The rail industry is in a mess. In the second that it took you to read that sentence, another £400 of taxpayer’s cash was tipped into the gaping void between what the government spends on the railway and how much passengers pay to travel by train in Britain. In the course of a year, that amounts to a £12.5bn subsidy (excluding the ballooning cost of the HS2 project.)
Cutting costs has always proved difficult, not least because the rail unions are adept at extracting higher pay in return for increased productivity. Significantly thinner timetables save only a morsel of cash, because the fixed costs of the railway are astronomical. But I fear we may soon see some swingeing cuts to services in a desperate bid to reduce the deficit.
How about approaching the destination of lower subsidy from the opposite direction: increased revenue?
Long-suffering commuters may shudder at the prospect of even higher fares. Yet there could be painless ways to persuade more passengers on board. That’s according to Thomas Ableman, mobility guru and former Transport for London director of strategy and innovation.
In his latest blog, he comes up with some radical ideas.
Reservations for any train
If you book a specific intercity train, such as Bristol to London or Birmingham to Newcastle, you will usually get a seat reservation. But for shorter, high-density journeys there is no such certainty about where – or whether – you will sit.
Those of us who rely on rail probably already have a sense about which trains are likely to be busiest. The first post-rush hour arrivals into London that allow off-peak tickets to be used are often packed. Conversely, most other trains will have spare seats. But people who travel infrequently by train can’t be expected to know that.
“The fear of not getting a seat is one of the biggest barriers to rail travel use,” says Mr Ableman. “You can use a car, in which you own the seat – or you can travel by rail and potentially have to stand the whole way.”
A smartphone app could give reassurance to occasional users the certainty that they will get a seat from Winchester to Bournemouth or Lancaster to Manchester airport– and perhaps increase revenue by charging £1 for the privilege.
“This doesn’t require special kit on trains or special staffing, as it can all be done by mobile app,” he says.
“At the start of my career, reservations had to be manually put out by hand as little slips of seatback paper. Now, they can be fulfilled entirely digitally at more-or-less zero marginal cost. There is no logic to sticking to the intercity-only rule. It only exists because these were the trains with sufficient staff to set out the paper labels – a requirement that no longer exists.”
Simpler railcards
“Only single, childless adults in their 30s-50s, outside the South East, without disabilities and who never served in the forces are not entitled to a railcard,” says Mr Ableman. But, he says, the array of options and the conditions attached to each create such a muddle, “people don’t understand what they can have and what they get for it, so they don’t sign up.”
In Switzerland, almost every rail passenger pays the annual subscription of around £180 for the “Half Fare Travelcard.” Only tourists like me lament the price of a Swiss journey from (say) the deep south to the far north of the country, because only tourists pay around £90 for the privilege. For everyone else it’s £45.
“A true loyalty product is one people are willing to pay for,” says Thomas Ableman. “Like a railcard.”
More first class
In recent years Greater Anglia and Southeastern have scrapped first class on their networks to and from London. You may celebrate these developments as minor victories along the path to a more egalitarian society. Yet Thomas Ableman says the railway should be reinstalling the posh seats.
With a growing cohort of people prepared to pay extra for higher quality, he describes the gradual withdrawal of premium seating across the national rail network as “a strategic mistake”, saying: “The market for first class has basically given up using rail.”
“Switzerland has first class on virtually every train, even local S-Bahn commuter shuttles in the suburbs of Geneva.
“As our society builds a growing cohort of rich with high standards, the railway needs to be ready to respond. More first class and better first class.”
The challenge now: will the government allow train operators the freedom to test these ideas to see if they generate some desperately needed extra cash for the railway?
Read more: A brief history of first class
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