Tag: transport

High-Speed Rail

August 26th, 2009 · · Society, Technology No comments - Tags:

Just been interviewed by Real Radio about the newly announced high-speed rail link between London and Glasgow. I haven’t expanded my remit to cover transport now – just a random collaring at Piccadilly station. Good topic for a quick blog entry though, while I ride the standard speed train down to London.

Do we need a high speed rail link? My natural inclination is to say ‘yes, of course’. It’s cool new(ish) tech; it will make me more time-efficient; it cuts the arguments for the more carbon-intense options of flying and driving. But I find I’m not without concerns.

At £34bn, it’s not going to be cheap, and somehow that cost will inevitably be transferred to the traveler. Now that I have other people booking trains for me (in advance), I’m finding the costs a little less oppressive, but the trade-off is the lack of flexibility. The nature of work travel means that sometimes it is hard to predict when you will want to travel, but the price of open off peak tickets is absolutely prohibitive. I can already foresee a situation where I know the train could get me home in an hour, but I have to wait three hours for the next train my ticket allows me to take.

Higher speed also doesn’t fix the main problem with trains: they get you to where the tracks end, not where you want to go. Even if it only takes an hour to get into London, I would still choose to drive to meetings around the south east because of the cost and complexity of getting to smaller stations, and then from the stations to the meetings themselves. Without a car it takes huge amounts of time and money – neither of which I or most people can afford in a working day.

Despite all this though, on balance I am in favour of the new link. On occasions it will be very useful, and, I hope, the price might not be too painful.

Manchester says ‘no’: a massive marketing failure

December 12th, 2008 · · Society No comments - Tags: ,

After months of campaigning it wasn’t even close. In every single council district across Manchester, people voted to reject the £3bn Transport Innovation Fund investment, and the congestion charge attached to it. This came as little surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the debate. The referendum was lost by the ‘Yes’ campaign months ago.

The ‘Yes’ campaign entirely failed to communicate the benefits of the TIF bid to voters. The volume of paper sent out was massive but the presentation was too complex and the detail too great. In marketing terms, it was all about the features not the benefits. Nowhere were people told how the bid would benefit them specifically. The only attempts to simplify the arguments were the insipid adverts, no match for the starkly negative messages of the ‘No’ campaign.

With the ‘Yes’ campaign mired in detail and unable to translate the investment plans into real-world benefits, the ‘No’ campaign was given an easy ride. But it was still conducted well. On a fraction of the ‘Yes’ campaign’s budget, the ‘No’ campaigners managed to focus the entire debate on the congestion charge rather than the planned transport improvements. The moment that the debate in the media became focused on the charge not the investment, the vote was lost. In the current financial climate the emotive adverts about the potential costs for drivers had an amplified effect. Without them I think it would have still been a ‘no’. With them the result was overwhelming.

I’m not saying the ‘Yes’ campaign was easy. Far from it. But this is one marketing campaign with a very clear, very public metric of success. And the figures speak for themselves. This campaign failed.

Northern Wail

August 3rd, 2008 · · Society No comments - Tags: , , ,

Northern Rail, First Transpennine Express and Network Rail: please give me a call. As a communications professional I can stop you making such chronic balls-ups as this one.

As mentioned in previous post, my wife had a not-so-entertaining experience on the trains recently. She, along with all the other people who regularly get her train, turned up at the usual time at Burnage station one Monday morning. The lady behind the counter comes out and says to them all: “You do know the 8.29 isn’t running don’t you?” That would be a ‘no’. How were they supposed to know? “There’s been a poster up for ages.”

Here is that poster in all its glory (click on it for a larger view).

Now this may only make sense to residents of Manchester, or those that know the geography of the Northwest. Suffice to say that all of the stations mentioned on this poster go from Manchester NORTH. Our station is SOUTH of Manchester. Not only is our individual station not mentioned, neither is any other stop on our line. In fact the diagram seems to show that our station is NOT affected. But it is affected: the train won’t be running for over a month.

This error was compounded in a couple of ways. Firstly, the timetables that the companies concerned produced for the work-affected trains. These only showed the trains that had been affected and altered. Not the trains that were running normally: of course you need a separate timetable for that (!?!?!?!?). And throughout this timetable? A colour code that has no key. So all crystal clear there.

Secondly, the companies are offering no compensation for those travellers with season tickets because they “have provided alternative transport”. Hmmm, I’m not sure an occasional service that requires the commuters to travel over an hour earlier in the mornings can really be considered equivalent.

Why is this relevant to this blog? Because companies have to move in to the present first if we’re to have any hope of getting to the future.

An efficient public transport infrastructure is vital to both a successful economy and tackling climate change. Every cock-up like this drives more people back to their cars.

In the 21st century, is a poster really the best these companies can do to reach out to their customers? Quite apart from the total inaccuracy of the message, the medium hardly seems sufficient when you are talking about the working lives of thousands of people. I’d say that they were cheapskates, but I’m not sure that the alternatives would be any more expensive than designing, printing and taping up posters in every station.

So if you are reading this and you work for Northern Rail, Network Rail, or First Transpennine Express, I realise I may not be your favourite person right now. But please, give me or one of my colleagues in the communications industry a call. We can talk to you about quality processes to ensure that little details (like the whole south side of a major city), don’t slip through the cracks. We can talk to you about clarity of communication, so that what you produce is comprehensible. And we can talk to you about using appropriate media for communicating, so that your message reaches people before they turn up to get a non-existent train on a Monday morning.