In response to the Government’s announcement on rail franchising, Michael Roberts, Chief Executive of the Association of Train Operating Companies said:
“The next few years present a chance to improve fundamentally how the railways are run. On the right terms, longer and less prescriptive franchises would give train companies more opportunity to invest in improvements, respond more quickly to passengers’ needs and reduce costs.
“We welcome the Government’s commitment to a horses for courses approach to franchising.
“The Secretary of State rightly recognises the scale of work ahead to translate principle into practice – his announcement will allow the Government and bidders alike to plan how best to respond to that challenge.”
Anthony Smith, Passenger Focus chief executive, said:
“Passengers will welcome the certainty that comes with today’s announcements, but do not want to see all improvements put on hold pending new agreements.
“We are pleased to see the focus firmly put on passenger needs, while ensuring our railway starts to offer value for money – for passengers as well as taxpayers.”
The only difficulty I have with this is the ‘less prescriptive franchise’ and more particularly how this relates to timetabling. The most successful public transport networks, in terms of passenger usage, such as in Zurich Canton (and also Switzerland generally) and places like Toronto have become so because the transport networks and timetables are centrally planned and hence connections between individual services, whether within the same mode or inter-modal can be planned to work. Time and time again the UK rail industry and de-regulated bus industry have demonstrated that a lack of central planning can make using public transport for all but the most straightforward of trips needlessly difficult, stressful and time consuming, because for all the lip service paid to transport ‘integration’ in this country very little of it actually seems to percolate down into timetable planning.
The ‘free market’ doesn’t work at the point of public transport delivery – this can be seen from de-regulated bus industry where ‘competing’ operator’s timetables are generally far from co-ordinated, meaning that there can be a massive oversupply of capacity during the daytime (albeit not on an even headway) and little provision in the evening – and what there is in the evening is often supplied thanks to ‘subsidy’ from local authority coffers, rather than cross-subsidised from more lucrative daytime trips. Imagine if other networks, such as the Royal Mail or water companies were allowed to operate on this basis… …I am sorry that you live in a rural area, but we only deliver mail on the first Wednesday of the month and that is that… …I know that you have the choice of three water companies’ pipes to take your supply from, but I am sorry that none of us supply after 6pm, there just isn’t the demand, we turn the pumps off then…