January 2017

Summary

We all knew that people worked on trains.  This note goes further.  It cites a report by Mott MacDonald, commissioned by the DfT, and one by Microsoft.  Taken together, those reports show that business time on a train is almost as productive as time spent in an office.  The implication is that the value of in-train journey time savings for business passengers should be set to zero, destroying the economic case for HS2 at a stoke.

The Mott MacDonald report[1]

The Mott MacDonald report of June 2009 with the title, “Productive Use of Rail Travel Time and the Valuation of Travel Time Savings for Rail Business Travellers” was commissioned by the DfT.  The report provides:-

• At page S-2, “It was found that the proportion of business travellers working on the train was, in Spring 2008, 82% for an outbound journey, and 77% on the return journey, a significantly higher value than the figure of 52% obtained from the National Passenger Survey (NPS) in Autumn 2004, the last comparable dataset. For those that spent some time working, the percentage of journey time spent working was 60% on the outward leg, and 54% on the return leg. For both directions combined, this corresponds to 46% of journey time by all business travellers being spent working”
• At page S-3, “In economic appraisal, if work is done on the train, it has to be appraised in terms of the working time needed were that to be done in the usual office environment. The SPURT surveys showed that some two-thirds (68%) of working business travellers would take “about the same” amount of time, 8% would take “more” time (on average 29 minutes more) and a quarter (24%) would take “less” time (on average 18 minutes less). Across all journey lengths a slight saving of 1.7 minutes per journey would be realised in the usual workplace as compared to the train, this corresponds approximately to a 97% efficiency of working on-train compared with at-workplace”

Hence nearly 45% of business in-train time is used effectively.

The Microsoft report

The Times, 5th Oct 2015, reports a study by Microsoft.[2]  It found, “Employees waste three hours of every shift and only half of the normal working day is productive”.  The implication of that, together with the findings in the Mott McDonald report, is that time in an office is no more productive than time in a train.

[1]  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4003/productive-use-of-travel-time.pdf

[2]  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4576147.ece,

The Government response to the House of Lords Economic Affairs committee, Cm 9078, says at paragraph 2.14, “Over 90 million passengers are expected to use HS2 each year once the full Y-network is complete – not just a few business people. Phase One is expected to carry 138,000 passengers a day, rising to over 300,000 passengers a day in 2036 after Phase Two opens and the full Y-network is complete”.

Well, 300,000 per day equates to 150.000 each way. They would require 150 one-thousand-seat trains or 12 per hour over 12 hours or a 1,000-seat train every five minutes with every seat taken, which is ludicrous.

After all, Virgin West Coast carries an average of only 200 passengers per train and the East Coast, 244 providing an average of 220 representing 56 million passenger journeys per year or 190,000 per day, not all of which would have one end in London. (Source, Office of Road and Rail statistics).

Why on earth does the Government believe this nonsense? It’s not as bad as the £15 billion benefits per year from the scandalous KPMG report but it is in the same league.

(The KPMG figure implies every generated business plus commuter trip yields £1,860 or £3,700 per round trip. To appreciate how ludicrous that is note that the £1,860, if applied to existing business plus commuter rail trips, would generates £1,500 billion pa equal to the nation’s entire GDP. If only that were true building a railway may rescue the nation. Instead the railway takes massive subsidy from the taxpayer every year).

The forecasts for HS1 were three times too high.  Perhaps the forecasts for HS2 would be more realistic if the executives, senior staff and their consultants were liable to prosecution, if the forecasts proved wildly wrong, as would arise if the matter were in support of a share offering.

Claire Haigh, Chief Executive, Greener Journeys, has a piece in the Transport Times blog of January 2017 which suggests buses are a solution to congestion, air pollution and all indicating a startling a lack of knowledge.

• A so-called green bus, presumably electric powered, will emit as much, or more carbon than, a diesel one once the emissions from power stations are taken into account.
• Heaven knows the environmental impact of disposing of all those lithium-ion batteries. Incidentally the battery of the hyped Tesla weighs half a tonne. So, in city conditions its fuel consumption, on account of stop and start, may be massive.
• A diesel car designed to pass the tests imposed on lorries and buses would emit a fraction of the NOx currently emitted by such vehicles. The target should be an appropriate change in the legislation.
• There is no more environmentally damaging vehicle than a subsidised bus lumbering around with a couple of passengers aboard – except perhaps a train.
• The idea that congestion can be solved by transferring a significant proportion of passenger journeys from car to public transport is unsustainable, see the first diagram below. It is from John Prescott’s white paper, “A New Deal for Transport: Better for everyone” Cm 3950, July 1998.  Obviously increasing bus and train use by e.g.  50% would have at best a marginal effect on cars.  Presumably Prescott and his advisors had no idea what the diagram implied.  If they had, the policy would not have been so idiotic.
• The second diagram, taken from Cm 7176: Delivering a Sustainable Railway, July 2007, when Ruth Kelly was the Sec of State, illustrates the trivial effect that transferring a few handfuls of people from car to public transport could have on carbon emissions. Despite that they continue to bleat about transferring people out of cars etc.
• A hydrogen powered vehicle is pure nonsense. Readers may not know it but there are no hydrogen mines.  Instead manufacture takes lots of energy and the gas is so volatile that it is nigh-on impossible to store.  It’s then bunt in an internal combustion engine which may be little more efficient than a diesel.
• (Burning wood chip is probably worse than burning coal. The wood chip would otherwise take decades to rot and give off its CO2 in which time other growth would absorb the same.  Burn it and find some more trees to burn …….).

So, I ask, who needs enemies when we have ignorant people like Clair Haigh, Prescott, Ruth Kelly and the rest of those Secretary of States, through to Philip Hammond, Patrick McLoughlin and Chris Grayling, along ,with their advisors, making “policy”.

Ms Haigh will be speaking at the Transport Times Conference, the UK Bus Summit on the 9th February in London – a seminar costing £195, thereby debarring all but the wealth or those on expenses.