Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for commuters?

Property prices are the main reason why so many people who work in metropolitan areas have to live further and further out and become captive to the train companies. Property within the London Underground commutable distance is prohibitively expensive to buy for young people and almost unaffordable to rent if you want something decent. Where people are living together and jointly funding the home, the work location issue becomes even more difficult.

I suppose the new high speed railway [HS2] will attract a number of commuters from Birmingham because journey times will be manageable despite the greater distance – our second city will move into the London Travel to Work zone and there could also be a contra-flow for any central London residents who can get a better job in Birmingham. I guess the fares issue will still be a bugbear, however.

I thought that the main purpose of HS2 was to release capacity on the existing railway lines to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. This should free-up timetable slots for extra trains on routes from the outer suburbs north-west and north of London [e.g. Milton Keynes – London and Peterborough – London]. However that’s two decades away, I believe, by which time the trains serving many areas favoured by London workers will be running well in excess of capacity so captive commuters will be at risk of higher fares. And HS2 will do nothing for those living to the east, south-east and south of London where the lines are already electrified, can take the longest practicable trains, and are running nearly at capacity in the peaks. Changing working hours or doing more work from home might bring relief but not all employment is conducive to those measures.

I should have added that the first high speed railway in this country [HS1] between London St Pancras and Ashford in Kent – originally built for the Chanel tunnel] has brought Thanet much closer to london in journey time and led to a rise in house prices in Margate and Ramsgate among other places. It’s also done good for the Medway towns by releasing capacity on the original routes [but fares on the now inferior services have not been lowered].

Bad news for Margate and Ramsgate potential residents? It seems in these days of energy awareness, commuting 160 miles a day seems nonsense – let alone having to earn over £8000 pre-tax) a year perhaps just to pay for the basic season ticket. That’s equivalent to an £80-90k mortgage. Plus probably 5 hours a day travelling.

To be fair, Jennifer didn’t mention a particular country! Previous Conversations about rail fares have shown that Which? staff do know that the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly have devolved transport responsibilities, and that Northern Ireland [which is not part of Great Britain] runs its own railway system [NIR/Translink] under the authority of its own Assembly.

Which? does have a tendency to be metro-centric – perhaps it should be dispersed to a region where travel to work is more affordable! – but I think most Which? Conversation correspondents know that commuter whingeing is a predominantly English trait.

The above-inflation escalator on rail fares was designed to transfer more of the cost of operating the railways away from the taxpayer and onto the fare-payer. The government now senses that it has gone too far and is causing too much pain so it is changing the formula. Since increased peak-time travelling does not appear to reduce unit costs, on the face of it, making commuter journeys less unattractive seems like a move in the wrong direction from a purely economic standpoint and the balance will have to be picked up elsewhere – partly from increased off-peak travel, partly from operating economies, and partly from higher subsidies/lower franchise premiums [funded from taxation].

I think the consequences of not financially supporting the railway infrastructure from general taxation would be calamitous, in particular if more commuters took to the roads. Most commuter train services are uneconomic. While many of the train operators pay a premium to the government for the franchise to run trains on their routes, all of that and more is handed over to Network Rail to provide and maintain the track and signalling systems and run the biggest stations. The ability to organise the location of office work relative to populations has eluded successive governments and with the change from an industrial to a service economy the problems have got worse. The New Towns were intended to be self-contained residential and employment locations; today many of them are commuter dormitories.