How to get workers back into London by train

Getting workers back into London by train remains a big challenge, but it needn’t be with the right fares and ticketing offers more in line with what passengers want.

Whilst Tuesdays and Wednesdays are back to where they used to be, Fridays are far quieter than they ought to be and Mondays are stubbornly slow. People have got used to working from home and have lopped off the start and end of the once traditional five-day commute. A revolution in ticketing can get them back and more importantly re-establish regular but flexible commuting.

The rail market has changed dramatically since the pandemic. The key ‘cash cow’ London and South East commuter and season ticket markets are significantly underperforming.

Millions of rail journeys a month that were made in and out of London before the pandemic are no longer occurring on weekdays. London’s three main commuter lines – South Western, Southeastern and Govia Thameslink, carry about 22 million fewer passengers a month than four years ago, according to latest statistics.

Interestingly, the suburban services to locations within the M25 have been the slowest to recover. Trains out of Waterloo which serve South West London and Surrey are carrying just 68% of pre-pandemic levels and Thameslink services which connect London’s north and southern outer suburbs with the City are carrying just 75% of previous flows.

So what should train planners be doing to encourage more people to use trains and return to the office, which in turn powers London’s retail, leisure and hospitality sectors?

Importantly they are both sides of the same coin but the rail part has so far failed to deliver.

It is striking that attempts to replace the old season ticket with an ill thought through flexi-season ticket have not had anything like the impact policymakers had hoped for, precisely because it didn’t take into account the public’s post-pandemic needs.

Next week’s King Speech can go a long way to delivering a better offer with long awaited new legislation to reform the railways. The creation of a new centralised body to own and run the infrastructure, with private firms contracted to run trains will be called ‘Great British Railways’ (GBR). This is meant to replace the crowded plethora of public sector organisations that have overseen the failing franchise model and the more recent demise in passenger numbers.

This will likely see the return of a single brand for the railways which must avoid the unnecessary confusion of tickets that can be used on one operator’s train but not another, despite being on the same line and visiting the same destination.

But such legislation is woefully irrelevant and incomplete if it doesn’t lead to easier, flexible and cheaper tickets all of which is necessary for a more customer centric railway. Plans announced in September to start closing nearly every ticket office in England are back to front. Passengers need to be told that the closure of manned ticket kiosks will only follow the smooth introduction of the world’s best digital ticketing system which can provide the cheapest and most flexible fares at the time of purchase. This was meant to happen last year with the new GBR but the plans are long delayed.