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People are travelling less. That may sound strange to the rail industry, where passenger numbers have doubled in 20 years, but it is clear that overall land travel per person in England has decreased significantly. It is now 10% lower than it was before the 2008 recession (see graph, page 11).
The average number of miles travelled by English residents peaked in 2007. It fell sharply, then stabilised. That has been masked by population growth of 12% between 1995 and 2014, largely through immigration which has been concentrated in the South East.
We are making fewer trips, although our trips are longer in both time and distance. In 2015, the average stood at 6,500 miles a year. Cars accounted for just over 80% of that, and rail carried around 9%.
Rail’s growth is due to a greater proportion of the population travelling by train, rather than existing passengers going further or more frequently.
All this we know from the National Travel Survey and from research by the Independent Transport Commission. What we don’t know is how this will play out over the coming decade.
There is a clear divide between different generations of transport users. Younger people are less likely to own a car than before, and are more likely to be reliant on public transport.
This divide is sharpest in London. In the capital, the number of bus journeys has doubled since the 1980s, whereas in the rest of the country, the number has fallen by more than a third. London now accounts for more than half of all bus journeys. Car use is also falling faster there than elsewhere.
Perhaps the most significant change is that a correlation between income and travel has weakened. In the past, the more money we had, the more we travelled. Mobility was a function of wealth.
Rail travel per person has continued to rise, despite fares increasing by 25% in real terms over the past 15 years. Meanwhile, car driving per adult has declined, despite motoring costs remaining stagnant. Rail has always been used most by the richest quarter of the population - people with limited money are still less likely to take the train, although rail use has increased across all income groups.
“We look at transport as an economic project,” says David Brown, chief executive of Transport for the North. “It is a means to an end. The end for us is more jobs and economic growth. We need to link places of economic activity, and we are modally agnostic.
“Will there be a drop-off with new technologies? Despite lots of people saying there will, it does not seem to be the case. Our modelling shows people will travel more often and longer distances for both work and leisure.”
“For someone who can never be satisfied, plenty is not enough,” comments Professor William Powrie, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton.
“When you look at what we could use in health services, in energy or in transport, as a society we have an insatiable appetite. Transport policy has almost always been on a basis of ‘predict and provide’. That gets us into an untenable position.
“Take a step back. Our use of transport is very different from what it was 20 years ago - not just in commuting patterns, which have seen the London effect getting wider and wider. We are chasing our own tails. Improving journey times and increasing capacity encourages people to live further from where they work.
“Look how quickly supermarkets run out of stock, because the warehouses are now lorries moving on the motorways. Look at factories such as Jaguar Land Rover - they don’t want to store components, they want to offload components straight from the lorry onto the production line. Why? Because all the improvements we have made have just fuelled demand by changing the pattern of business, as transport has got cheaper as a proportion of total costs.
“Ford makes engines in Bridgend. But the block is cast in one place, machined in another place and assembled somewhere else. The engine criss-crosses Europe up to half a dozen times by the time it reaches the buyer at the showroom. We wouldn’t work like that if transport was not fundamentally cheap.
“Using transport as a moving warehouse is clearly not a good thing. Transport does not meet our needs, because we allow our needs to be driven by what is available and affordable. We need to generate new patterns of housing and employment that drag people away from that.”
“Look how fast our city centres are changing,” observes John Dawson, founding chairman of the International Road Assessment Programme and chairman of the management committee of the Road Safety Foundation. “They are no longer transport-intensive in any real sense. They are cultural and entertainment centres: restaurants, coffee shops, theatres, discretionary shopping, courts, local government and niche businesses.
“In major cities, one-third of travel is into or around the centre, and best catered for by public transport. Two-thirds is criss-cross movement better catered for by more flexible systems.
“Manufacturing has long since relocated to the motorway network. The city centre load is getting lighter. It’s all about people movement. Look at the growth of urban cycling, only possible because of this change. Only just over half of rail travel is now about business and commuting. The rest is discretionary.”
Brown adds: “Transport is one part of the economic picture. We need to drive economic growth, not respond to it. It’s about skills, education standards and more. We identify the requirements on a corridor basis, not by mode - to have a clear plan is not just about improving the roads or buying new trains.
“For example, we think there is huge economic opportunity in what we call ‘energy coast’ - the energy research, generation and delivery across a number of sites in the north of England such as Cumbria, the Humber and Teesside. These need to be better connected to each other and to the big urban areas to satisfy their need for more skilled people.
“If you use the corridor between Leeds and Manchester, Highways England focuses on the M62. Network Rail is looking at the trans-Pennine rail route. The Department for Transport is looking at what train services it should put on the franchises using it. But we need to add up all the needs of all the passengers and freight on that corridor for one multi-modal approach to get the best out of the whole. To have a clear long-term plan like that is not often done.”
Four out of every five miles travelled by British people are by car. Rail accounts for less than one mile in ten. Car travel increased rapidly from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1990s, after which the growth gradually levelled off. That led analysts to suggest we had achieved ‘peak car’, whereby mileage per person no longer increased, regardless of economic growth.
The steepest fall in car use has been among men under the age of 35. The holding of driving licences has been falling (see graph, page 11), and the number of people taking the driving theory test has been dropping for some years. In London, millennials (people born since 1980) are also using the bus and the Underground much more, and walking less.
Young people are travelling in patterns that differ significantly from previous generations. In its On The Move study, The Independent Transport Commission concludes that this could be due to less secure employment, stagnant wages for younger people, high student debt, unaffordable housing costs (especially in London and southern England), and a reliance on shared living accommodation coupled with the postponement of marriage and parenthood. All these issues combine to create a much less financially secure life for younger people than in previous generations.
The deferment of various life landmarks is resulting in a car-orientated existence becoming less common among younger people. And if it does occur, it is happening later in life.
Car and rail use will also be affected by changing age patterns of living. Younger people are much more likely to live in urban areas, especially in London. In shire towns and country areas, older people represent a much higher proportion of the population than they did 25 years ago. Car travel has fallen most slowly in rural areas, where dependency on cars is greatest.
“This will have to be plugged into our transport strategy,” says Dr Matthew Niblett, director of the ITC. “There will be a greater proportion of city dwellers who are commuting, compared with shire towns and rural areas. Younger people have different needs and wishes from their journey.”
A visit to Jaguar Land Rover’s design centre at Gaydon, beside the M40, is instructive. JLR has overtaken Nissan as the UK’s largest-volume car manufacturer. A new dual carriageway leads straight from the motorway to the gate, and a proliferation of cranes shows how fast it is expanding. No manufacturing is done here, but 5,500 people work on future models. 43 new product lines are in development.
Design work on the Jaguar I-Pace (a volume-production battery-powered family SUV) is largely signed off. Innovation Acceleration Manager Jim Johnston talks passionately about how enthusiastic motorists will start switching to electric power, for its greater driving performance as well as for its environmental benefits.
Development of autonomous vehicles is also under way. Commercially sensitive, it is kept out of sight. Driven by market demand, car manufacturers are investing heavily in what they believe is the long-term future of the automotive industry.
“Jaguar Land Rover are already in that space,” warns Brown. “They know that at some point the car will drive itself. They know the people inside it will want to have a coffee, do work, watch a movie and use social media while the car moves. But rail operators are still scrabbling around wondering whether to fit WiFi. Rail seems a long way behind the curve.
“Expectations are far higher than they were even five years ago. People expect more than just a seat on a crowded train, they need the ability to work and communicate while travelling.
“I turn up, I pay cash on the train, and the conductor gives me a very long piece of paper which I have to show to another person at the end. I have to stand up, and I can’t do anything else during those 30 minutes of my day. This is a very long way from the journey that car designers are already working on. Northern ticket machines now give you a ticket that seems two and a half feet long. If you travel for a month you end up with enough to wallpaper your office with it. That might be modernisation in railway terms, but everyone else is already using a smartphone.”
Rail use has increased in all areas. It is rising rapidly in large metropolitan centres, but is highest in London by a large margin.
“London has a particular capacity problem due to the huge jobs growth in the region,” says Niblett. “Population growth is disproportionately concentrated in the South East. To solve housing and development issues, rail will have an increasingly important part to play.
“But the same congestion problem is becoming evident in Manchester and in Birmingham. We cannot neglect the change in commuting in other metropolitan areas. I would like to see more investment in local rail connectivity. Rail is less than 10% of passenger journeys, so the road lobby is stronger and more dominant.”
“London is a mono-centric model,” says Brown. “People largely travel in, and travel out again. London is constrained, leading to a focus on mass transit. It has more people, less space and more defined travel patterns, whereas the North has lots of centres and points of economic growth. In the North, housing opportunities are more varied.
“The UK cannot keep on growing its whole economy by just pumping more and more investment into just one place. If we can get the connectivity right, and make it possible to live on the outskirts of Leeds and travel daily to work in Liverpool or Manchester, it becomes comparable to going into London. Business gets access to a greater labour force. We’re looking at the North as one economic unit, rather than a collection of cities and towns.”
Niblett adds: “Air quality in cities favours rail over road travel. Electric vehicles will mitigate that to an extent, but city centres are increasingly pedestrianised, and we are seeing increasing merits in high-density urban living over suburban sprawl. These suggest rail will continue to have advantages, but growth might not continue at the rate seen in the last 25 years.”
“The cost of transport systems should fall with automated vehicles,” says Dawson, of the Road Safety Foundation. “The costs in future will overwhelmingly be in the right of way, the infrastructure. That is unlike today on heavy rail, where a large portion of the costs arise from the vehicles and their operation.
“Looked at from a distance, the strikes over how many crew should be on a train are no more than friction as our transport needs evolve. But there are frictions at the road interface, too. For example, there is a public willingness to invest in highly automated vehicles which have some form of self-steering. But at the same time there is a public unwillingness to invest in maintenance of the roads.
“Personally, I’d like to think the end of mindless public subsidy for buses is in sight, and that they can be replaced by funding for Uber-type technology with on-demand mobility services in rural areas.”
Sarah Kendall, an independent consultant who has worked for Network Rail and train operators, and who is a commissioner at the ITC, believes that “we are going to be challenged on funding”, adding: “We are competing with hospitals and schools for national infrastructure spending. We will have to be more joined-up in our thinking and less bothered about our contractual structures and behaviours. Our days with an orange piece of cardboard are on the way out, and we need to be much more responsive to our customers.
“Too often a rail project doesn’t look beyond the rail boundary. We need to engage better with planners and regional authorities. Railways are too important to be just left to the people that run them.
“I’m looking out of the window across Cardiff towards the valleys, where I see railways built to get coal out of the hills to the port. Those railways have transitioned to passenger use, and are now overdue their next transition to cope with more capacity and new economic development.
