number of Eurostar trains that call there. Granting planning permission for the huge London Gateway container terminal without thinking ahead about what needs doing to accommodate many additional freight trains was rather strange. Conversely, an ill-considered commitment to run a regular Lincoln > London service was made without a proper assessment of timetabling feasibility, and when it had to be abandoned it was found that the signalling at Newark Northgate prevents good connections being made instead. It may be hoped that the new working arrangements between Network Rail zones and the train operators will prevent the worst consequences of the division of responsibility, but a radical change of culture and process is called for.