When you open a significant stretch of new railway, you find (you certainly hope to find) people flocking to use it ... and indeed that has happened with the Borders Railway. But there's an interesting corrolary question - what did those people do before the railway was available?
This
article in the Berwickshire News - based on a survey taken before the line opened - looks forward to the changes, with comment being made on "subsequent experience".
Figures and effects quoted don't come as any great surprise to me. And you need to consider adjusting results to take into account "optimism factors" where people say they will use the service, but in the end they don't don't get round to it - they just wish they could / did.
Over 90% of Borderers who took part in a major region-wide survey said they were "unlikely" or "not at all likely" to use the new Borders Railway to get to and from work.
Even in the Scottish Borders Council ward of Galashiels and District, only 11% of respondents indicated they may take the train to work, while 55% said they would use it for shopping.
In Leaderdale and Melrose, which includes the Tweedbank terminus, even fewer people (7%) said they were likely to use the railway for work purposes with 48% saying they would use it for shopping.
Although these views were canvassed before the line opened in September, the findings from the 2015 Scottish Borders Household Survey appear to chime with the subsequent experience of those retailers in Galashiels who recently claimed the railway had resulted in a net exodus of shoppers from the town.
Ironically, when the 2,706 households from across the region who responded to the survey were asked to tick the "neighbourhood issues" most important to them, "growing the economy of the Borders and supporting local retailers and businesses" emerged as the top priority.
We considered, and have looked back at, such effects from our relatively small 'reopening' of the TransWilts - I'll call it a 'reopening' in this context as the previous service was of little use to all but a handful of people. Perhaps that's where my lack of surprise comes from. We've not seen the shopper's exodus - and I suspect that the traders of Galashiels have had something of captive market which is no longer quite so captive; further, there's around 8 times the train capacity from Tweedbank that we have from Melksham, for a population
http://www.ourscottishborders.com/live/towns/populations which (Tweedbank / Melrose, Galashiels, Stow all together) is still well under that of the Melksham area.
An interesting report and I would love to see follow ups / surveys of actual users and where they come from. There may be something of a "Honeymoon period" - perhaps with Christmas shoppers trying it out this year and deciding next year that it's not going to be a regular (annual) change for them. That was certainly something the
DfT» was worried about (or perhaps threw up as a caution to keep their options open) when TransWilts took off well above target. And interesting thought too for the communities of Portishead and Tavistock in our own region.
