John Lauder, Senior Programme Development Manager, Scotland’s Railway (Network Rail)

Really thinking about how people get to a station and then make their onward trip

The strategy I lead is called Railway for Everyone and I was seconded into rail two years ago to write the first chapter of that, which is the Sustainable Travel to Stations (STtS) strategy, which has on overall aim to reduce driving to station to 10 per cent of trips by 2035, with increased bus and active modes to be the dominant modes of how people get to stations.

Over the past two years, we’ve for the first time begun to understand how people get to our stations in Scotland. The dominant modes are walking and wheeling, after that, the next highest mode is bus and then it’s driver, but our emphasis in the past decade has been on driver – we’ve invested a lot in park and ride schemes, we’ve invested a lot in car parking. That didn’t grow passenger numbers – that’s a lesson we’ve learned.

Our strategy is being rolled out across Scotland, in partnership with local authorities and communities, and our aim is that every year we’ll deliver improvements in accessibility across our four pillars of accessibility – how people get to a station and then make their onward trip from train – something we haven’t necessarily done a lot of thinking of in Scotland.

We’ve relied on people doing the thinking on how to get to stations themselves, and we haven’t necessarily done the deep collaboration with local authorities, in particular, that we could have done, to make sure it’s easy to get to the station by bus, by wheeling, by walking and by cycling. For us, that means a much deeper relationship with our local authority partners, because it’s their roads and their streets that people need to use to get to our stations. Everything we’re doing is under the umbrella of at least doubling the numbers of people using trains in Scotland – that’s our clear aim. As part of that, the Scottish Government is committed to decarbonising all passenger services by 2035. What that gives us is a really big opportunity, along four strategic corridors, to not look at decarbonisation not just as an engineering project where we electrify along lines but also where we decarbonise everything, including how people get to the station.

That’s pillar one. Pillar two is how people move around within the station, if it’s warm, clean, well lit. Third pillar is platform to platform step free access. And pillar four is level boarding. Pillar one is where we have to collaborate. Budgets are tight and the biggest challenge is pillar three. That’s our strategic aim and what we’re seeking to do over the next 20 years.