Getting workers back into London by train remains a big challenge, but it needn’t be with the right fares and ticketing offers more in line with what passengers want.
Whilst Tuesdays and Wednesdays are back to where they used to be, Fridays are far quieter than they ought to be and Mondays are stubbornly slow. People have got used to working from home and have lopped off the start and end of the once traditional five-day commute. A revolution in ticketing can get them back and more importantlyre-establish regular but flexible commuting.
The rail market has changed dramatically since the pandemic. The key ‘cash cow’ London and South East commuter and season ticket markets are significantly underperforming.
Millions of rail journeys a month that were made in and out of London before the pandemic are no longer occurring on weekdays. London’s three main commuter lines – South Western, Southeastern and Govia Thameslink, carry about 22million fewer passengers a month than four years ago, according to latest statistics.
Interestingly, the suburban services to locations within the M25 have been the slowest to recover. Trains out of Waterloo which serve South West London and Surrey are carrying just 68% of pre-pandemic levels and Thameslink serviceswhich connect London’s north and southern outer suburbs with the City are carrying just 75%of previous flows.
So what should train planners be doing to encourage more people to use trains and return to the office, which in turn powers London’s retail, leisure and hospitality sectors?
Importantly they are both sides of the same coin but the rail part has so far failed to deliver.
It is striking that attempts to replace the old season ticket with an ill thought through flexi-season ticket have not had anything like the impact policymakers had hoped for, precisely because it didn’t take into account the public’spost-pandemic needs.
Next week’s King Speech can go a long way to delivering a better offer with long awaited new legislation to reform the railways. The creation of a new centralised body to own and run the infrastructure, with private firms contracted torun trains will be called ‘Great British Railways’ (GBR). This is meant to replace the crowdedplethora of public sector organisations that have overseen the failing franchisemodel and the more recent demise in passenger numbers.
This will likely see the return of a single brand for the railways which must avoid the unnecessary confusion of tickets that can be used on one operator’s train but not another, despite being on the same line and visiting the same destination.
But such legislation is woefully irrelevant and incomplete if it doesn’t lead to easier, flexible and cheaper tickets all of which is necessary for a more customer centric railway. Plans announced in September to start closing nearly every ticketoffice in England are back to front. Passengers need to be told that the closure ofmanned ticket kiosks will only follow the smooth introduction of the world’s best digitalticketing system which can provide the cheapest and most flexible fares at the time of purchase.This was meant to happen last year with the new GBR but the plans are long delayed.
Rail’s annual subsidy now runs to £11bn and the priority must be to win back passengers despite the terrible backdrop of strikes and unreliability.The answer for London and SoutEast travel is ticketing with flexible Monday to Fridaytravel incentives that also caters for those who want the shorter week. A new rail reward schemewhere points are earned and can be used for future travel and shopping is years overdueand could be a real gamechanger. The more you travel the more you earn and can spend.
The Treasury and Department for Transport continue to look backwards, hoping the old flows will eventually come back and all the time failing to understand that the passenger is no longer forced to travel and certainly not by rail. Weneed a strategic business mindset, not a Whitehall one.
New legislation can hopefully help, especially when the passenger now enjoys alternatives and choices in the way they work and play. Innovation is key.
Tony Lodge is a Research Fellow at the Centre for PolicyStudies and author of Changing Track – How to rescue the railways after the pandemic
