I work in I.T and companies have found in 2020 that you can get the same results with people working from home as you can with people commuting into the office. Lets face it most people who commute are doing keyboard related jobs. The internet seems to have replaced the train and doing a grand job of it to.
I find it hard to believe that Boris is putting so much investment in railways when nobody is using them and to my knowledge my company has no plans to bring everyone back into the office.
If that model fits most businesses where are the passengers coming from to fill the trains we have? With more railways and more trains being built it seems the biggest builds and ambitions have come at exactly the wrong time.
As a rail enthusiast I watch videos of people travelling on trains and the the seats are all empty. Some stations have more spotters on them than passengers.
What is your experiences? Do you commute on train? What are the numbers like on your commute train to work?
I work in an office designing roads, my team of 6 all still wish to be in the office, I've got kids who would be around for some of time some days.
Another is married to a childminder, I needn't need to say any more.
Another is a graduate and is still learning so asks a lot of questions and needs a fair amount of guidance. They also live alone.
Two others don't have good office space.
We've all found that there's advantages of being in the office on terms of communication, not least being able to judge when it's a good time to ask a question (i.e. the person you wish to take to isn't busy, isn't in a meeting/on a call, etc.)
Whilst I would expect that we'll end up with some WFH it's not going to be the default situation.
Likewise I'd expect that there'll be some (probably easily 25%, but could be higher) of people who will have a similar preference. Whilst that's still going to leave a significant number who would like working from home I'd expect that would mostly be doing so about 2 or 3 days a week. That's still going to result in commuting levels of about 2/3 of what we saw before.
That's before you consider that a reduction in miles traveled site to WFH could also impact on car use, which on turn could change the economics of car ownership.
For some that could result in more occasional rail travel as well as some extra rail travel for getting to/from work.
Given that 80% of travel is by road a 1.25% shift from road to rail would result in an extra 10% (2019 values) uplift in miles traveled by rail.
Given that new car sales in September were very low (and it's worth remembering that restrictions weren't that bad at the beginning of the month with businesses being encouraged to reopen offices) it's not looking like that there's going to be a significant shift from rail to road use long term. In that probably the drop is mostly down to people WFH rather than driving to work.
Anyway, of there's a 15% drop in use overall then all that's going to mean is that we'll be back to 2015 levels of rail use. Whilst that may well take to 2030 to recover to 2019 levels it's not as bad as some suggest that it could be.
Even a 20% fall would only be back to 2012 levels.
Now whilst that seems a million miles from where we're at, given that we're at 40%, it should be noted that some big companies took the decision to say that everyone could work from home until the end of this year back in the late spring. Whilst others were planning on encouraging staff back to the office just before Boris said that people needed to work from home again.
Chances are a lot of those falls will be in London and the South East, rather than the rural lines which people fear might get cut if there's reductions in travel and they're not viable any more (such lines are unlikely to see much of a fall as they are less likely to be carrying many office based commuters).
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