The UK's three per cent increase in rail fares has incensed passengers, and could add more than £100 to the price of some season tickets in 2019. But the long-term cost could be much higher.
Transport accounts for more than a quarter of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, with the majority of that coming from cars and vans. As train fares increase, and punctuality – which is at a 13-year-low – goes down, driving can become a more attractive option than taking the train for regular commuters.
“Rail fare rises are bad news for long-suffering passengers, but they are also terrible news for the environment,” says Darren Shirley, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport. “If even a small percentage of the millions of people who use the railways are pushed onto the roads through unaffordable fares, our climate will suffer.”
According to The Trainline, a family of four travelling from London to Bournemouth – around 100 miles – could expect to pay between £55 and £170 for train tickets, depending on when they booked. The same journey by car can cost around £20 in petrol, according to Journey Price.
That train journey would release greenhouse gases equivalent to 13.536kg of carbon dioxide per passenger, according to figures from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (try the calculator based on this data here), while a petrol car making the trip will account for 55.731kg of CO2 equivalent in total (not per passenger).
For longer distance journeys where flights are an option the problem is even more acute. Flying from London to Edinburgh, for instance, releases six times as much carbon dioxide as taking the train.
Obviously, the exact carbon footprint of a rail journey will depend on how full the service is, and myriad other factors, but in the UK rail makes up less than one percent of total emissions, and this figure should go down as electrification becomes more widespread.
In a recent report, the UK Committee on Climate Change recommends bringing the number of miles travelled by car down by five per cent in order to help meet emissions targets. A 2008 report commissioned by the Campaign for Better Transport suggested that a 20 per cent reduction in fares would have sparked a 17 per cent increase in rail travel by 2015.
“Everything possible should be done to enable more people to use public transport, walking and cycling rather than more polluting means, such as driving," says Shirley. But instead, fares have risen sharply in recent years – they’re now more than a third higher than they were at the start of 2010.
Read more: What is climate change? The definition, causes and effects
However, passenger numbers have increased in step with fares, even through the financial crash and subsequent recession – something which took even the Department for Transport (DfT) by surprise. The number of rail journeys has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 735 million in 1994-95 to 1.73 billion in the last year, even as the total number of trips per person we make across all modes of transport has fallen by 16 per cent, according to the National Travel Survey. We now travel 66bn kilometres a year by rail, twice as much as in 1992.
Some people, particularly commuters in large cities, have no option but to take public transport because of traffic congestion and limited parking. There’s also a demographic component – young people are much less likely to have a driving licence than their parents’ generation, due to the rising cost of insurance and a squeeze on disposable income.
“There is no indication that passengers are leaving the railway,” says a DfT spokesperson. “In fact, as a result of the continued investment in our rail network, passenger numbers have more than doubled.”
Convoluted pricing structures and offers make teasing out the relationship between fares and transport habits incredibly complicated, even for the train companies themselves, according to rail strategy expert Jim Steer.
But, there’s some evidence that the fare increases are starting to bite. The total number of rail journeys taken in the UK dropped by more than nine million between the fourth quarter of the 2016-17 financial year and the same period in 2017-2018. Figures released by the DfT in December 2017 revealed a 9.4 per cent drop in season ticket sales between July and September 2017 compared with the previous year.
Some jurisdictions have experimented with making public transport completely free in an attempt to tackle emissions from other modes. In December, Luxembourg – which has the highest rates of car ownership in the European Union – announced that its public transport system of trains, trams and buses will become entirely free from the summer of 2019.
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has had a similar scheme running for its residents for a few years, although tourists still have to pay. However, according to research by Oded Cats at Delft University of Technology’s Department of Transport and Planning, the main effect of the scheme has been to reduce the number of people making journeys on foot.
People who would have walked will jump on a bus instead – use of public transport in Tallinn has increased by 14 per cent, but the car journeys that account for the bulk of emissions have continued largely unabated. “We see that choices of which mode to use are much more to do with service qualities,” said Cats in an interview. “If this investment is made in increasing frequency rather than reducing the prices you're much more likely to gain new customers.”
It’s quite unlikely we’ll be getting free travel in the UK any time soon, but the government has introduced new schemes to try and bring down the cost for certain groups, including a new ‘millennial railcard’ for 26 to 30-year-olds. The rise in fares has been part of a slow move away from subsidies towards passengers paying more, but in 2017/18, the UK government still provided £6.4bn to the railway industry, a third of which went straight to HS2.
As YouGov have pointed out, rail passengers tend to be at the higher end of the earnings scale. Cutting fares in favour of more government contributions could lower overall emissions from transportation, but amounts to a subsidy for the wealthy at the expense of those less well off. Essentially the fares debate boils down to a question of who should foot the bill for our travel: passengers, taxpayers or the environment?
Updated 04/01/19, 17:41GMT: This article has been updated to clarify carbon dioxide amounts for journeys and CO2 equivalents.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
