Social & economic effects of new railway - Borders study and lesson discussion

[whole diary]

[grahame]

When you open a significant stretch of new railway, you find (you certainly hope to find) people flocking to use it ... and indeed that has happened with the Borders Railway. But there's an interesting corrolary question - what did those people do before the railway was available? 

This article in the Berwickshire News - based on a survey taken before the line opened - looks forward to the changes, with comment being made on "subsequent experience".

Figures and effects quoted don't come as any great surprise to me. And you need to consider adjusting results to take into account "optimism factors" where people say they will use the service, but in the end they don't don't get round to it - they just wish they could / did.

Over 90% of Borderers who took part in a major region-wide survey said they were "unlikely" or "not at all likely" to use the new Borders Railway to get to and from work.

Even in the Scottish Borders Council ward of Galashiels and District, only 11% of respondents indicated they may take the train to work, while 55% said they would use it for shopping.

In Leaderdale and Melrose, which includes the Tweedbank terminus, even fewer people (7%) said they were likely to use the railway for work purposes with 48% saying they would use it for shopping.

Although these views were canvassed before the line opened in September, the findings from the 2015 Scottish Borders Household Survey appear to chime with the subsequent experience of those retailers in Galashiels who recently claimed the railway had resulted in a net exodus of shoppers from the town.

Ironically, when the 2,706 households from across the region who responded to the survey were asked to tick the "neighbourhood issues" most important to them, "growing the economy of the Borders and supporting local retailers and businesses" emerged as the top priority.

We considered, and have looked back at, such effects from our relatively small 'reopening' of the TransWilts - I'll call it a 'reopening' in this context as the previous service was of little use to all but a handful of people.  Perhaps that's where my lack of surprise comes from.  We've not seen the shopper's exodus - and I suspect that the traders of Galashiels have had something of captive market which is no longer quite so captive; further, there's around 8 times the train capacity from Tweedbank that we have from Melksham, for a population http://www.ourscottishborders.com/live/towns/populations which (Tweedbank / Melrose, Galashiels, Stow all together) is still well under that of the Melksham area.

An interesting report and I would love to see follow ups / surveys of actual users and where they come from.  There may be something of a "Honeymoon period" - perhaps with Christmas shoppers trying it out this year and deciding next year that it's not going to be a regular (annual) change for them.  That was certainly something the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) was worried about (or perhaps threw up as a caution to keep their options open) when TransWilts took off well above target.  And interesting thought too for the communities of Portishead and Tavistock in our own region.

[ellendune]

People are unlikely to rush out to change their jobs because a railway makes new journeys possible.  However, they may change their jobs over a longer period knowing the railway is there.  So any commuting I would expect to take longer to build up. 

[TaplowGreen]

People are unlikely to rush out to change their jobs because a railway makes new journeys possible.  However, they may change their jobs over a longer period knowing the railway is there.  So any commuting I would expect to take longer to build up. 

On a completely different scale of course but in Taplow and the surrounding villages we are already noticing the stirrings of people mentioning Crossrail as a reason for moving there for a far easier commute to London and house prices are already going through the roof in expectation, despite its arrival still being 3 years away!

[Bmblbzzz]

I expect some/most of those shopping trips on the Borders rail would be new trips rather than replacements. Somewhere else on this forum is a review of a book about this kind of stuff by Steve Melia. I haven't read the book but I've met Dr Melia a couple of times and he likes to talk about these things even on unrelated occasions, so from my memories of that and the review (I'll find it in a mo) this would conform to his findings/theories: that new transport possibilities, of any sort, tend to create extra journeys rather than replace existing ones and that public transport tends to replace other public transport rather than private modes.

Edit: Here is Red Squirrel's review of Urban Transport Without the Hot Air.