Both the leading candidates in Labour’s leadership election have now committed themselves to renationalising Britain’s railways.  No surprise – the policy sounds left wing, but commands popular support:  even Conservative voters favour it.

The unpopularity of rail privatisation is an odd phenomenon.  British Rail, the monolithic state-owned operation which preceded privatisation, was one of the most reviled institutions in the country.  And what people do seems at variance with what they say.  The story of rail usage under British Rail was one of inexorable decline.  Between 1960 and 1995, passenger numbers fell by around one third.  Since 1995, they have more than doubled. (Transport Statistics Great Britain: 2014) The reversal in trend is dramatic, and coincides exactly with rail privatisation.

Britain’s railways generate a wealth of data – every single rail journey in the UK is reported and the results aggregated. Massive demand forecasting exercises are undertaken by the train operators collectively in conjunction with the Department of Transport. Nevertheless, we have very little understanding of this shift in public preferences.  (The reasons why this vast analytic exercise is so unproductive will be the subject of a future column).

Some similar trends in transport choices can be seen in other European countries, although the growth of demand in Britain is exceptional. From the 1960’s car ownership became the norm.  Households embraced the new sense of personal freedom it offered, and in later decades access to a car was a means by which young people could assert their independence.

But the golden age of the automobile ended, or perhaps petered out, in the 1990s. As the environmental movement became powerful, road building did not keep pace with car use, and the dream of the open road was replaced by the reality of urban congestion. If greater personal mobility was the life changing technology of the 1960’s, it is mobile communications that have fulfilled that role in the last two decades.

And that shift is relevant to how we travel.  You can use your phone or laptop on a train – and every train is full of people who do. You can use your phone in a car, but not comfortably, and you endanger public safety.

For journeys such as trips from London to Scotland – the deteriorating quality of air travel favours the train.  But these changes have happened everywhere, not just in Britain. We need a distinctively British account of increases in rail usage.

 The bewildering plethora of fares offered by train companies – derived from innovations in yield management pioneered by British Rail – irritates customers, but does appear to be an effective means of stimulating traffic while limiting public subsidy.  More generally, privatisation has achieved many of the things its proponents hoped it would: better trains, new timetables, more responsiveness to passenger needs. 

The benefit of rail restructuring (achieved at the cost of complex negotiations between different service providers) has been the freeing of line managers from the dead hand of centralised control which was the hallmark of British Rail.  And some of the worst managers – the abrasively incompetent executives of Railtrack, the weaker franchisees – have been shown the door. Critics of privatisation are right to point out that such autonomy and accountability for performance could be achieved under public ownership – as with the directly operated East Coast franchise.  But mostly it isn’t.

The public attitude to rail is ambivalent. People love trains, loathe rail operators, and mostly use their cars (rail still accounts for less than 10% of passenger mileage) We want a service that cannot be delivered – a public transport system that picks you up at the door, effortlessly deposits you where you want to be, and does so at modest cost.  The good – and startling – news is that such a service is on its way.  It is called the driverless car.

Citation:

(https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-modal-comparisons)