Rail Air

Air-Rail Intermodality 2: The “Heath-Wick” Debate

In our September blog we discussed how the global growth of high-speed rail should be giving rise to interline agreements between airlines and rail companies. However, we recognised that air-rail intermodality cannot become a reality until we have the investment in infrastructure needed to make it viable. High speed rail services either need to connect directly to international airports or effective transit systems between airport and station must be established to make transfers as seamless and efficient as possible.

It was with great interest therefore that we read in October about the proposal to build a new ‘Heath-wick’ airport hub featuring a £5 billion high speed rail link between Gatwick and Heathrow. The idea was put forward by Councillor Victoria Borwick, a member of the Greater London Authority’s transport committee and former Conservative party treasurer, who believes it will expand capacity around London without jeopardising the coalition’s promise not to build new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted.
The proposed link would mean that passengers would be able to travel between the two major international airports in the South East in just 15 minutes. The 35-mile high-speed rail route would see trains travelling at up to 180mph parallel to the M25, before disappearing into tunnels en route to Gatwick. Passengers would not need to pass through immigration or check-in twice.
Unsurprisingly, the idea has received a mixed response. Willie Walsh, the chief executive of International Airlines Group, has said that it would be difficult to deliver and potentially more expensive than the proposed third runway at Heathrow. He also questioned who would pay for it when the airlines using it had offered to pay for the new runway. Others have argued that hub airports, and Heathrow is the UK's only one, rely on single site operation to gain the efficiencies of having functions such as engineering, catering and maintenance in one place.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson meanwhile, despite his enthusiasm for building a new international hub airport in the Thames Estuary said the idea was "certainly worth exploring" and praised the former Transport Secretary Philip Hammond as "brave and right" for suggesting the hub.
Undoubtedly this debate is only set to continue in the run up to spring 2012 when the Department for Transport is set to publish a draft aviation policy for consultation. For the rail industry, however, what the proposal shows is concerted recognition of and support for the role that high-speed rail can play in increasing transport capacity and efficiency, especially when it works in conjunction with airlines and existing air transport infrastructure. Whilst there is still a way to go before we see a fully integrated air-rail transport system in the UK of the type we envisaged in September, this proposal surely represents a stride in the right direction.

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2 Dec 2011

Posted by: Philip Martin

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Planes, trains (and automobiles): intermodality is the future of global travel

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5 Oct 2011

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Another year, another ash cloud…

Only a year after the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull caused travel chaos for millions of air passengers, this month a second volcanic ash cloud threatened to do the same. Over 200 flights in and out of Scotland and Germany were cancelled as ash fragments from the Icelandic volcano, Grimsvotn drifted over Northern Europe. Fortunately, it was not as serious as first thought and the cloud dispersed after just a few days and in time for the bank holiday weekend.

It is timely that this occurred so soon after the release of the EU whitepaper - Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area - which provides a vision of a fully integrated, European - wide travel network that will encompass all modes of transport. For, as the familiar scenes of stranded holidaymakers hit our screens, the overreliance on airlines by travellers and the woeful unpreparedness of the European travel network for disruption to air travel was once again laid bare.

Currently, when flights are cancelled the majority of passengers are forced to either abandon their plans or seek and pay for an alternative form of transport themselves. As the Financial Times reported on May 25^th, the one exception to this rule was in Berlin where Lufthansa advised passengers on cancelled flights that they could exchange their tickets for rail vouchers. Lufthansa’s ability to do this was thanks to the interlining agreement that it holds with Deutsche Bahn. This makes it easier for passengers to book their travel using multiple providers and make changes to their itinerary when necessary.

Such agreements are currently far from commonplace; but they could and should be. Technology has the potential to transform the travel experience and help the industry to streamline its services so that travellers can have a seamless journey, however they choose to travel. This can be achieved through a combination of the right technology and access to the right travel content - through a global distribution system that is already used across the travel and tourism industry.

Interline agreements across the European network form the quickest route to fulfilling the EU whitepaper’s vision. The current lack of them is due to the fact that there is NO open access for rail to this distribution network (access to full fares and timetables). This needs to be executed in cooperation with a European standard in order to ensure the traveller benefits from a total trip experience and the railways (and airlines) start to capture new business from other modes of transport. Not only will doing this ensure that travellers across Europe are kept moving even in the event of disruption, but it will reduce our reliance on carbon guzzling aeroplanes - another key objective of the white paper and crucial to meeting our 2020 carbon emission targets.

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30 May 2011

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Monthly blog from Andrew Sharp (IARO Director General) Jan 2011

"No-one told us anything" is a frequent complaint made by the travelling public during major disruption. That kind of comment regularly hits the news media.

There are good reasons for passengers to receive less than comprehensive information. One of these is unrealistic expectations. Is it possible to manage both information and expectations better – and if so, how?

During the volcanic ash cloud emergency, no-one knew more than about 8 hours in advance what the situation was going to be – whether planes were going to be allowed to fly and where to. So for a passenger to ask, “When are you going to fly me home?” and expect a firm answer was just not realistic. Reasonable to the passenger, maybe, but unrealistic.

Similarly during the recent winter weather problems, affecting airports from Moscow to Chicago, people wanted to know when they would be able to fly. No-one knew when the snow would stop: no-one knew when it could be cleared enough for planes to move around the airfield safely and take off – especially if the destination airport was also affected.

Planes need to move away from stands so that inbound planes can take their place, unload, load and take off again. This smoothly choreographed plan is blindingly obvious to those in the industry: it can be unrealised, unappreciated, by passengers.

Delayed passengers can understandably get annoyed and frustrated: they can want to take out their annoyance and frustration on someone. Airline and airport staff, equally understandably, do not wish to be assaulted – verbally or otherwise – when trying to deal with passengers.

It is very difficult to deal with a crowd of stressed passengers individually. Each member of the crowd demands priority, and can be reluctant to allow a member of staff to give one passenger a full answer before moving on and handing their own questions. One person trying to help can be mobbed, and the information given to one passenger in a crowd can be passed on, distorted and wrongly assumed to apply to all.

Hence the reports of staff taking shelter behind remote check-in desks, or even going into hiding – and the reports that, “There were no staff around to help me”.

Allied to this is the willingness of passengers to assume that anyone in uniform knows everything! They don’t, of course: even well-informed airport employees are often unable to answer ticketing questions, for example.

A big component of the problem is the load factor issue. Planes are 80% - 90% full, on average. So for every 100 seats on an aircraft, there are only 10-20 spare on each flight. If, because of winter weather, a day’s flights are cancelled, it is going to take about a week to catch up. If Monday’s flights are cancelled, Tuesday’s flights can only take Tuesday’s passengers plus 10% of Monday’s, and so on.

So if you were booked to travel on Monday, it could well be Friday before you actually leave – which leads to the associated question of who decides who flies when?

Having been on both sides of this myself – a transport operator with delayed passengers, and a delayed passenger – I appreciate the need for people to be given as much information as possible. Exactly how this should be done in this day and age of social media and the like I do not know, beyond stating that passengers need to be informed where they are and in a way they can accept and understand. Not everyone tweets!

People who know what is going on, people who are told why they cannot fly now, are more likely to be accepting of the problem. However, the problem of how exactly you put across complex issues – like the load factor problem – to a stressed and unsympathetic audience, needs work. A new challenge for the transportation industry, I think!

I hope you enjoyed reading this: I look forward to your feedback.

Andrew

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13 Jan 2011

Posted by: Philip Martin

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