Leon Daniels, OBE, President of CILT

Reflections and summing up

The clever thing in the question was about expectations. Whether we like it or not, the public has very high expectations of multimodal interoperability, communication and interchange. So all this stuff we’ve been talking about only makes some progress towards what they are expecting.

Here are a few of things that jumped out to me…

1. About engaging with communities, Jules and John – that business about car parking not necessarily being an indication of car patronage, and of the experience inside stations is as important as the experience to and from them. The good relationships between bus and rail operators (Rich, you said this) and Barclay, you mentioned about it being better when in common ownership, but we mustn’t discriminate against the places where bus and rail are in different ownership. Kate made the point about people being able to travel at all, which was hugely important, and also the huge increase in people cycling to and from stations.

2. I’m here as president of CILT. CILT doesn’t have a policy on this, so these are my views.

3. Connections between bus and rail only work in one direction. If the bus arrives at the station in time for the train, then the people on the train who want the bus will miss it. People need to understand that when we work very hard on this, it only works in one direction. We need to make sure, we’re moving in the right direction.

4. I’m fascinated to learn how little we know about origin and destination for many of our travellers, and how little we know about the retail problem we have. People go shopping in supermarkets and make very complicated retail decisions, Tesco’s, Heinz, big tins, little tins…  they get to the checkout with literally a basket full of value for money decisions. Yet they tell us public transport fares are complicated. How is it that people make these sophisticated decisions in one place but find public transport fares complicated?

5. Finally, two things that I think we should take away as actions.

a. We must stop the people that provide journey planners from optimising the journey planning in a way that isn’t optimised for passengers but for the commission they make on the other parts of the service.

b. The default rail ticket to 280 destinations should be the PlusBus ticket. You should have to opt out of it, not into it. Frankly, if I’m paying £70 to Bristol, I should pay £72 to go to Bristol and it should give me free bus travel at the end. If I get something for free, I try it. What would we do with all those £2s? We would give them, in proportion, to all the bus operators and they would provide us with a much better service. It would produce a whole lot more revenue which can be used to provide better bus services at railway stations. Those are my thoughts, thank you very much.