Research for the DfT identified seven categories of public transport ‘requirements’: affordability; accessibility/ease of use; comfort; environmental friendliness; frequency and reliability; safety and security; and (rather curiously lumped together) speed/seamlessness of journey. The most important are accessibility/ease of use and frequency/reliability, followed by the comfort/cleanliness levels of rolling stock and waiting areas.
To these might be added good WiFi provision and good pre- and in-trip information. High-quality, real-time service information was the highest rated attribute in Seattle, while the benefits of seamless interchanges and integrated ticketing were apparent in Haifa (Israel), where an 8% increase in trips followed the introduction of a zonal fare system. Fragmented ownership or operation need be no impediment to high-quality transfers and real-time information, as Singapore and Switzerland both demonstrate.
It is hopefully only a matter of time before the UK catches up with the rest of western Europe in the provision of bike hire schemes, London’s scheme being the exception rather than the rule.
Although rail operators do not have to be the provider, they have often taken the lead on the Continent. Eighty Swiss stations and 44 German stations offer bike and e-bike hire, while DB’s ‘Call a Bike’ flex programme in Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and Karlsruhe allows cycles to be rented at the station and deposited at docking stations around the city. Since 2010, bikes can be unlocked and checked out using a smartphone app.
In Lyon JCDecaux has set up a bike-hire system with 340 stations and 3,000 bikes, with 52,000 registered users. Day or week-long tickets can be bought with a credit card without pre-registration.
For business travellers, the opportunity to work on trains is paramount, although surveys suggest some choose the car because of the privacy it offers. Are trains designed with a wide enough variety of accommodation? DB provides bookable meeting compartments on some trains, while Pendolinos on VR (Finland) have a working compartment for seven people or the option of hiring a whole coach.
Pull factors can also become negatives - if a passenger cannot depend on the virtues of punctuality, reliability and comfort, they may give up on rail if they have a choice.
Transport Focus surveys repeatedly show that reliability, punctuality and cleanliness have the greatest impact on satisfaction. Overall satisfaction with both trains and stations is high at 78% (spring 2015), but toilet facilities, delay management and value for money receive perennially low train scores. At stations, availability of seating, the choice of shops/eating and drinking facilities, and car parking regularly score the worst marks.
At St Pancras and King’s Cross, the policy of raising the standard of shops and places to eat has led both to become destinations in their own right, attracting local users. In contrast, current plans at another London terminus, aimed at maximising returns, look likely to lose the most interesting and upmarket retailers regardless of the perception and demographic of users.
Free public transport
Perhaps the most extreme pull measure is offering free public transport, such as the free use of buses for UK pensioners, for whom travel can be price-sensitive. However, the cost benefit payback of this measure has yet to be studied.
From November 2014, about 46% of the Slovak population became eligible for free train travel, with 103 new services to absorb the expected increase. But in Austin (Texas), free use of buses was ended at the request of existing users, because it attracted a new clientele that dissuaded existing and other potential passengers from using public transport.
Thus a permanent change of mode is more likely to be achieved through improved quality, rather than price reduction. That said, ‘Value for money’ constantly remains one of the lowest scores in Transport Focus surveys.
Disappointingly for environmentalists, a desire to save the planet by adopting greener travel barely registers in some surveys. The societal costs or externalities of more polluting modes do not sufficiently concern the overwhelming majority of people to make them change their behaviour and adopt more benign modes. The question some researchers have asked is whether this is due to indifference or ignorance, and how best each mental state should be addressed to effect change.
This is partly due to the way in which people trade off benefits and costs: individual vs societal; immediate vs deferred; and local vs global.
Because a higher weight is attached to immediate (rather than deferred) benefits, it is more productive to focus education and persuasion on present and local negatives - for example, traffic pollution and noise rather than climate change, even though the potential impact of the latter dwarfs the former.
There is the inevitable sense of feeling both more responsible for the local than the global and recognising the greater likelihood of ‘making a difference’. Yet the local environment suffered in the Netherlands following the introduction of catalytic converters - users of cars fitted with one tended to drive more, ignorant of the fact that they don’t work effectively until warmed up.
Research published by the DfT in 2011 (Public attitudes towards climate change and the impact of transport: 2010) found that 65% of respondents said they were willing to change their behaviours to help address environmental issues, although only 42% were willing to do this by using public transport (see graphs). Graduates appear to be more concerned about climate change, more willing to change their behaviour to limit it, and were significantly more likely to be willing to use public transport more (57% compared with 41%).
Recent travel behaviour research suggests that the dynamism in modal choice is higher than expected, presenting an opportunity for policy-makers and public transport operators to influence those willing to change their behaviour.
Enlightened companies have responded to the effects of stress brought on by congestion during commuting, recognising that it leads to increased absenteeism, reduced job satisfaction and decreased task motivation. They have bought into Smart Travel Plans to unfreeze habitual behaviour, and provided bike loans and facilities such as good changing rooms/showers.
The benefit for train operators of more active travel to stations is a reduction in the demand for car parking spaces. Virgin added 30 spaces at Penrith at a cost of £83,333 per space, which would take 19 years to recover through charges assuming every space was constantly occupied. The £2.5 million spent by Virgin could instead have transformed the town’s cycling network, producing far wider benefits and an obvious environmental gain.
“I can’t make a difference” is the sentiment behind the ‘dilemma of the common pool’, in which a behaviour makes sense from an individual point of view, but proves disastrous to society when repeated by a large number of individuals. The individual car user perceives their impact as minuscule in the context of millions of other users, and so has no incentive to reduce car travel.
Changing this attitude so that people take responsibility for their behaviour will always be a challenge, but there are principles behind persuasion that can help:
- Reciprocation: People respond better to favours than bribes. In Melbourne, an environmentally friendly (but unbranded) shopping bag was given away with a discount voucher for a whole shopping centre.
- Commitment and consistency: There is an innate desire to be consistent and in harmony with one’s values.
- Social proof: For affirmation of one’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviour, people look to their peer group. There is a stronger willingness to comply with a request if one believes others will do the same, providing social validation.
Theft of protected wood in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona increased after a notice was put up reading “Your heritage is being vandalised every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time”. It fell when it was replaced by one reading “Many past visitors have preserved the environment by not taking away any petrified wood”.
- Identification: People are more inclined to follow a request by someone they like.
- Authority: Advice is more readily accepted from an acknowledged, credible authority. Personal travel plans need convincing ambassadors - in Melbourne, bus drivers were used.
- Scarcity: People respond more to the fear of loss than to gaining a saving. An energy-saving campaign proved much more effective when households were told how much money they would lose by not having insulation, rather than how much they might save. So in travel, one might stress the loss of time to read or work by not taking public transport, or the lost chance of physical activity.
There is an obvious range of ‘push’ factors: making car use more expensive through taxation or road-user charges; reducing parking provision; reallocation of road space away from motor vehicles.
Evidence shows that alternatives to the car have to be economically superior to induce non-users to switch to public transport, which makes it all the more important that externalities are incorporated in the cost of journeys. These kinds of measures are advocated by those who consider the competitive playing field to be biased in favour of unsustainable modes. To implement them, politicians require either a sense of support for them, or the courage of their convictions.
Measures to influence travel behaviour first have to be agreed and then applied consistently over a long period of time. It has taken decades of bike infrastructure development to achieve Copenhagen’s 36% modal share for cycle commuting. The city calculates that the cost of 1km (0.6m) of cycle track is paid off in five years by the health benefits of users getting more exercise.
Human nature is inevitably to the fore here - in terms of the ‘social dilemma’. The consequences for each individual acting in their own interest (called defection) are ‘better’ than the consequences for acting in the interest of the group (called co-operation), regardless of what other group members do. However, all individuals are worse off if they all defect, rather than co-operate.
If this is accepted, one logical conclusion must be that behaviour change in all but the most altruistic members of society requires an element of coercion that can only stem from government policy. But democratic governments are generally timid and behind the curve, and they will remain so until there is a climate of opinion in which politicians no longer see a choice between environmental suicide and political suicide. Achieving that desirable position would require politicians to ignore the siren calls of unsustainable solutions, as well as a public ‘hearts and minds’ campaign with the same success as those for drink-driving laws and restrictions on smoking.
