The Department for Transport recently published its strategic vision for integrated transport within England (the Strategy). “Integration” sits at the heart of the Strategy: with a commitment to more joined-up decision-making across transport modes.
People are to be “at the heart of everything we do, so transport serves them, no matter who they are." This is something the rail industry has been working towards for some time, and is a key governmental objective of the current Railways Bill passing through Parliament. It is sometimes seen as a refrain, however, rather than delivering real and positive action. Tangible steps are needed to ensure the user is genuinely at the heart of the decision-making process.
“People” is supported by two further guiding principles: “Places” and “Partnerships”. “Places” relates to better connecting communities to drive growth, which forms a core part of the government's strategy. “Partnerships” is about ensuring local and national authorities work collaboratively with the transport sector to deliver optimal, integrated outcomes. Further devolution, and empowerment of locally-elected leaders to make the right decisions for their areas, also features in the Strategy.
Particularly interesting is recognition that a journey is “door-to-door”. Passengers do not care about transport modes, or who operates them. They care about getting from one place to another - whether for work or for leisure. This touches a number of areas. First, integrated ticketing. London's Oyster and contactless system is the most famous example, but bus franchising is also seeing integrated ticketing rolled out across Manchester's Bee network and soon-to-be Liverpool's franchised bus network. Ensuring a seamless ticketing system, in which passengers are confident they have been charged the correct fare, will be an essential component of success.
Second, integrated service provision: a less frequent bus service should not be timetabled to arrive at the railway station just after the train has departed. In addition to infrastructure improvements, this is a part of driving safety and accessibility, so that people are not waiting around for transport where they may not feel safe. Ensuring sensible, system-wide, decisions are taken with the customer in mind will be important. The Strategy notes that this could be supported by data, and it is important to understand the data we have, and deploy it, with relevant technology. Various stakeholders will need to be brought together and work collaboratively.
This neatly links into confidence in the system itself: services need to be reliable, accessible and affordable in that “door-to-door” journey; else people will not use them. Equally important is that “affordable” needs to be linked to people feeling there is “value for money”. This relates to both reliability and accessibility, but also what happens when things go wrong. What information is made available? How are passengers helped with their journeys when there is disruption? Getting this right is key.
The Strategy has a lot of useful principles at its core. How they translate into real action remains to be seen, but this is a useful foundation for future decision-making and action.
