Bridging Passion and Pragmatism

Senior account director, Ben Blackburn, considers the National Travel Survey and the perspective it brings on how Britain moves.

Providing consultancy services to rail sector clients every day means we at Freshwater are highly aware of the importance of the rail industry for the wider value it brings to society. For example, the Rail Industry Association’s 2018 ‘economic contribution of UK rail’ report measured the economic activity directly and indirectly related to rail goods and services, and valued it at £36.4 billion (GVA). Yet this (intentionally) did not include the much wider value of rail to people and communities.

The railways move people from A to B. They link us with places of work and education and help us enjoy life-enriching leisure pursuits. They can help make us individually better off, and also grow the tax base, by helping people living in areas of low employment to access more dynamic job markets. Rail travel eases congestion, and reduces pollution, and accidents, on the roads.

Nor is there little doubt about the importance of rail in the UK’s cultural landscape. It is central to our industrial history and has been the focus of countless prime time television programmes, books and radio shows. It’s a cultural phenomenon whose enthusiasts consume an array of specialist publications across print, web and social media.

Put simply, the railways are important and people’s passion is easily comprehended. This passion appears to help influence the news agenda, too. Taking May-July as a sample, there were the better part of 1,000 rail news stories appearing in the major national print news titles alone – roughly four per cent of their overall output. Add the reams of coverage in regional and local press, trade publications, online outlets and the broadcast world, and it’s fair to say that rail is a serious focus of interest in the media world.

Yet, sometimes it is important to take a step back and assess whether the focus on rail in the media and elsewhere necessarily means that the railways play a similarly important role in the lives of the majority of the population.

The annual National Travel Survey provides an excellent opportunity to do just that. What does it show? In a nutshell – that travelling by rail is the exception rather than the rule for most of the country.

Rail travel in context

The results of the 2017 National Travel Survey, published in late-July, puts into context the importance of rail travel in most people’s lives.

In 2017 surface rail accounted for only two per cent of trips across all modes, with the average person taking just 21 trips per year, less than two per month. This puts rail well behind the motorcar (61% of all trips), and also behind the bus (six per cent), on modal share.

While eight per cent of all people used the mainline rail network to travel at least once per week, mostly for commuting, 40% of people didn’t use the network at all. For those of us who rely on trains every day, this might seem hard to believe. Yet the reality for most of the country is that the car remains king – and by some distance.

Digging beneath the headlines

Part of the ongoing dominance of cars, with a long-term increase in the proportion of households with access to a car or a van, is likely linked to the long-term decrease in the cost of buying a car, and social changes which have seen an increasing employment rate and higher rates of license-ownership within certain groups, particularly women and older people.

Yet none of these trends are simple and it is in the detail of the headline figures where we can find evidence of how they don’t tell the whole story.

For example, against the backdrop of increasing car access, the NTS also describes a long-term reduction in car use: there were 12% fewer car trips last year compared to 2002 and over the same period average car miles travelled per person also fell by 12%.

Meanwhile, although rail has maintained a low modal share, rail trips per person per year increased by a huge 56% between 2002 and 2017, representing by far the biggest change of any mode in the period. For comparison, bus trips have decreased by 19% (not including London bus use which has remained steady).

Finding future growth

For those of us who are advocates for the railways day in and out, it’s worth keeping in mind the big picture. Yes, rail’s modal share has rocketed over the last fifteen years, but this started from a low base and we need this trajectory to continue if rail is to significantly increase its share of all trips – to near, say, five per cent.

Thinking optimistically, the low base suggests that there remains serious untapped potential for further growth. But where might this growth come from?

Rail accounts for eight per cent of all distance travelled, second only to the car, and this distance is particularly focused on long distance trips of between 150 and 350 miles. If the railways want to build on where they are already more prominent, then the mission will be to encourage drivers out of their cars, and, to a much lesser extent, passengers out of coaches and airplanes, on these longer distances. HS2 is the medium-term catalyst which may help to shift the dial – particularly if it encourages a serious national policy focus and financial commitment, as Sir John Armitt has recently called for, to improve local transport services connecting into the high speed line.

Similarly, as previously noted, the majority of rail users are commuters and this may, therefore, be a customer group that the industry should aspire to attract more of. However, looking at shorter commutable journey distances, this is likely to be challenging as the car also dominates here: on journeys of between one and five miles rail has a small (around two per cent) share of all trips and while it is more popular for trips between 10 and 50 miles, even in this range it only accounts for around 15% of trips.

Where passion meets pragmatism

While these statistics are fairly blunt, they help to illustrate macro trends which are part of the wider context for policy makers when they consider what is realistically achievable for rail travel over the long term.

The UK has a vigorous railway culture, yet is it not clear that this culture – and the passion it inspires – always translates into influencing people’s daily choices about how to travel. For all the prominence of the railways in UK life, too many people appear to put off by the issues we are all aware of: punctuality, quality of experience, cost, access, convenience.

In simple terms, if we can square that circle then the challenge of how to take people off the roads and onto rails might become that bit more straightforward.

A version of this article was originally published in the September 2018 edition of Rail Professional magazine.