Decisions made by people who don't even live here and use the services

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From the Morning Star

RAIL workers’ leaders have expressed fury over revelations that government plans to axe northern rail investment were made largely by politicians and officials who live in the south.

The group at the Department for Transport (DfT^» (Department for Transport - about)) drew up the government’s Integrated Rail Plan, which abandoned the Northern extension of the HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) link to Leeds and cut spending on improved regional services.

But of the group’s 24 members, 18 live in the south.

The details were obtained through Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Guardian newspaper.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the Morning Star folks.  I would go further
* It's not just "the north" - it's all regional services away from the Home Counties
* It's not just "rail workers's leaders" - it's the passengers as well - and they are the electorate ...

There are some excellent and logically centralised resources / knowledge, but attention needs to be given to what regions require rather than "nanny knows better" solutions imposed when it looks pretty clear that nanny might be ill-informed or (heaven forbid) looking after herself.

[Red Squirrel]

The Guardian put up a similar story the other day. In a tweet, Christian Wolmar said of it:

This is a completely ridiculous story and any competent news editor would have spiked it

Wolmar is of course in that odd little area of the Venn diagram where people who are pro rail but anti HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) live, but it would help if he had gone on to explain why he thinks the story is ridiculous…

[TaplowGreen]

The Guardian put up a similar story the other day. In a tweet, Christian Wolmar said of it:

This is a completely ridiculous story and any competent news editor would have spiked it

Wolmar is of course in that odd little area of the Venn diagram where people who are pro rail but anti HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) live, but it would help if he had gone on to explain why he thinks the story is ridiculous…

Or perhaps there are some who inhabit an odder area whereby it's necessary to be pro HS2 to be pro rail?

......I think the Morning Star lost a little of its magic when the funding and the bulk orders from the Soviet Union ceased, it was much more entertaining in those days!

[eightonedee]

This deserves a much longer response, if not a thread of its own, possibly under “Looking Forward – Life after Coronavirus to 2045” – but that is meant to be about transport in the South and South West, so I will stick to this thread if the moderators will permit me.

The fundamental error in the Morning Star’s superficial analysis is the “north-south” approach. Here in the South we have had rail infrastructure schemes (namely electrification of the GW^▸ (Great Western) Main Line) lopped off so that neither Oxford nor central Bristol have electric trains – which were planned, albeit as part of a cock-eyed scheme in which commuter trains on the Kennet Valley line (final destination Bedwyn) lost their electric supply at Newbury. We have just lost a valued service from Bristol to Waterloo. Local trains in the South West are operated by trains that are between 30 and 38 years old, but there is a shortage of stock because some of the newer trains that should be used (those only 30 years old) have been retained in the Thames Valley pending delivery of some older trains that were meant to have been rebuilt to cover a failure to electrify lines by bolting diesel generators on old electric trains. There are no current proposals to replace any of this stock even though much of it is older than the previous generation of diesel trains were when they replaced them. This in turn is partly driven by the continuing failure to plug the gaps in the electrification of the North Downs line. If the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) and SWT^▸ (South West Trains) catchment is not “the South”, I don’t know what is. But in Islington we probably don’t often feature in anyone’s thoughts.

The problem is more a problem of decisions being made by people who are based in central London whose outlook is conditioned by the woefull state of knowledge too many decision makers have about geography, not just where places are but how geographic factors work (especially economists!). Morning Star journalists fall into this category too.

The real problem with HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) is not whether it does or does not go to Leeds as well as Manchester (although this makes things worse), it is that it has not been planned at the outset to reach Edinburgh and Glasgow, and that the driving rationale has not been proclaimed as reducing travel by air and private car. We have a “levelling up” mantra/superficial slogan to justify regional expenditure, but we are simply repeating the mistakes of the 1940s to the 1970s.

I remember proudly being shown the point near Bolton where I was told that 16 lanes of motorway and dual carriageway met by a university friend from the North West when I visited him in the late 1970s. This did not transform Bolton, Preston, Burnley, Blackburn or any of the other towns in the region into modern thriving service and commercial centres.  Don’t they teach them at school that most of these towns were founded on coal, heavy engineering, textiles and chemicals and tended to be sited where there is ready access to waterpower, iron ore or coalfields? The ports serving them through which such products or the raw materials to make them passed grew on the back of this industrial economy. When we moved away from an economy and a workforce based on these industries, because their products were replaced by newer more efficient (and often cleaner) alternatives or those produced overseas where costs are lower, and newer more efficient means of bulk transport evolved that no longer required an army of manual labour to handle them, these towns and cities and their hinterlands inevitably entered into relative decline. Taking half an hour off the time to reach London by train is no more going to transform the fortunes of the old industrial towns of the West Midlands and the North of England than taking two to three hours off the time to drive to London did in the mid-1970s.

I read the Guardian article a little while back reporting that Friends of the Earth were claiming that HS2 would cause more carbon emissions than it saved, but to be honest it presented such a confusing set of wildly inconsistent assumptions, “unknown unknowns” and speculation about how a “modal shift” in transport usage and knock-on effects might work, it simply reinforced my cynical view that anyone can serve up a set of statistics based on assumptions that ultimately are simply prejudices to justify any stance. Somewhere lost in this was the fundamental point that a major construction project will always involve up-front carbon emissions in producing steel, concrete etc., but if the result is transport with emissions (based no doubt on equally dodgy assumptions) of 8 gm per passenger km by train (at what load factor?) instead of 67 gm by car (not sure if that’s petrol. Diesel, hybrid, one passenger a car or more) or 170 gm by air (again, not sure what the load factor is or how much emissions are assumed to be generated by travel to the nearest airport or what means of transport it is assumed will be taken), then surely once it is open we all start “winning”?

Would there be better decision making if it was all devolved? But how far do we drive devolution of transport decision making, and how will it all be coordinated? Where does this leave Cross Country or East-West Rail? The comments on this forum about the performance of the sub-regional transport decision making in “Greater Bristol” indicates that it might not be a sure-fire route to public transport nirvana, and my experience of the way it works in Cambridgeshire, as someone who has dealt with local government decision making in the context of the planning system is discouraging too.  France is a country notorious for centralised decision making, and a ruling class that is almost exclusively drawn from the graduates of the Ecole Nationale D’Administration, but they seem to do infrastructure planning much better than we do. Or is this just the grass always being greener on the other side – Lee?

The real challenge the rail industry and those of us who wish more would use rail transport face is the “modal shift” in working patterns that seems to be becoming embedded as a consequence of the Covid pandemic. If five days a week commuting is largely replaced by three or four days a week we will see a drop off of 20-40% in passenger numbers, and while the fare box income may not be entirely reduced in direct proportion, I cannot see any outcome other than an increasing need for public subsidy. There will be many calls on the public purse as we come (hopefully) out of the effects of the pandemic – more resilience in the health and education sectors, tax concessions for the hard- hit hospitality sectors, dealing with the problems of labour shortages exacerbated by Brexit, the challenges of an aging population, IT infrastructure, environmental challenges of all types and on and on. Sadly, I can see that all this makes defending public spending on rail services on lesser-used (or less well known?) lines difficult, but if we cannot improve the way make decisions about transport outside the M25 I fear we might see services like the Trans-Wilts line topple into a spiral of decline driven by a reputation for unreliability and poorly planned services that do not meet the current or potential demand. Get ready too to grind your teeth in the coming years when reductions in funding are announced as “an increase per passenger compared to 2019”.

Sorry to start the year on such a gloomy and negative note.

[CyclingSid]

Don’t they teach them at school that most of these towns were founded on coal, heavy engineering, textiles and chemicals and tended to be sited where there is ready access to waterpower, iron ore or coalfields?

Almost certainly not at Eton or similar. Mind you I did not go to such an august establishment, and if it was mentioned it has vanished in the years since.

Federalisation of England is sometimes toted as the solution, but who divies up the money? London? In Germany, 30 years after the wall came down the East are still not happy despite vast amounts of money having been pumped in.

Subsidies are mentioned when it is related to public transport. But not mentioned when money is showered on new road projects (to get you to the next traffic jam quicker), or that tax on vehicle fuel has not been increased for years. Not to mention the almost complete lack of tax on aviation (or shipping?) fuel.

Not sure I would necessarily put economists in the firing line before accountants.

At the end of the day politicians will do what gets them votes. Duncan Campbell says in a weekend paper that he asked a politician if he had been to the top of Ben Nevis, no electors up there was the reply.

Much like Public Health, could be 15 or 20 years until the benefit is seen, by which time the other lot might be in and get the benefit. Or is that a recipe for inertia?

[grahame]

This deserves a much longer response, if not a thread of its own, possibly under “Looking Forward – Life after Coronavirus to 2045” – but that is meant to be about transport in the South and South West, so I will stick to this thread if the moderators will permit me.

I'm delighted to have this thread here off wider as it is doing.  Really important stuff and I may split, move, rename the topic to give it more exposure.   I'm going to leave a full answer to a separate follow up - just comment on mechanism in this individual response ...

[snip]

Sorry to start the year on such a gloomy and negative note.

Please do NOT be sorry - indeed, thank you for those thoghts.   We need to identify and acknowledge those issues and work forward  with things like campaigning and partnership - I hope we can limit the complaining and protesting.   Identification of an issue and brining the elements together - as you are doing in this thread - is a step (and IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion) a vital one) in starting to address it.

From a .sig on an email from yesterday ...

Railfuture – Campaigning for better services over a bigger railway - run by volunteers to benefit rail users

And this "tag line" now worries me.

Better services - yes, yes, yes. Whether that means "more", "better connecting", "more reliable", "better understandable", "lower cost [to whom]", "all trains with buffet cars", "comfortable","safer","less crowded" I will leave  to discussion

Bigger - and this is where I'm not so sure. Size of infrastructure is a feature and not a benefit.  I recall seeing a very sad picture of Felixstowe station, with three derelict trackbeds and just a single line leading to a buffer stop on the fourth. Ouch.  But, hang on, that station now handles more passengers than it ever did in the past with the efficiency of modern trains without the need for run arounds, filling with coal and water, lots of cleaning, and the need for an extra person to keep the power train running with a head of steam.

Railway - not even so sure here, either. Public transport - whatever the mode - for the future.  Railway technology is vey much the best in some places.  But don't limit to trains - or even trains and buses. I suspect that not many members here use ferries or cable cars as part of their regular journeys, but a number do fly quite often. And upcoming perhaps we have hyperloop and material transfer.

Volunteers - I thinks the reference there is to the Railfuture organisation rather than to public transport.  We can and should make much more use of volunteers - people doing the job for their keen advocacy of the topic rather that doing it [just] to earn a living.  But there is (IMHO) a need to ensure that this keen advocacy (call it enthusiasm) is not limited by the financial limits on these advocates; at present, so much of this work is done in small chunks that we are grateful for by people in the earlier phases of life, with the lion's share by the newly retired who all too quickly fade and are no longer with us after too few years when we could have done with having them on board decades earlier.

benefit of rail users - Qualified yes.  For the benefit of all people travelling around (whatever mode they use) and for the continued sustainable thriving of the places they go to and from and of other places too - including the wider social and economic benefit.

I suspect I have opened a further can of worms there ...