News Desk

Opening the Door to an Integrated Transport Network

12th July 2009




The report, ‘Door to Door by public transport’, was published by an alliance of transport operators and the Department for Transport in June. The introduction by Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, suggests the intention of the report is to announce agreement with the main UK transport operators to work towards better transport integration and to highlight existing best practice and some short term ‘wins’. The ‘working together’ bit will be handled by a cross industry working party with the catchy title ‘Door-to-door Journeys Working Group’.

As supporters of improved integration we must surely applaud this high profile move. At last, the Department is beginning to take the issue seriously, and that must be a good thing mustn’t it? In reality a degree of caution is indicated about the amount of enthusiasm to be mustered. This is the same Department for Transport that has progressively watered down to near extinction the Transport Integration requirements in successive rounds of franchise bidding and which (until recently perhaps) attached little importance to seeing through the surviving ideas put forward. The first franchise bid Transport Integration Plan we wrote was over 130 pages (in 2004), the last one was about six and was spread about as nobody wanted an integration plan, as such. The material written for successful plans was not pursued by operators once the bid was in the pocket, being viewed as ‘cost’. So what has suddenly changed? Why have hard nosed operators and an uninterested DfT suddenly been galvanized into apparent action?

There are probably several reasons why those charged with running the industry have had to shift their position. First, there is this 'climate change' issue and pressure to maximize to the hilt use of the more carbon-friendly forms of transport. Nobody really knows exactly what this means or how to achieve it at the moment, but clearly more rail use and less car use seems likely to figure in any solution. It is now accepted (apparently) that people actually travel from one ‘door’ to another ‘door’ rather than from one bus stop to another, or one station to another, and that each modal change is a stressful and often inconvenient ‘barrier’ to the use of public transport at all.

Secondly, with station car parks often full but with latent demand evident it may make commercial sense to reduce the interchange barrier in order to generate or recover traffic. Rail operators are being squeezed harder as a result of each franchise bid and they need revenue so much they are even prepared to look beyond station boundaries to see if there is anyone there looking as though they might use a train (this might be slightly unjust in some cases, but there too many examples where promoting train services has involved unimaginative marketing, a lack of basic care about station access and facilities, and a thorough lack of comprehension of how passengers view things). Bus operators are looking for new traffic opportunities too, but have a reputation for being picky about it.

The third, and probably the main reason for ‘action this day’ is the welcome arrival of Lord Adonis who is intelligent, articulate and takes sufficient interest in his job to have gone out and had a look at the railway network for himself. It is to be expected that he had trouble correlating the material supplied to him by his officials with what he actually found when he went out to ride the system. It seems that what he found is exactly what every other rail user already knew, which is that stations in general and interchange facilities in particular vary dramatically in quality and in accordance with no obvious pattern. It is a lottery. It is not, however, a surprise. The rail network is a network its own right with its own legislation, objectives, funding and management structure (but funded with a proportion of public money intended originally to represent social benefits). The bus network is largely unregulated and exists on a purely commercial basis with no social obligations except those local authorities are prepared to pay for (usually specific services or trips). Cars and bicycles endure under general traffic objectives and are hard to control at all. Walking is an ancient but unfashionable form of transport often confined to the commuting classes; more seriously, people seem prepared (to an extent) to walk to or from stations with which they are familiar at the ‘home’ end of a journey but at the far end lack of route knowledge, confidence in finding location or, at night, fear of how friendly the natives are, perhaps means that it is easier to get a cab. For sure, testing out (or even finding) late night bus services is not for the faint hearted either. So, no surprises (at least in this quarter) about what Adonis found.

So what is Transport Integration? For a start, that question is one that has been asked for a very long time. Does anybody remember the British Transport Commission, that unloved monster created in 1948 to take over the whole of Britain’s inland transport (including half of the bus network). Transport Integration featured heavily in its objectives, and the Commission owned the means of achieving it. The term was never explained but by any scale of measurement the Commission pretty much failed entirely to integrate anything except a collapsing balance sheet. Some would say that some areas of passenger transport integration actually deteriorated (the Commission’s buses were previously owned by the railways – a perverse inversion of today’s position!). Transport Integration has come up constantly in Parliament since 1948 (notably in preparing for the 1968 Transport Act) but we are not there yet. Passengers would probably tell you it is about identifying the ‘trunk haul’ of their intended journey and making sure that they can (to meet their own personal requirement) easily reach the ‘trunk haul’ and then get to their final destination safely, conveniently and in the minimum time. It implies making the interchanges pleasant, convenient and stress free; it implies minimum fuss in paying for the journey(s); it implies some co-ordination of timetabling and information, and so on. Oh yes, it also implies that you tell people how easy it all is and match what is said with what is subsequently delivered. Some things are easier to do than others, and some things are quite cheap, as we have pointed out to operators on several occasions!

So what of the report? Well …..

The report is coy about who actually wrote the words though there is some evidence that it was committed by more than one hand. Appendix 1 contains the names of those on the working group and it is a relief to see a number of familiar and highly respected names present, even though there might be said to be some dominance of busmen and not much station operator representation, which seems a bit odd given that station boundaries would seem to be the very places within which transport integration opportunities are greatest.

The report is a tad confusing about its scope. The executive summary rather suggests the working party had agreed to focus just on bus-rail integration, but in fact the body of the report covers a much wider area. The term ‘Integration’, as usual, is not defined, but some key attributes are referred to given that the objective was stated to be ‘a successful, seamless journey by public transport, when National Rail is the primary mode and where buses/coaches and trams provide access to and from the rail station’. The use of the word ‘successful’ is intriguing and perhaps ‘convenient’ might have been a better choice. The attributes thought to deliver the proposition are:

• readily available, easy to understand information about services and fares (before and during the journey),
• integrated multi-modal ticketing for the entire journey, including modern purchase methods,
• good interchange infrastructure and facilities, so that changing between methods of transport is convenient, easy and quick, and
• services that provide timely connections.

Not much to argue with there.

An attempt is made quite early on in the report to justify the present level of concern being expressed about transport integration, using the headline that 55 per cent of people undertaking rail journeys also use at least one other transport mode (with the remaining 45 per cent just walking). The implication was that 660 million passengers already treated stations as transport interchanges. We didn’t find this very helpful, in part because it only related to use of an alternative mode at the start of the journey, leaving us simply to guess about what happened at destination end. In addition, it included car and cycle parking (which are not public transport) and Underground usage where interchange is usually tolerably good and is really just another example of rail-rail transport integration, about which the report is nearly silent (even though there is often scope for improvement there too).

The amount of bus/coach to rail interchange is given as 13 per cent, working out as 156 million trips using DfT figures (or 148 million using our preferred rail usage base). This is still a lot of people. However a good proportion of these will be commuters making regular journeys and it would be good to have had an indication of how many non-commuters (ie business and leisure users) used buses to get to the station, though that is not necessarily much of a clue about how many would have done so had conditions been better. 42 per cent of all rail journeys are commuters or those in education so by implication somewhere between 80 – 90 million trips are non-daily users starting off by bus (averaging roundly a hundred per weekday per station, but with massive individual variation).

The report commends the work done so far in providing good transport interchange and in particular the work done so far by operators. Section 3 of the report highlights what is considered to be good-practice. However one must ask, by whom? This section would have been much more credible had Passenger Focus (the rail passengers’ champion) been part of the process. Incidentally, the report generally excludes reference to interchange within the TfL area as TfL is promoting uniquely high quality modal interchange which are considered to be exceptional in terms of general need and affordability, though a few examples are given, presumably when the main line network can't offer its own alternative.

The good-practice guide is divided into separate sections covering pre-journey, getting to the station, at the station, ticketing, ticket-buying, on the train, at an interchange station, at destination station and at destination forecourt. The examples chosen are doubtless reasonable attempts to capture things that are good in someone’s eyes, but it is interesting to see how much jargon is used, for example the term ‘RailLink’ is pretty much only known within the industry and many passengers do not in our view know that there is through ticketing to certain (ie ‘RailLink’) connecting bus services and would not think to enquire (even when connecting buses are shown in timetables there is usually no clue that through ticketing is possible). Curiously operators’ practices vary and it isn’t helpful that even the better operators which show bus links show ones with (unexplained) through fare facilities in the same way as ones that do not. There are, by the way, over 240 RailLink fares covering buses, coaches, trams and ferries – this must be one of the industry’s better kept secrets.

It would be tedious to go through all the examples given, but would query that in some cases better example of good practice could not be found. The getting to the station section was rather weak, not having a 'getting to the bus stop' section or dealing with quality or reliability issues (or whether there was a direct bus to the station at all). Car and bicycles were also included in this section. It was interesting to have one’s attention drawn to the Office of Fair Trading ‘ticketing block exemption’ rules which facilitates more through ticketing possibilities than would otherwise be the case. Nothing said, though, on the terrible problems operators face in co-ordinating timetables across operators owing to enthusiastic interest by competition authorities which make operators nervous. This is a real problem having perverse consequences for passengers.

PlusBus gets a push. This is a facility for buying zonal bus travel as part of a rail journey and has been the result of a crusade by its developers; it is catching on painfully slowly but still needs to be much more widely known about.

The quick wins recommended by the report for early implementation are:

• Introduction of more ‘continuing your journey’ information posters by Journey Solutions to 100 or so more stations.
• Transport Groups to produce more bus timetable information at stations;
• Station staff to be better informed about onward journey connections through briefings and information packs.
• National Rail Enquiries website will provide more information about onwards road transport connections (many are in the ticketing database accessible by the public, but you have to know they are there first).
• Improved PlusBus marketing with possibility of adding PlusBus automatically to any ticket sold to a station served by the facility.
• Improved directional signage.
• Research into passengers’ views

In addition there are some longer term aspirations, the most significant of which is to identify the business case for Transport Integration, introducing station travel plans and (perhaps far more important than all the others) to introduce transport integration targets into future franchises in order to force operators to make progress as part of the franchise commitment (but noting that this can hardly make it binding on third party bus operators or even PTEs and local authorities under existing legislation).

So what didn’t the report cover?

It didn’t cover the absence of any clear definition of what Transport Integration is, how it can be contextualized to be applicable in a useful and meaningful way to a wide range of stations so that passengers could reasonably anticipate the quality of interchange available. In particular it didn’t cover the pretty comprehensive absence of any objective standards relating to the conveyance of most passenger information, let alone that relating to Transport Interchanges. We have already done some work in this area and do not believe it would be particularly difficult. There are of course some standards but much of this is focused around the supposed needs of corporate identity rather than passengers’ needs and consistency in getting things right when placed in the hands of those who are not necessarily trained communicators.

The report made no reference at all to transport integration policies, successes and lessons abroad, not even in nearly Europe. Successes there have been, and there are good examples where fares and inter-available ticketing seem to work well and passenger information is of high quality and consistent. This is surely a missed opportunity (especially as some of the participants operate services in Europe).

Confusion about whether we were simply dealing with bus-rail interchange or were really attempting to deal with wider station access left out the issue of walking completely. Bizarrely, the DfT insists that train operators provide local maps to facilitate onwards journey planning, mainly by foot. Train operators usually respond by farming out provision to third parties who provide free maps (paid for by advertising). But the maps actually provided are of the kind used in gazetteers and are designed for motorists (the very people not likely to use them), and are quite unsuitable for people walking. Nor are maps provided to meet common sense local requirements, thereby losing utility. We have done our own research into requirements here and the existing mapping is simply not very good. Significantly, there is no example of these maps in the good-practice section of the report.   

We would have liked to have seen a poor-practice guide which could be used to illustrate why certain approaches do not work. We understand why train operators might not view this with much enthusiasm, but actually using a name and shame process seems far more likely to galvanize people into taking positive and well thought-through action! We have lots of examples of poor-dreadful material we have collected which is a far more powerful tool than anything slightly complacent industry operators can show us! Perhaps we should do such a guide and explain how things could be better? Actually with East Coast coming into government control we have an excellent opportunity to turn it into a Transport Integration showcase.

Overall view about Door-to-Door? Five out of Ten (and it doesn't actually deal with the door to door bit). A very useful indeed step in the right direction, but the good practice guide disguises the fact there is a great deal to do, much of it needing consistency of approach and by no means necessarily very expensive (and occasionally cheaper than current practice) to implement. The railway needs to raise the bar a bit if we are to meet the expectations of the next generation.

Actually with East Coast coming into government control shortly we have an excellent opportunity to turn it into a Transport Integration showcase; at present NXEC makes no reference in main publicity to RailLinks or existence of through tickets at all, a perfect example of how little grip DfT has had on the subject hitherto. We’re here to help!