Much has been made of late in Transit magazine and elsewhere of about the level of public transport fares.

There are groups, such as the Campaign for Better Transport (the artist formerly known as Transport 2000), the rail unions and certain trade press columnists who seem to equate cheap fares with success, and continually call upon the Government to increase spending on subsidies in order to achieve this.

Such calls, particularly when echoed to some extent by other bodies such as Passenger Focus, have a habit of feeding into the media, and reinforcing the view – too often held already – that public transport fares are too high and should be cut.

In the rail industry particularly, the arguments have got taffled up with other issues about advance booking amid accusations that train operators are trying to “price off” casual users who do not book in advance. 

My own view is that much of the argument about the level of fares is fallacious. For a start, we have to remember that all the analysis, by TAS and others, shows that rail travel especially is a predominantly middle class mode of travel, so by increasing subsidy we would simply be making life better for people who are already doing quite well thank you.  As regards bus fares, there is plenty of evidence from consumer research that bus fares are considered good value for money by more than 70% of users.

The second thing to say is that for some reason consumer groups and the media have got hung up on the relationship between fares and the level of retail prices – as if there should be some equivalence between the two. So what has the price of baked beans got to do with train or bus fares? 

We have to face the fact that running a public transport service costs what it costs – especially if you try to meet the needs and aspirations of increasingly demanding customers. Of course, we must adopt measures and a regulatory regime which ensures efficiency and value for money, but beyond that we cannot wish away higher fuel costs or drivers wages or all the other elements which go together to provide the service.

Campaigners and others make much of the fact that rail and bus fares have historically tended to rise above inflation. But in fact this is inevitable: it is primarily driven by the need to pay higher wages and pension contributions. But other factors also have an effect: electricity and fuel prices, health & safety requirements, regulatory changes (such as accessibility and environmental issues like cutting noise or emissions) and customer expectations (air conditioning, bigger and more comfortable seats, wi-fi, power leads for their computers, and so forth).

And – as former transport secretary and now chancellor Alistair Darling used to point out – there are only two sources of revenue to pay for all this: the taxpayer and the passenger.

What is made less of in all the statistics is that – even though fares have risen, average wages have risen at roughly twice the rate. In other words, the proportion of weekly earnings required to commute to work by public transport has fallen by more than half over the last 25 years. Why can we or should we assume that this pattern will continue?  Clearly, we cannot and should not.

The other reason for not continuing to rely on subsidising fares is that it does not work:

• Firstly, as we have seen over the years since the Second World War, if you spend huge amounts of money on subsidy, there is little or no money left over for investment and maintenance (a lesson the French railways are learning too, now).
• And secondly, there is little or no evidence that cheap fares get people out of their cars and on to the bus and train: what drives people away from public transport is not just the price, but a whole package of things to do with time, self-image, product quality and convenience.

When you evaluate those in terms of cost to the customer, you often find that – in terms of time and price – a public transport journey costs more than three times the equivalent in the car. And cutting the fare does not offset all the other disadvantages; time is the main driver, not price.

Thus, it is those aspects of the journey which reduce the perceived and actual journey time which we must focus on – like avoiding buses sitting in traffic jams or trains going slowly because of signalling problems or poor track. Other things matter too – the quality of stations and stops, how operators look after people when things go wrong, how safe and secure people feel during their journey… and how easy or otherwise it is to obtain a ticket.

Which brings us back to the whole question of ticketing on the railways: of course we must retain the ability of people to buy ‘walk on tickets’ for any train (though it has to be said that we probably already have the most flexible system in Europe, particularly for our long distance intercity services: try getting on Eurostar, a TGV or an ICE without an advance reservation!).

But we also have to acknowledge that technology and public attitudes are driving major changes in this area. We are only at the beginning of a major revolution in ticketing and ticketing fulfilment on the railways (and, to a lesser extent, the buses). The huge success of Oyster and other smartcard schemes points the way for many people, whilst mobile phone and internet ticketing offers other major advances. The airlines have led the way in this, and other forms of transport are now beginning to catch up.

There are major advantages to the consumer in reducing journey time and making things more convenient – eliminating booking office queues, for instance, or reducing bus stop dwell times while the driver collects the fares.

Nowadays, you can not only book in advance on the railways up to the night before, but you can also collect your tickets from the machine at your local station, or (soon) print them on your own printer before you leave home. There’s even a possibility of downloading your ticket onto a smartcard by way of a reader attached via a USB port to your laptop.

Arriva’s plans for the Cross Country franchise envisage even more flexibility for people, driven both by the desire to make services more accessible, but also to manage better the available capacity on trains which are rapidly filling up. Other new franchisees – like National Express on the East Coast route – are planning similar improvements to their ticketing service.

The old model of railway ticketing, involving pieces of cardboard and a station booking office or a travel agent to issue them, is coming to an end – and this will happen with increasing speed over the next few years. This is especially true when you bear in mind that data shows that it is the 20-35 age group that make more train journeys than the others – precisely the group that is most switched onto technology, on-line shopping and all the other internet-driven changes to our lifestyles.

Consumer representatives or public transport campaigners should be wary of being drawn into backward-looking resistance to change, driven mainly by a trade union desire to preserve jobs and maintain the status quo.

We all need to recognise that it is time, quality and convenience that will drive up demand for public transport and achieve modal shift, not cutting the price.