Direct services everywhere shouldn’t be the goal of the Railway though, that’s a reason why the UK has such a congested rail network. Frequent and reliable regular connections are better than a few direct trains per day as it allows flexibility for passengers and is operationally efficient. How many people actually travel from Nuneaton to Scotland and the other way around? Many Scottish people haven’t heard of that place!
I agree that the regular service to a hub followed by onwards 'Inter City' Journey offers a more consistent journey time and is probably a better operating model, but there are people who will look for the 1 or 2 tpd through services, and tailor their travel plans to use them. People with mobility issues, loaded down with luggage or travelling with children may opt for the direct service.
It’s tempting to be dismissive about ‘a few Glasgow suburban stations’ but North Lanarkshire district has a population of well over 300,000.
Lumo west coast is popular north of Preston. Very popular with passengers changing at Motherwell to go to Glasgow
And will I suspect be used by DfT to mean “whatever we determine at the time” rather than being an objective test. It could well be remunerative for the lawyers.
That would be true if London wasn't treated as the center of the universe. That's why Open Access to London exists, to fill that 'gap'.
Neither is Heathrow Airport!
Nor is it plausible to expect them to. The point, though, is that Open Access increases the total market for rail, rather than just taking a slice of someone else's cake.
I mean of course, that's why I'm kind of in two minds about it. On the one hand, Trenitalia and Italo's competition have made Italy's high-speed network better, and the Madrid-Barcelona route has given passengers four options between AVE, Avlo, Ouigo and Iryo. It can make passenger services better, but in principle I also believe railways are a public service first while open access will merely cherry-pick the most profitable routes. Having recently returned from Switzerland which practically has no open-access operations, competition isn't an absolute necessity for a better railway.
In the real world of the UK, I'll put money in the OA basket over one marked "government making or letting the railway be good". I also don't fully buy into the view that, if the railway is a public good, the service must be publicly provided - that seems to blur categories.
The railway doesn't have to provide a direct service from London to everywhere, that would be practically impossible, but it should provide an easy enough access through connections and interchange at the very least. If you don't believe that a service must be provided because the railway is a public good, then what do you believe the railway is?
I don't believe it's a detriment if the state-owned operators aren't providing a service even if there is a market for it, but you can't really argue against the idea that OA operators are cherry picking. They all want a piece of the intercity or airport express market, but none of them want a piece of the regional and suburban rail lines. Competition on the railway is only competition for the most profitable high-yield routes.
Two separate issues. On cherry picking, it's simply a question of basic market economics. New services into a market encourage further demand, which (up to a point) benefits the market as a whole. The category error some make is in assuming that, because an OA has done this, it is costing the other operators.
There is nothing like a bit of competition on quality front, which of course tends to weed out the rubbish offering as poor quality or value
To be fair, some of the current nationalised operators do cherry picking too, putting better, or newer, or faster rolling stock on some routes, or giving better catering on selected routes, even beating those of longer duration than some others they operate.
Switzerland is different, it is happy to spend to sort bottlenecks, or add spurs, tunnels and flyovers so service patterns can reflect 21st century population, leisure and workflows.
They're also not exactly "cherry-picking the most profitable bits" (as an MP was quoted as saying a couple of months back on this thread) either though.
Maybe it could cost other operators in the sense that the paths the OA operators are using could've been used by the state-owned operator, but this doesn't really hold much water given there wasn't much stopping them from using them previously.
I can sort of see where you're coming from here; that while the provision of transport is a public good, whether the railway is publicly or privately owned and operated is a different matter entirely. I just lean towards state ownership because if railways are a public good, there comes a fundamental tension between that reality and the fact a private company's top priority is delivering a return on investments to it's shareholders.
I would personally put this down to cultural and institutional attitudes rather than the state having a monopoly. Britain and the Anglosphere in general (from my point of view) seem to think of railways as costly relics of the 19th century, partly evident by the DfT's desire to reduce subsidy and shift the cost onto the user rather than the taxpayer. It's not helped by the fact we're trying to run a 21st century operation on 19th century infrastructure without the political will to build new railways.
Which is why I'm not inherently against open access operators even though I have my own reservations about them in principle.
I would certainly prefer a more standardised level of service but I can sort of see why an intercity service to London with many business passengers might get better first class provision than one to Bournemouth which may be more catered towards tourists. This lack of standardised service is a legacy of taking different private operators in house and I hope in the long-term GBR changes it to be more consistent.
I think this just comes back to my earlier point of institutional attitudes. While Switzerland seems to be happy to treat railways as a major pulse of the nation's entire national infrastructure, Britain seems to think railways should pay for themselves and that they exist to compete with road and air travel rather than provide their own transport niche. Open access filling gaps is arguably a symptom of this problem.
