Eight months of Freewheeling
I find it somewhat hard to believe that I’ve only been doing this for eight months. It feels so much longer.
Today’s post is a retrospective on some of the key themes.
Possibly the most important theme I kept coming back to was around incentives. The structure of the public transport industry is never settled and part of the reason is that it’s really hard to get the incentive structures right.
Thomas and the Misaligned Incentives
For those who were surprised I’ve chosen to join TfL (and there have been one or two of you!), I’ll remind you of my response to the Shapps Williams review when it was published.
The point I made was that there are two ways in which service users can hold service providers’ feet to the fire. One is through private competition and the other is through public accountability. TfL is a great example of the latter. The rail industry has decided to move away from the possibility of private competition but - as I talked about in my review of the Williams-Shapps review - I worry that the incentive structures do not properly allow public accountability.
In my most controversial blog post of them all, I highlighted that the response of the rail industry to the Hitachi crisis was to tell customers not to travel. In that post, I highlighted that the new contracting structure may make those decisions more common in future. In a subsequent post I worried that:
that the contractual incentives in place on the rail network (as far as the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail suggests) don’t really encourage this kind of obsessive determination to encourage customers to keep travelling.
Getting both the culture and the incentives right in Great British Railways will be absolutely critical. Earlier this week, I spoke to Andrew Haines, the guy with the monumental task of creating GBR, about some of these issues. The key thing now will be that the GBR transition team (which already exists) places culture and incentives absolutely front and centre.
You may feel that incentive and culture are a strange focus, but they drive everything else.
Other rail topics of the last eight months include the desperate need to get the costs of the railway under control, the need to fix train fares and the need to create new markets to replace lost business travel.
All of these are easy to type into a blog but harder to do. Probably not much progress has been reached in the short time since the posts were published. But they are critical.
Bus back better?
Another key theme of the period was the bus strategy.
The ambition was breathtaking but now it’s down to reality. My holiday experiences in Cornwall showed that big ambitions and big money don’t always turn into big outcomes.
As I wrote in a post a few months after the strategy was published, everything I was hearing told me that the bus strategy was on track to underwhelm against expectations.
It’s critical that the Government listens to local authorities and operators and fixes the flaws in the plan to enable the bus strategy to achieve at least some of its objectives in some places.
Success will now be down to what happens in practice; on the ground. Not just in partnerships like Cornwall’s (which mustn’t misfire) but also through schemes like Oxfordshire, Bristol and dozens of others.
Road pricing
I’ve banged on about road pricing so much that I won’t bang on about it again.
After my most recent post on road pricing, I got an extremely thoughtful and intelligent reader email giving some of the downsides of road pricing as a policy.
They are significant.
They include the fact that some people aren’t able to change their behaviour. If peak travel time is 8.20 because employment starts at 9, then people will need to travel at that time - which means pricing becomes a tax. They also include the social justice implications of differential charging for something that was previously free.
All these are reasonable and valid points and all will need very careful handling in any scheme that emerges. Like any sensible innovation, a scheme should be small at first, tested and trialled carefully and evolve gradually. But the fundamental point is the one I made here: road pricing isn’t new. We already do it, and we’re currently abolishing it.
Road pricing is not a tool to be used on its own. It’s not just about incentivising people away from cars, it’s about incentivising people to use public transport. I spoke about mobility credits, and I’d love to see this idea taken forward with urgency by councils around the country. The new bus partnerships provide a framework for the first time.
Other posts that stood out for me during this period were this piece on why Scottish independence isn’t as simple as it sounds - at least not when it comes to the border and details like Google’s hidden bias against public transport.
And finally a reminder that there are some Freewheeling blog posts that - hopefully - will survive current affairs. Here are some of my favourite ‘anytime’ posts that will live - if not forever - then at least for a few more months!
