Alison Munro
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2012
last heard Jan 2012
Alison Munro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, clearly, you have to make some judgments about how you think things will be in the future because no one can predict with certainty over that time period.
So what we do is we look at what has happened in the past.
Over the last 15 years, we've seen the number of people traveling making long distance rail trips double.
And over the past three years, even during the recession, we've seen the number of passengers making long distance journeys grow by 14%.
Well, we haven't just drawn a straight line.
With our latest updating of the numbers, we're effectively assuming that demand for travel continues to grow until 2037 and then it levels off.
Now, there are some who say that's a rather pessimistic view and that, in fact...
Demand could continue to grow for a much longer period than we are assuming, but we've deliberately taken what we believe is a rather cautious approach.
I think the experience of Eurostar was really rather different to what we're talking about here.
And you were talking there about a relatively new market, rail travel between London and the continent.
Here we're talking about an established market.
And the other thing about the Eurostar market was that the reason really why they overestimated the amount of travel on Eurostar was they didn't predict the advent of the low-cost airlines.
What's interesting actually is that the forecast that had been done recently for the fast domestic services on high-speed one
have actually proved rather accurate.
The values that you quoted there are the values used for journeys that are made during business time.
which, as you correctly say, are based on an average cost to the employer of £75,000.
But we use different values if people are travelling for commuting or if they're travelling for leisure purposes, the values are much lower.
So it's £7 if you're commuting and £6 an hour if you're travelling by leisure, whereas for a business traveller, we value that at £50 an hour.
You're right in saying that the way we currently make the calculations, we effectively assume that time is not productive on trains.
But what is interesting is that if you actually compare the values that we use with observed behaviour, so where business travellers actually make a choice about using a faster train,
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