However, what you always need from costings is a clear insight into how costs arise – and they’re certainly not going to get that by working on a per-km basis. Two very important trends are affecting productivity in the industry, and both of these will muddy the waters as far as per-km costing is concerned.

The first is traffic speeds generally. They’re slower. “It needs no spirit hot from Hell to tell us this, my Lord” – but perhaps it does in this case. All other things being equal, that will increase costs per km.

The second is the impact of the Traffic Commissioners’ expectations about on-the-road performance. In order to satisfy these, operators have slowed down services. And, surprise, surprise, that will also increase costs per km. It’ll also reduce patronage, but that’s another story.

Any well-run investigation would seek to control for these known effects. That’s what “all other things being equal” is about. And yet here the authors have chosen not to. Since that’s such a stupid thing to do, the only possible conclusion is that they have chosen to do so deliberately. Which takes us into the very murky waters of Lies, Damn Lies and Government Statistics.

Or perhaps I’m just naturally paranoid…

As the recession deepens, the rail market is going to be hit by (1) fewer commuters and (2) a loss of traffic as people find that car commuting isn’t as bad as it used to be.

That’s very bad news for the rail franchises.
But they’ve allowed for that in their bids. Haven’t they?

I currently sit on the East Midlands Regional Assembly (EMRA) monitoring group representing Transport Statistics. As you may well know, the Draft East Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS) has had to be reviewed. One of the reasons given by the Planning Inspector at the Public Inquiry in 2007 to review the draft RSS was that the ambition to achieve a zero rate target of road traffic growth from 2025 was unrealistic given the lack of analytical evidence and analysis to support this target, and also that the required modal shift from road transport to public transport may be unrealistic given the lack of capital and local authority revenue funding available to achieve a step change in the public transport product necessary to achieve the rates of modal shift required to meet the target. So your work on the ’13:1′ ratio is quite relevant here, particularly since the East Midlands Region has the highest rates of road traffic growth in the UK.

I provide a written commentary relating to transport statistics for the annual monitoring report of the East Midlands Regional Plan, and I was thinking of applying your thoughts regarding the ’13:1′ ratio in my commentary with regard to an analysis of regional transport statistics relating to the East Midlands. There are some points I would like to raise:

Is there any way of breaking down the total volume of car travel (number of trips * length of trips in km) down by length of trip eg % of car passenger kms with a trip length of under 1 mile, 2 miles etc? Previous research has shown that public transport may be able to capture car trips of less than 5km in length. There will always be some trips by car that might not be able to be made by public transport just because of their length.

Also is there any way of breaking down the car demand between urban and rural areas? This point relates to the levels of transport choice available to urban and rural residents – rural residents may have to use the car as there may be a lack of bus services in their area, whereas Residents in urban areas have a greater choice of available bus services.

I think the eventual aim is to get a total of passenger kilometres made by car that can potentially shift to other public transport modes (this may be less than the absolute figures which you have used in your analysis), and then relate these to the public transport passenger kilometres by bus, rail etc. Also, it would be useful if this could be broken down by geographic area – I’ve heard the National Travel Survey has been geocoded to enable results to be analysed at a local level?

I would be interested to hear your views on the above.

Many thanks,
Jonathan Hall,
Senior Transport Planning Officer,
Nottinghamshire County Council

But there may be another mechanism at work here. Season tickets are more price-controlled than open returns. And that’s producing some weird pricing anomalies.

Suppose that you work in Bristol but that your employer wants you to go to London for meetings twice in one week.

You know when you’re going to travel up but don’t know when the meeting will finish, so book-ahead cheap fares aren’t an option. And Saver (sorry Off-peak) fares don’t start until the 09:00 train, and can’t be used to return in the evening peak.

So your choice is between two open returns (each £137 in steerage class) or a season (£227.10). A saving of nearly £50.

The savings are worthwhile if you make 2 journeys per week, or 7 per month or 66 per year.

Meanwhile, the railways’ accounting systems still score 10 passenger journeys (and their associated pass’r-miles) for the weekly season.

So the idea that season ticket journeys have grown by 45% while ‘ordinary’ tickets have only grown by 16.9% may be what the statistics are reporting – but does it reflect what’s really happening?

(1) “unscrupulous operators would be able to make fraudulent claims”. The BBC website reports a nice example (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7698940.stm):

“BT has been forced to pay the Ministry of Defence £1.3m in compensation after some of its staff met call-answering targets by phoning each other. The Audit Commission found they fixed figures to help the company avoid fines for not answering calls quickly enough.”

(2) I’m so old that I remember a real example of Peter Huntley’s proposed splitting of services. National Express used to have an interchange at Aust, where half-a-dozen coaches did a small hub-and-spoke operation for traffic comming out of South Wales and going to London and South and SW England (and another going the other way). Younger readers shouldn’t even ask when this was!

Anyway, one year NX re-jigged the through links so as to better serve the passengers (for example, there was no need for the Swansea coach to run to London because there were other direct services anyway).

Alas, passenger volumes fell as a result of this ‘improvement’.

Until that is, you looked at the figures properly. NX’s reporting systems counted “passengers” when they boarded the coach. So if a passenger’s journey no longer involved a change of coach, then you lost a passenger as 2 journeys became 1. In actual fact, there’d been a gain of what we might usefully call ‘real’ traffic.

The advantage of your proposed layout is that such vehicles would be comparatively simple. A massive weight reduction is essential: I’m horrified by the weight of today’s double deckers. The importance of fuel economy seems to have been lost until now.

The two superb 1950s designs we have referred to carried 80 people, weighed less than 8 tons and, certainly in the case of the D9, achieved 12mpg on average and the engine lasted 300,000 miles. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that the figures for today’s equivalents are 12 tonnes,6-7mpg, and 100,000 miles or less, respectively. The passenger carrying capacity is the same but of course today’s vehicles are one-person operated.

All the more reason to have produced the FRM then, or in Midland Red’s case, the D10, incredibly, an underfloor engined version of the D9 of which the two prototypes seated 78 and could have been OPO.

The bus of the future needs to be capable of being produced in very large numbers for economy of scale but with the variations and options operators need to meet local circumstances. Hub motors, hybrid power, lightweight construction and modular – yes, that should do the trick!

I can only assume that in the Netherlands, they are still able to engender a large amount of community spirit that encourages people with spare time to put something back into the community. Sadly in the UK we seem to be heading towards the American attitude of “what’s in it for me” which makes finding volunteers to do something for nothing for any length of time extremely difficult.

I would therefore suggest that anyone wanting to do more research into this idea has some lengthy conversations with existing community bus groups in the UK to find out the difficulties they face, as whilst cost of acquiring and operating a vehicle will certainly be mentioned, finding enough volunteers will also be raised as a major issue.

I joined Midland Red just at the point where it was being nationalised and saw the beginnings of the slow and painful death of a company that had its heart cut out: it was effectively hung, drawn and quartered thanks to nationalisation. The transfer of its ‘heart’ to WMPTE had a traumatic effect on most employees and the loss of brilliant expertise in building technically-advanced lightweight and fuel-efficient vehicles was a great shame, especially when you consider what NBC replaced it with – the Leyland National factory at Workington!

Given the opportunity to help set up the National Express network in 1973 I jumped ship from the dying Midland Red to National Travel. The NX network was one of the good things that came out of NBC and it has developed as one hope it would although at that time no-one could have imagined that National Express would become a £2.5 billion company running trains as well.

In the 70s I frequently used to ride on National Express services and didn’t like too much about what I saw: passengers were treated like cattle and there was really no such thing as customer service. I was also appalled by the coach stations. My comments and suggestions were not circulated as my boss at the time, God rest his soul, felt they would be ‘too demoralising’!

It has taken 30 years for Victoria Coach Station to be improved to the standard that I envisaged then, and even longer for Digbeth but it’s great to see it happening!

If I had been less impatient I might have hung around to see it all happen. Many of my friends and fellow NBC colleagues from that era stuck with the industry they knew and loved and have achieved great things during the exciting era that followed that time of corporatist state planning.

NBC did some things right and, as we have seen, today’s big groups now realise that the NBC (formerly BET) training scheme was one of them. I might also add that the company training scheme, for GCSE/A level school leavers, also had its place and the groups should not limit themselves to recruiting only graduates. (Chris will no doubt smile at that one!)

Today’s young managers have an exciting time ahead of them. We are now coming to accept that unlimited use of the private car cannot continue, that public transport is no longer a Cinderella industry, that it can be ‘cool’ to use the bus (am I exaggerrating there?!)and, in may instances, it’s simply a more enjoyable way to travel – someone else doing the driving, no worries about where to park, get on and off right in the city centre etc.

So, good luck to today’s young manager and I shall continue to work with my colleagues at UK Bus Awards and the Passenger Transport Management Awards to give their best efforts due recognition!

Bon chance!

Ian Smith
UK Bus Awards

The Local Authorities were given powers under the 2000 Act to improve these matters and charge the operators for doing so: it is significant that public perception has improved dramatically since then, so clearly the approach has worked in many areas. However, despite this progress, more needs to be done.