Should we need the state in transport at all?
Here’s my provocative post of the day - should our goal be to get the state out of transport entirely?
This isn’t a Serpell Report type question - precisely the opposite.
After all, until 1933, all public transport in the UK was private.
And that was the era of Frank Pick and the Orient Express: hardly dark days for public transport.
Yet, over the next couple of decades, the private sector was squeezed out - not by politics but by cars.
Once cars had made private profits in public transport unviable, the Government needed to step in and wanted to control where its money went.
Privatisation, since then, has often been an underwhelming combination of public money and private profits.
The conventional answer is to say that, given the public sector is providing the cash, the public sector should also pull the strings.
But, of course, this is only a question because the private sector cannot meet peoples’ needs without public money.
You hear very few calls for aviation to be nationalised, nor hospitality, nor petrol forecourts (to name three random examples) as their private markets just work.
Similarly, Rolls Royce and Pickford’s removals, both of which were, at some point run by the state are now comfortably in the private sector without complaint.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was so much demand for public transport that its markets could just function in the way they did before cars sucked up the majority of demand.
It’s about demand
With just 11% of journeys of >1 mile being made by public transport, there just isn’t enough demand to create a functional public transport market.
Mode share of trips >1 mile (National Travel Survey 2019, table 0308)
But that 11% exists in an environment in which roads are generally designed to facilitate car use and discourage buses.
Imagine a world in which it was accepted that roads were designed for the highest capacity users of them (i.e. bus users), not the lowest (i.e. single-occupancy cars), in which railway lines were seen as necessities for new developments and road users paid the full social and environmental costs of their journeys.
If, instead of 11% of journeys being made by public transport that became 20% over time, that would be an extra 5 billion trips made every year.
And, by the way, that’s only taking us to the public transport mode share already being achieved by Switzerland.
Assuming, for sake of argument, an average fare of £5 each, that’s (*quick back of fag packet calculation*) an extra £25,000,000,000 of public transport income. Perhaps enough to create profitable markets across the board?
It’s not about politics
Traditionally the argument between public and private has tended to fall along roughly political lines, with the left wanting better public transport and more state control, and the right wanting to cut costs in order to balance the books and seeing privatisation as the means to achieve this.
But how about trying to combine these by combining a better product with balanced books.
After all, successful products don’t need the Government behind them. That’s why the amount that the Government subsidises computer games is not a political issue.
So if people aren’t buying public transport in large enough numbers to make it viable, then maybe the answer is not to campaign for the Government to take more control and spend more money, but to create the environment in which they will?
And remember, 89% of journeys over 1 mile are not taken by public transport. So I think we know where to look. And the policy prescription is road pricing: which I described in the first-ever post on this blog.
By paying us your pennies…
If you visited my home, the first thing you would see in the hall is this beautiful poster:
It was created by Macdonald Gill, younger brother of Eric Gill, inventor of Gill Sans typeface.
It was an advert for the London General Omnibus Company, and the caption around the edge reads:
BY PAYING US YOUR PENNIES, YOU GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS IN TRAMS, ELECTRIC TRAINS AND MOTOR DRIVEN BUSES, IN THIS, LARGEST OF ALL CITIES, GREAT LONDON BY THE THAMES
That poster sums up perfectly why I’m in public transport.
It’s simple and self-confident and describes a transport network in which demand was sufficient to pay for it.
This is all nonsense
Now, I’m not remotely serious.
The state has always been involved in transport: railways need Acts of Parliament and have always had their fares regulated, and benefited from bespoke safety regulations.
I’m also not suggesting that transport - a natural monopoly - should be left to the market.
Of course it shouldn’t.
This whole post is just a thought experiment.
But there’s a serious point behind it.
If we think of transport as a business with customers, then our goal is to create a confident, attractive, positive, user-friendly, high-quality, fast, reliable public transport system that users want to pay for. Even if it still also needs subsidy, it will need less - or that subsidy will buy more.
Thanks to London Centric, I happened to see a recent TfL board paper, in which there was a commentary on why revenue was below expectation. It was very characteristic of our sector, in that it was all about the economic factors - nothing about the attractiveness of the TfL service. Demand reads as something that happens to you. This is not unusual. If I’d written a Board paper at Chiltern Railways in which I blamed the economy, I’d have been torn to bits. I’d have felt most aggrieved but the Board’s view would be that it was my job to attract more customers to replace those who’d lost their jobs.
Another little obsession of mine is the idea that we - in the public transport industry - should be actively working to integrate autonomous vehicles into our networks, as a way of growing demand. Here’s me talking about this at the Re//Thinking Mobility conference last year:
Next month, I’m visiting Oslo and will visit their autonomous vehicle project, where they’re working on doing exactly this. But who else is?
So, no, I’m not even slightly suggesting that we don’t want the state in transport. But the purpose of this thought experiment is to encourage all of us to pretend that they’re not here and to think hard about how we can make our service as attractive as possible to paying customers.
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