14 - Rail as a Component of Urban Multi-Modal Transport

Question 1

National trends

Answer 1

Ageing population: 2016 had 12.4m people over pension age; changes balance of where people live, how they want to spend their time, how they want to travel and their funds to do so; affects workforce available
Urbanisation: more young people living in cities; mostly driven by younger people moving to cities; declining number of driving licences held by young people, possible increase in use of other transport modes such as rail
New business models: Uber/Deliveroo; Work accommodation changes, shared spaces
Digital networks, 5G: enabling working from home

Question 2

Impact of national trends on transport

Answer 2

Fewer trips and shorter distances
Commuting journeys have fallen
Online shopping - more deliveries, fewer shopping trips
2005-2018, private hire vehicles up 55% nationally, 120% in London

Question 3

Impact of COVID-19 on transport

Answer 3

Freight has been much more resilient than passenger demand
Some passenger demand changes may be long term

Question 4

Intelligent mobility

Answer 4

Primarily a business concept
Getting people/things from A to B in cost-effective way
Using communications to route traffic, preventing disruption
Charging people for travel regardless of mode
Often equated with electric and driverless/autonomous vehicles or linked with ‘Mobility as a service (MasS)’, a move away from personal ownership of transport
Can also include trains, buses, e-bikes, scooters etc.

Question 5

Are trains about to disappear?

Answer 5

For lightly used routes, autonomous pods could provide sufficient capacity
For urban situations, unlikely to reach space efficiency and energy efficiency of steel wheel on rail

Question 6

Important factors of passenger experience

Answer 6

Station environment
Ease of transfer
Service frequency
Safety
Price

Question 7

What are ‘journey stages’?

Answer 7

Walking into station
Waiting on platform
Riding on train
Changing between trains/platforms
etc.

Question 8

What is the meaning of a passenger’s ‘value of time’?

Answer 8

Different journey stages are worth different amounts
Value of time is how much one would pay to reduce time of a journey stage
Evaluated by questionnaires and changeable over time

Question 9

What is a ‘journey score’?

Answer 9

Single journey can be given a journey score by a passenger
Network operator or transport planner needs to think wider - how do individual journeys add up to a ‘network score’

Question 10

Industry performance metrics

Answer 10

Public performance measure (PPM) - % of trains making entire planned journey and all planned station stops, arriving at terminating station within 5 mins
Times at intermediate stations and passenger experience are not considered
Metric can distort operation (e.g. building in ‘recovery time’ so a train running late can still reach terminal station on time but whole service is slower than needed)

Question 11

Factors influencing decision

Answer 11

Number of train journeys: shorter, more frequent trains; more drivers and onboard staff; network congestion as long and short trains each occupy the network to the same extent; ability to mix freight and passenger as freight is often slower so needs more time; freight is harder to route with lots of high frequency passenger services
Value of time: relevant to passenger experience; can be normalised by distance to compare different route lengths
Energy use
Utilisation level of assets and staff
Multi-modal
Risk - joining and separating multiple unit rolling stock can cause delays and misdirect passengers
Resilience - coping with difficult to foresee events (e.g. sports fixtures)
Multi-objective optimisation - application of genetic algorithms or Bayesian techniques