For leisure I'm sure passengers will return, but for the more profitable business travel the strikes and general railway unreliability at the moment is helping to further ingrain digital / remote ways of working in my experience.
In our business, aside from the commute to office, travel to project / supplier meetings generated some train travel previously. These have switched to Teams calls, some permanently so. So I expect we'll end up with a high mix of Teams meetings and fewer in person meetings even once the strikes end. That's even greener and cheaper for businesses.
If nothing else there is lost income from these strike days. Unless railway subsidy is going to increase to fund this income shortfall, won't this require further savings to be found in this financial year?
I am not so sure the industrial disputes are the only thing putting passengers off, look at Avanti, TPE among others. Frequent cancellations and high unreliability and people are paying thousands of pounds a year for these services. The railway itself doesn't make itself look very attractive, but some people have no choice but to take the train.
For our business travel the competition is Teams not another mode of transport.
I think this is the key point being overlooked by RMT. Without COVID, or if COVID lockdowns had not lasted so long, the strikes would be having more impact. As it is however, Lynch seems to have made the same mistake as Scargill- not taken account of the context in the timing of the industrial action and allowing a political desire to "kick out the Tories" to become the dominant narritive.
I recall a senior rail person who once referred to a 1st class season ticket on the south-eastern/southern area TOCs as "the ultimate distress purchase" A very accurate phrase. However, the unthinkable happened and COVID plus a particular stage of IT infrastructure/software/hardware development came together, and remote working became common
and embedded.
We've entirely stopped the monthly meetings we used to have in London that required me and my peers to travel there from all over the country, the vast majority doing so by rail, and that state of affairs is the same at all grades of the very large employer that I work for. It's all done via Teams now and won't revert except for once a year.
I suspect that's the same for most large nationwide companies.
As has been said rail has no form of monopoly for business travellers, and especially not against Zoom and Teams. Not to understand this is very naive.
A good friend has an IT business. He said a year ago that this is how it would go- as big companies had now invested so much into remote working infrastructure, there was no longer a way back to "before times."
And you know, I'm not sure the Westminster govt (i.e. the DfT) are so much gung-ho, as paralysed by indecision. They genuinely seem so out of touch that they have no idea what a post-COVID railway will need to deliver. So, rather than commit to a course of action, they sit on their hands and let things drift along- there's no real need to settle after all as it's not causing that much real pain to a large number of people (compared to the pain if the Grid falls over for example), HMT won't give hem the money anyway, and so they wait until they can see what the usage pattern things have settled into with the combination poor service and strikes before deciding about how much of a railway we really need. (The delay to the next HLOS determination tends to support that view IMO).
I don't think this is wholly party political BTW- both Sunak and Starmer are Blairites- rather it's also a reflection of a poor Senior Civil Service capability/competence aided and abetted by the massive hollowing out of the CS specialist grades that's happened over the last 20 years or so. The seeds of much of this were sown by Blair- to all intents and purposed we've had Blairite govt for over 20 years and the Blairite philosophy weaknesses and slight of hand (e.g. PFI spend in NHS) are starting to cripple core systems. There's no vision for the future any more (other than "magical thinking" towards the fairy-tale that is "net zero"), nor can I see any vision in the current Labour front bench unfortunately. Difficult to see how it gets better from here- in England anyway.
Still, some further-sighted (and non-Blairite) devolved areas are going things differently. In Wales, the policy is (I believe) to encourage home-based working (opposite to the Westminster attempts to get people back into offices) because this allows people to remain living in their community but get a decent job. It also reduced the amount of infrastructure spend the govt is required to do for coping with commuting crowds (retaining peak capacity for commuters has always been a costly part of public transport systems). This was all helped of course by the previous big push on roll-out of fibre broadband in Wales (stringing the fibre from the electricity poles in rural areas is much cheaper and very successful). The Welsh govt were laughed at when they pushed for this a few years back (as was a certain Mr. Corbyn when he suggested a "right to broadband" a few years ago), but time has shown they were on the ball. But then the Wales labour party has always been a different kind of Labour- i.e. actual Labour, not Blairite (I remember what happened when Blair tried to foist his candidate for First Minister on the first Assembly.... it didn't end well for Blair). Add in the better relations between the railway and TfW, and the TfW system being under less pressure, and although it's not perfect in Wales, it's a sight better than in England.
Interesting times [
in the Chinese curse sense].
TPO
