A critical assessment of the current political and industry set up of the
UK▸ 's railways. Written by Johnathan Tyler of
Passenger Transport Networks, and who is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of York.
http://passengertransportnetworks.co.uk/IRS%20paper_FINAL.pdfI'll not quote it in full, but he does make, to my mind, some very interesting points.
Preamble
Public discussion of the railway passenger business in Britain has in recent years been singularly superficial. The Department for Transport [DfT» ] confidently contends that franchising is the only possible model. The Association of Train Operating Companies [ATOC» ] has convinced itself that its members^ success is entirely attributable to the marvels of private enterprise. The Office of Rail Regulation [ORR» ] rests secure in its belief in the virtues of the regulatory process. And buccaneers at the helm of owning groups lecture us about how grateful we should be for the investment and skills they have brought to a moribund industry. Of course there is some truth in all this, but the future of the railway is too important to be left to the parti pris of these players.
Meanwhile most of the population treats the railway with indifference, an increasing number use its services but grumble away and debate is polarised around fares or HS2▸ or the legacy of Dr. Beeching. We could and should do better. This paper is a contribution to that process.
It does not discuss in any detail the controversy about franchises ^ the process-cost, their length, specification, incentives, risk-transfer and so on ^ or the relationship between Network Rail and its Regulator or the lowering but seemingly unmentionable matter of Network Rail^s unsustainable mountain of debt, but focusses on associated aspects of contemporary railway affairs, many of which receive less attention than they merit.
That governance of the railway is now dominated by a politically entrenched ideology.
... the reluctance of the governing and industry establishments to admit failure or contemplate other options, as for example the fact that the latest approach to franchising is at least the fourth attempt to get it to function properly since the Railways Act 1993, or perpetuating the system (as recommended by the Brown Review), in defiance of the well-argued case for examining the merits of concessions...
That the institutional structure of the industry predicates relationships whose consequences may be perverse or even malign
... Franchises are in the hands of either large transport companies, mostly with roots in the bus industry, or European state-railway conglomerates. When the McNulty study identified fragmentation as the explanation for some, or even a large part, of the high costs of running Britain^s railway it could have recommended some form of reunification. Instead, partly for ideological reasons but largely because the owning groups are so influential and could make legal trouble if they were deprived of their privileged position, it opted for adding to the complex structure yet more organisations optimistically designed to hold the system together. These included the Rail Delivery Group and ^alliances^ between Network Rail and TOCs2 which have sanctified the status of these owning groups, despite their being, by definition, only transient possessors of rights and responsibilities for running a section of the railway. Through densifying thickets of legal agreements this is progressively making it difficult to modify, let alone dismantle the present structure, yet there is virtually no public awareness of what is happening ^ only loaded press releases about the wonders of the arrangements.
That the franchising system has locked us into a set of assumptions and policies with no real debate about their wisdom or desirability. This has many facets.
The railway was necessarily divided in order to construct independent businesses. That not only sundered the single national network but has conditioned thinking to such an extent that politicians, DfT officials and railway staff often seem to have lost all sense of the railway as a whole and think only in terms of the arbitrary units they have to manage or work for ^ and there is virtually no printed or electronic material presenting the network as a national system.
That the railway is not being managed as well as its cheerleaders would have us believe.
Market-pricing of fares, as distinct from distance-based tariffs, started, be it not forgotten, under that exemplar of fossilised state bureaucracy, British Rail. Few would argue against its economic justification in differentiating market segments, extracting consumer surplus, smoothing peaks and filling seats on trains that would otherwise go unsold in a system that for sound technical and commercial reasons cannot avoid excess outputs. It is another thing altogether to have taken the system to a degree of complication that almost everyone except the TOCs▸ themselves considers to be counter-productive.
Yield-management may help to fill the coffers of the private companies, but perceptions that it does just that are part of the problem. Procedures that can madden even experienced users with multiple options; a scheme that has many quirks and barely-penetrable details; a construct that favours certain types of journey, disfavours others and distorts behaviour; and a set of rules that can trap the unwary in an unforgiving process has passed from common sense into about as customer-unfriendly a system as it is possible to imagine ^ and no amount of tinkering with fancy websites can redeem it.
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