UK

Take the train

Mike Phipps reviews How the Railways Will Fix the Future, by Gareth Dennis, published by Repeater.

In most developed countries, transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and road transport accounts for the vast majority of that.

Battery motors will not fix this crisis. Moreover, they keep the focus on private, individualised transport, maintaining existing social inequalities and benefiting existing power structures, including resource extractors. As previously reported on Labour Hub, so-called ‘green colonialism’ – the international grab for more environmentally friendly technologies is growing exponentially to meet demand – complete with child labour and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As we concluded then, “Replacing individualised fossil-fuel transport with lithium-based electric vehicles is not sustainable. A reduction in consumption based on new collective models of transport will be required in the Global North.”

This means democratising and widening mass transit. Social mobility requires actual mobility: better transport can help reverse regional inequalities. Only rail can do this on an environmentally acceptable basis: the emissions of a train journey per passenger mile is a quarter of those of a car journey and one fifth of a plane’s.

Rail travel is also much safer than using roads and does not have the same destructive impact on town planning.  It’s also a lot more efficient: the Victoria Line can carry ten times more people per hour than a six-lane motorway.

Demand for rail is increasing. London’s Elizabeth Line, opened only a couple of years ago, now accounts for one in five rail journeys in the UK. In the US, ridership and revenue are now at record levels.

The author favours publicly-owned railways on efficiency grounds, not just to eliminate wasteful competition and duplication, but to prevent the massive overcharging by  private contractors that takes place along the supply chain.

He also wants the industry devolved and democratised. By the end of this decade, one third of the world’s population will live in cities of more than one million people. So the control and oversight of the mass transit systems that they will need must be aligned to the elected cities’ devolved authorities.

This book is written in a lively, engaging style and it’s full of local detail. A recent interview, on Novara Media’s Downstream, revealed author Gareth Dennis to be a thorough and enthusiastic master of his subject, covering everything from station architecture to dedicated railway training colleges (he taught at one, but increasing student enrolment is difficult without a long-term government commitment to investing in the network).

Dennis was also the victim of a spectacular injustice in 2024 when Network Rail Chair Peter Hendy pressured the engineering consultancy that employed him as a railway engineer to fire him for publicly voicing safety concerns regarding overcrowding at London’s Euston Station, threatening to withhold public contracts from the company unless they did so. Dennis lost his job, while Hendy was later ennobled by Prime Minster Keir Starmer and brought into the government as Minister of State at the Department for Transport.

This book is full of interesting ideas. One area that I felt needed expanding, however,  was the issue of affordability. Dennis discusses the deterrent effect of complex ticketing systems and the iniquities of dynamic pricing, but hedges his bets a bit on the issue of abolishing fares.

There’s room here for a discussion about the way much of Europe subsidises air travel, compared to trains, putting the latter at an unfair disadvantage. A recent Greenpeace survey found flight prices were on average half those of train fares for the same routes – unsurprising, when one considers that airlines pay no taxes on kerosene and little tax on tickets or VAT, and their emissions are priced at a level below the social cost of carbon.

In 2019, a government briefing paper said the absence of an aviation fuel tax was seen by many as “an indefensible anomaly” – but nothing has changed. Instead, the aviation industry receives £7 billion in annual subsidies.

This is fixable, as Dennis acknowledges. Countries including Germany, Austria and Hungary have started to introduce ‘climate tickets’ which offer affordable train travel in order to encourage people to switch to rail. In Germany, a nationwide train and bus ticket was introduced in 2023 for just 49 euros.

Britian, even under a Labour government, seems to be a long way from such measures. Switzerland, on the other hand, moves nearly half of its freight by rail and has achieved the second-highest per capita passenger rail usage in the world, after Japan. So, why not here?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.