Peer review: Tim Shoveller
Managing Director, South West Railway
The perception that fares are complex and too expensive has become one of our railway’s key determinants of reputation and trust.
Perhaps this is most acute for potential passengers who may see this as a barrier to ‘trying the train’, or (worse) misunderstand the complexity and believe that the railway is deliberately obscure to satisfy a profit motive. This is not the case, and it is not the way we wish to be perceived.
Paul does a great job in bringing together some key elements of the debate. He highlights why the problem is so very complex, with few solutions that do not have sometimes significant consequences - even if there was political will to support the industry through a very difficult change.
The equally difficult issue of how to respond to passengers who do not comply with the conditions of their ticket adds further emotion and complexity to the position.
So, what to do? Perhaps we need to be clear ourselves about what we want from our fares structure.
While the existing arrangements are not perfect, we can at least understand if any of the alternatives actually result in an overall improvement - or just a lot of pain to move the problem around while creating new issues.
For example, I believe that further evolving the fares structure to ensure that we maximise the capacity of our railway is an essential area of focus - not least to ensure that we offer the best travelling environment to as many passengers as possible.
As making physical interventions to increase capacity become harder and much more expensive (as we complete the ‘easy wins’ to lengthen trains/increase paths), we will have to be much more careful in our use of capacity.
The current arrangements on some of our busiest railways are a rather blunt instrument and do not really manage capacity and yield very well. Contrast this with the more complex position on longer-distance, former Intercity flows, where the huge increase in Advance ticket sales has served to allow a successful degree of yield management while still smoothing capacity peaks.
For long-distance flows, it is not difficult to see how this principle could be taken further so that no passenger on an Intercity train should have to stand (that would be a fantastic achievement). But does the potential loss of flexibility in restricting walk-up tickets have a greater disbenefit than offering every passenger a seat?
As London South East fares tend to be relatively simple, to better support a capacity-focused approach extending yield management to LSE railways would add complexity from the current position. But is this a bad thing?
Further, I think the debate becomes less relevant with the massive development in technology that is under way. We have to stop thinking of a fares structure in an extrapolated Edwardian/1970s model, which relies on a paper ticket without any means of communicating lots of essential information to passengers.
Tomorrow’s tickets will in some form be digital, which I believe creates many opportunities to achieve what we really need: revenue growth in an environment where our passengers feel that they have been able to make well-informed choices.
