Professor Roger Vickerman comments on the report from the Rail Delivery Group calling for an overhaul of the way UK train tickets fares are calculated.
Today’s release of a report by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) into the reform of rail fares is only the beginning of process that may take several years to achieve. It addresses two separate but related issues. One is the complexity of the current system of rail fares where it is very difficult not only to work out what the right fare might be, but also to be confident that the ticket actually bought is the cheapest for that journey. The second is the system of fare regulation that governs the semi-privatised railway we have had since the mid-1990s; this sets maximum fares for certain types of ticket that usually rise in January each year to much political comment and is related to the retail prices index. What the RDG is proposing is a root and branch reform of the entire system that needs to address both of these issues.
Lying behind the debate, however, is an even more complex issue – a change in the ways we use trains. It is well known that train use has grown phenomenally over the past 20 years with a more than doubling of both passenger journeys and passenger kilometres travelled. The reasons for this are complex as a recent report by the Independent Transport Commission suggests, relating to changing work practices, changing types of employment and changing social and demographic pressures. It is not just a case of people travelling more, or more people travelling, but actually of people switching to use an often more frequent and generally more comfortable rail service. At the same time fewer commuters actually travel to and from work by train five days a week and if they do they may not always travel on the same route at the same time. Hence peak hour trains have seen a fall in demand and those either side of the peak (the “shoulder” as it is usually termed) are often overcrowded. Many passengers may want to travel to work during the peak but return outside the peak. The core regulated season ticket fare is no longer appropriate for this. Neither is the regulated standard off-peak return fare as more turn to online purchases.
The main proposal is a return to basing fares on a single fare appropriate to the actual journey being made. It is likely that this will mean higher fares for some journeys and lower ones for others in a policy that is designed to be overall revenue neutral, although there will need to be negotiations with the government over what will constitute the regulated fares and importantly how these should be set. But if passengers are already showing themselves to be responsive to fare variations by opting to use shoulder peak rather than peak services allied to more flexible working practices then a more even distribution of demand should result to the benefit of all travellers. Greater transparency is the key to this.
Much in the report discusses how modern technology can be used to simplify ticketing but ensure that passengers are charged the right fare; this may be an area where RDG and the rail operators will need to build trust after several years of bad publicity, itself brought about in part by the growth in passenger numbers.
Where the report does not go far enough is in leading proposals about rail as only one option in a journey, and often as only one leg of a more complex journey. What an efficient public transport system needs is the level of integration in which trains, buses and all other forms of public transport are integrated and have a single integrated ticketing system. This has largely been achieved in London and is coming in some other large cities, as the Report acknowledges, but needs to go further as for example in the Netherlands where there is a single national public transport chipcard (the OV-chipkaart). But that will require a degree of imagination and coordination in transport planning that has been sadly lacking in the UK.
Who knows, it could also link to a system of electronic road pricing so we could have a single individual transport purchasing card that would enable us to budget our travel by any mode and provide encouragement to use less environmentally damaging transport?
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