More passengers are a problem for the railways

When – from a passenger point of view – I make the case why the EU ought to pass a Regulation to fix cross border railway ticketing, the reaction from the railway industry (especially state owned railway firms) is essentially “why should we make booking easier, because our cross border trains are already full?”

And to some extent it is true – since the COVID pandemic passenger numbers have bounced back strongly, and especially in the summer months and on night trains it can be hellish hard to even get a seat.

What would airlines do when confronted with a problem like this? They would order more planes.

What has Deutsche Bahn done instead? Introduced compulsory reservation – a capacity limiting measure – on some routes in summer months, so as to cap capacity, rather than respond to it.

So why does the rail industry not respond by planning on upping capacity?

Because more demand is a hassle.

More passengers means more trains, more staff, more training facilities for those new staff, more maintenance facilities for the new trains.

Work, in other words.

And why – as a state owned railway company in particular – would you want to actually do more work?

The answer is there could be political pressure to do this work and up capacity – if you look at politically motivated plans like Bahn 2000 in Switzerland, or ÖBB’s 2040 targets agreed with the Austrian government, it is clear that if done right change is possible. Alternatively a private rival muscling into a market and seeing a profit making opportunity – as Italo has done in Italy or RegioJet in Czechia – can force a state owned operator to up its game in response.

But the absence of either – a state operator largely without rivals, and a lack of a national strategic plan – results in sub-optimal outcomes. Look at how SNCF has reduced its TGV fleet size, while crowing that 40% of its high speed services are sold out – this might make sense in terms of the raw income numbers for the French Ministry of Finance, but full trains mean passengers left behind and taking some less green form of transport instead. SNCF controlled Eurostar has likewise not upped its capacity, but has increased its prices on Bruxelles-Paris. And these are supposedly cost-returning long distance services.

Add onto this conundrum the fact that most regional trains do not cover their costs – 88% of the cost of operation of TER regional trains in France is financed from the public purse. In Germany it is slightly less – tickets cover half of the cost of operating public transport. But more passengers – if that means needing to purchase or operate more trains – means the state increasing its subsidy for regional rail.

Anyone with a slightly enlightened attitude to all of this can answer these points easily enough – public transport as a means to keep the population mobile, with the added benefit of generally being low carbon – is a good thing, and should be fostered and financially supported. But it is one thing to pay lip service to being in favour of public transport, and something else to find either the political will to get a state owned railway to work to up capacity, or create the market conditions to carefully introduce some competition to force change that way.

And so then back to ticketing.

With a Regulation on rail ticketing due to be proposed in 2025, the Commission will have a demand measure – this proposal, by making booking rail tickets easier, should up the numbers of tickets sold. This should then force railway companies and national and regional governments to respond – by providing extra capacity to cover the extra demand. Given this will be getting passengers out of more polluting forms of transport, from a passenger and environmental point of view, this is a good thing.

But for railway companies, more passengers means more work. And if you’re a conservative or weakly financed organisation, seen narrowly that is not pleasant news.

Source: http://jonworth.eu/more-passengers-are-a-problem-for-the-railways/