People should consider avoiding unnecessary journeys to ease congestion on the roads and train overcrowding, a senior rail industry figure said yesterday.
Rail chief’s overcrowding solution – don’t travel | Uk News | News | Telegraph.
And in other news, Turkeys were seen voting for Christmas moving en masse to a Bernard Matthews holiday home.
On closer inspection, this is not, as at first billed, a “senior rail industry figure” at all, but Bill Emery, the chief executive of the office of the rail regulator. In other words, a senior civil servant.
The rail industry on the other hand would like people to travel by train – after all, that’s how it makes money. Well, that and handouts from the tax payer.
“If the Government introduces road pricing as indicated, it is likely to have the affect of a shift on to the railways,” said Bill Emery, the ORR’s chief executive. “It might have the desired affect of reducing the number of people who travel.”
“There is a question of whether journeys are really necessary. These are very big questions and not just for the rail regulators.”
Really? That would depend on factors such as whether rail is a viable alternative to the traffic jam and whether business is forward thinking enough to allow people to work from home or stagger their working hours.
Mr Emery’s remarks caused some surprise and bemusement in the industry. “Their job is to police safety and the finances of the railway, not to blunder into public policy about what services should be provided,” one source said.
One source is quite correct.
Perhaps another indication of Whitehall’s long-held desire for a return to the 1940s, central control and rationing: ‘Is your journey really necessary?‘.
I really would not mind if there was a return to nationalisation – provided some reliability and accountability was the outcome.
As things stand the quality of service is awful and it is remarkably difficult to find anyone to accept responsibiity for anything.
What this inane ‘Government’ (and I use that term in its very broadest sense) needs to do is to make up its mind whether we should be travelling by rail, road, dugout canoe, pony and trap, or at all.
Therein lies the problem with the horizontal split. Network Rail’s decision to take maintenance back in-house was a tacit acknowledgement of the flaws in this system. The people who run the trains have no control over the infrastructure over which they run, the people who own the infrastructure had little say in the effectiveness of the maintenance – despite contracts and audit regimes.
The best solution was a vertical split along regional boundaries with special arrangements for cross country and freight services using other companies metals.