Buses: the overlooked option

Certain stories tend to follow a familiar pattern. Take the yearly hike in rail fares. Yet another ticket price increase just above, or way above, inflation is announced. Government trots out the usual reasons: necessary to pay for upgrades, expanding existing fleet, cope with passenger numbers. Rail bosses corroborate this line, whilst feeling pretty chuffed at the thought of another bumper bonus on its way. Rail passenger groups respond in kind, expressing outrage: travellers being priced off the network, particularly during a severe economic downturn. BBC selects weary commuter from a busy train station in London who gives a shrug of the shoulders and probably wants to say: “same *insert a word of your choosing,* different day.”

In fact, they could all save themselves a lot of time by simply copying and pasting this story from previous years. Labour’s policy review has vowed to look again at the current structure with all options on the table, although all those hoping for renationalisation will be sorely disappointed.

It’s time to accept that the cost of rail travel will never be a priority for any party. Certainly not an election issue at any rate.

Instead we should put our energies into public transport’s less glamorous and overlooked constituent: buses. Greener Journeys is a campaign group which is working towards getting more people out of their cars and onto buses. Set up in 2009, and backed by a number of prominent bus companies, it aims to demonstrate the wider economic benefits of bus travel.

Their website reveals that over two-thirds of journeys on public transport are made on the bus. This results in about 5 billion bus journeys a year in Great Britain. Bus commuters contribute some £45 billion of economic output. One in five full time workers and 30% part time workers are frequent bus users. For 11% of workers, buses are an essential part of their lives. Without them they’d be forced to find work elsewhere. Crucially, over two-thirds of Jobseekers Allowance claimants either don’t own a car or cannot drive.

Back in March, Greener Journeys and The Daily Telegraph joined forces and co-hosted a debate looking into how investing in the bus network can help mobilise the UK workforce and economy. This came ahead of a report, “Buses and Economic Growth,” due to be published next month, commissioned by Greener Journeys, and carried out by the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds.

One of the speakers at the debate, Gillian Merron, chair of Bus Users UK, says that buses represent great value for money:

“The very reason to invest in buses is because you get such a tremendous return. For a relatively low investment, you can make a huge change. A bus network doesn’t need five to seven years to get the project off the ground – they’re ready to roll out capacity immediately to get people to work, to the shops.”  

With 40% of trips to the high street made by bus, they can play a vital role in rejuvenating our struggling town centres.

Naturally, buses aren’t immune from the spending cuts. There will be a 20% drop in the Bus Service Operators’ Grant and £54m lost used to compensate bus companies for those benefiting from concessionary fares. In evidence given to the Transport Select Committee, unions expressed their concern that cuts would have a disproportionate effect on the unemployed and cited the then Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, who once commented that:

"Social mobility and, in particular, moving people off welfare and into work, often depends on transport infrastructure. If people on isolated and deprived estates cannot get a bus or a train to the nearest city or town, they may be stranded without work and without hope."

Disabled people are also likely to be badly affected with 60% not having access to a car and using buses 20% more frequently than non disabled people.

Whilst rising train fares hog the headlines on a yearly basis, spare a thought for those bus users. It is great to see a concerted campaign under way aimed at increasing usage. And yet I return to my earlier comment on priorities. Public transport will always cede ground to the economy, health, education and crime. If investing in the rail network and widening capacity means stiffer fares, we can surely expect the same thing to happen on buses. But first this requires someone to believe they are worth investing in in the first place.


This article was first published by Shifting Grounds on Tuesday 21st August 2012

The Cost of Train Travel

We’ve got to get people off our trains and into their cars. Nobody’s exact words, but they may as well be. The rail industry, firmly backed by successive governments, seem hell bent on seeing how far they can put up fares and get away with it.

This week commuters were met with the wearingly familiar news that rail tickets will rise by an average of 8% from next January. On top of the increases from last year, and the year before, and all the years before that.

With a 60% rise in passenger numbers since privatisation, rail travel has never been more popular. This has resulted in state subsidies ballooning from a pre-privatisation high of £1.5 billion, to just over £4 billion a year since 2006, but with an assumed acceptance that it should now be the passenger who foots a greater proportion of the bill, rather than the taxpayer.

Hence, since 2007 ministers decided on a reduction in train subsidies with the passenger being asked to eventually shoulder 75% of the costs, moving away from the 50-50 split with the taxpayer, as has previously been the case.

But, according to Passenger Focus, an independent transport watchdog, ministers would be wise to avoid such an intended shift, proposed at the height of the economic boom, and coming just before the credit crunch and then recession:

“this policy was born in very different economic times. Passengers cannot be expected to continue paying above-inflation fare increases year on year.”

The same argument to justify the trebling of tuition fees can also be heard when talking about increasing rail fares: those who use the service are affluent (students are expected to earn more in their lifetime than non graduates), and in the minority (however significant a minority they may be).

Yet this view is flawed and ignores the fact a huge proportion of rail journeys are done by people commuting from the suburbs and home counties into London, partly because living in the capital has become so unaffordable. Using the car means endless traffic jams, the congestion charge, and the daily struggle to find a parking spot.

Some commuters have little choice but to take the train. So, whilst the rest of Europe gets on with expanding their high speed rail lines, reducing the need for domestic flights, and generally making peoples’ lives a lot easier, our train companies do their best to discourage travel at rush hour and make that last minute trip as expensive as possible.

All wonderfully helped by their convoluted, and quite frankly baffling, price structure, with huge peak versus off peak variations.

Beyond this, further explanations for the cost of rail travel come with the allegation a couple of years ago that the previous government put pressure on train companies hoping to secure rail franchises, to increase fares, with those who offered to lower prices losing out. Whilst in opposition, the Tories accused Labour of using

“the rail franchising process to squeeze the train operators to pay the Government higher and higher franchise payments, when ministers were fully aware that this would push fares up.”

Thus, the huge cost paid to the government to run a franchise has meant that companies have had to recoup their costs somehow, the easiest way being in the form of charging passengers more to use their service.

Passenger Focus has also found that the confusing nature of purchase tickets online has also played a part in inflated prices being paid.

In 2009, Passenger Focus, released its findings from a government commissioned report into fares and ticketing (see page 15 in particular). To nobody’s surprise, Britons paid the most of all the countries surveyed, four times more in some cases, and in particular its ‘walk up’ fares, the ones you buy at the time of travel.

Yet according to the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC):

“fares have risen at a significantly lower rate since privatisation than during the last 15 years of British Rail.”

Indeed, ATOC notes that because of the numerous types of tickets that are now available, the last 10 years has seen the average fare “consistently fallen below the headline increases in fares, as passengers have increasingly switched to buying cheaper fares, such as Advance tickets.”

This of course will resonate most with that ultra-organised traveller, who has little need for flexibility, and a desire to travel sometime between 10am-3.30pm, ideally avoiding London. Needless to say, this is not how many of us lead our lives. 

If you compare this to a country like Belgium for example, this level of planning is unnecessary. The peak and off peak ticket is unheard of. You pay the same whether you book your ticket weeks in advance, or on the day. In fact, when you buy your ticket, you are able to travel on any train you like, and sit wherever you like. If you work for the public sector, season tickets are heavily subsidised.

One of the problems is that the railways can be firmly placed in the ‘unsexy’ box when we think of all things political. Discussions about fare increases and over-crowding tend to be fleeting, provoking outrage and newspaper columns one day, but then almost as quickly forgotten about the next. They just don’t generate the level of debate that issues such as crime or immigration do.

In fact, they don’t really create much debate at all, being an issue that meets with broad support from all the main political parties, and an area where the public’s views are routinely ignored. I can’t remember an election campaign where public transport has ever been mentioned.

Our fragmented, over-priced railways, where the interests of private shareholders come before passengers, will ensure that we revisit these same arguments again soon.

Meanwhile, somebody is now paying even more for their season ticket, so that they can stand in an overcrowded train, where the windows don’t open, but where they can still get some work done, if only they manage to balance their laptop on the head of the passenger sitting below them

This article was first published by Left Foot Forward on Friday 19 August 2011