The economic functions of railways could be carried out by express coaches and lorries at one-quarter the cost of the train, using 20–25% less fuel, requiring one-quarter to one-third of the land and imposing a casualty cost on passengers half that suffered by rail passengers. The railway conversion debate was initiated in the 1950s by the late Brigadier Lloyd and carried forward by the Railway Conversion League, subsequently renamed the Railway Conversion Campaign, until the death of its chairman, Angus Dalgleish, in 1994. The purpose of this paper is to reignite that debate. The government should remove all impediments to the conversion of railways to roads.

Subsidies to rail and the value of roads

The subsidy to rail over the period 1975 to 1995 amounted to £37 billion at June 2000 prices – an annual average of £1.7 billion (1). Today, the subsidy is hard to assess but appears to be running at between £6 billion and £10 billion annually. Yet, for most taxpayers a rail journey is a rarity; fewer than 1 in 50 motorised journeys are by rail (2).

The annual income to the exchequer provided by taxes on road vehicles minus expenditure is in excess of £30 billion. Thirty-seven per cent of vehicle miles are driven on the motorway and trunk road network. The lane length of this is 55,000 km. Hence the income per lane-km from the road network is at least £200,000 per year. In contrast to this, the annual subsidy to the national rail system per track-km will extract at least £150,000 per year from the exchequer.(3)

These respective figures should start alarm bells ringing. We know that the tax revenue from road users does not necessarily reflect the economic value of roads: that can only be discovered by a proper system of road pricing. However, it would seem that, in order for a subsidy to rail of this magnitude to make any sense, the so-called social benefits or positive externalities from rail travel would have to be huge. As we see below, they demonstrably are not. The identification of this issue demands a serious consideration of the relative costs and benefits of rail and road travel.

Road and track costs

The Treasury has estimated the replacement cost of the M1, including land, as £2.1 billion at 1999 prices.(4) The lane length, assuming three lanes in each direction, is 1,800km. Hence the cost per lane-km is £1.17 million. The West Coast Main Line Modernisation Programme (WCMLM) concentrates expenditure on the core 1,000km of track (from a total of some 2,600km).(5) The cost has risen to £10 billion. Hence the cost per track-km is £10 million – over eight times the £1.17 million per lane-km for rebuilding the M1 from scratch. However, the product of the expenditures should perhaps be measured in terms of equivalent vehicle flow. If one makes reasonable assumptions about the capacity of the rail and road alternatives, in terms of flow per lane- or track-km, the WCMLM is 12 times as expensive as the M1 built from scratch.

Maintenance of rail is also more expensive. Railtrack’s Network Management Statement for 2001 provides an estimate of £3 billion per year at 2000 prices for track maintenance. Even on the most generous assumptions, the cost per vehicle-km by road was one-ninth of that by rail.

Signalling costs

Significant amounts of money are being invested in rail safety mechanisms. Stopping the SPAD (signal passed at danger) problem was reported to have a cost as high as £6 billion. The latest figure for the European Train Management System (ERTMS) is £3.6 billion.(6) If that is to be repaid over 40 years and if the interest rate is set at the old Treasury Discount Rate of 6% then the annual cost is £240 million. If the annual maintenance of these systems is to cost as little as 5% of the £3.6 billion, that will add £180 million to the annual bill, leading to a total of £420 million per year. Network Management Statements suggest that these systems will save two lives per year, valued at some £1.2 million each at 2001 prices. However, deaths account for only about 22% of casualty costs in train accidents. Hence the actual value of life and limb saved may be close to £11 million per year, or less than 2.5% of the annual capital plus maintenance cost. In comparison, motor roads seldom have any signals despite carrying flows many times higher than achieved by rail.

The SRA claims that the ERTMS will allow higher capacity and hence use and that the additional passengers will be from those previously travelling by road so saving perhaps ten lives per year. However, these assumptions seem over-generous. First, the hoped-for growth seems unlikely; second, there is no evidence that the additional rail travellers would otherwise be travelling by car; third, it is unrealistic to assign all the growth in rail traffic to the ERTMS; and fourth, system-wide the casualty costs by rail are not less than those for motorways (see below).

Rolling stock

A railway carriage may cost £1 million. If capital and interest at 6% are to be repaid over 30 years, the annual cost is £72,000. Bus and coach costs range from £120,000 to £250,000. However, the vehicles may offer only 70% of the floor area available in a railway carriage. If capital and interest is to be repaid over 15 years, the annual cost for comparison with a railway carriage has the range £17,600 to £36,800, a fraction of the rail costs.

The belief

It is clear from the above that rail is expensive compared with road transport. That cost, and the consequent cost to the taxpayer, is tolerated because of the strongly-held belief that:

• rail has a far higher capacity than road;
• rail commuters to central London could not get there any other way;
• rail uses much less fuel than road transport;
• rail is far safer than road ever can be;
• high-speed rail is essential;
• rail is in some way ‘sustainable’ compared with road transport;
• railways are far too narrow to be converted to roads.

Do those beliefs have any basis in fact? The most important of these issues are considered below.

Capacity and use

In the morning peak hour some 50,000 passengers alight at Waterloo mainline station. There are four pairs of tracks on the approaches. The 50,000 could all find seats in 1,000 50-seat coaches – sufficient for one lane of a motor road managed in a way that avoids congestion. With a demand as high as 50,000, probably 70- or 100-seat buses could be used, cutting the vehicle flow to between 500 and 700 per hour. That illustrates that on the line haul, the express coach would have three to four times the capacity of the train to move people. That is consistent with American research, which concluded long ago that there is no movement corridor in the world where demand cannot be satisfied by a single bus lane, (7) (8) and also consistent with the example of the approach to the New York bus terminal. There, 30,000 seated passengers per hour pass in one lane 3.2 metres wide.

Terminal capacity is a separate issue and more difficult to demonstrate simply. However, commuters with prepaid tickets may board at the rate of one per 1.5 per second and alight at the rate of one per second, providing a total of two minutes for a 50-seat bus. If five minutes are allowed 1,000 buses per hour require 85 bus bays. If these are spread over three levels there would be some 30 bays on each. At Waterloo there are 21 platforms plus a very large concourse area. Probably the bus would use terminal space three to four times as efficiently as the train, in line with the track capacity.

With similar calculations, it can be shown that, in terms of both capacity and use, road transport out-performs rail by a factor of three to five across the network. This is important. It suggests that alternatives to rail are not only technically feasible, they would be technically highly efficient.

Fuel consumption (9)

Rail is often held out as environmentally kind compared with road transport, but does that have any basis? In 2003, rail returned the equivalent of 108 passenger-miles per gallon for Network South East, 123 for regional services, 123 for intercity, an average of 115 for all services. In comparison a small diesel-powered car containing two people may return 120 passenger-miles per gallon and an intercity coach containing 20 people may return 200 passenger-miles per gallon. Figures for freight show a similar picture.

Of course, from the environmental standpoint, energy consumption is only part of the story. Other factors include the location of the emissions and their relative toxicities. However, it is clear that, at least on the energy measure, efficient mass transit road transport outperforms rail by a significant margin.

Safety (10)

Sir Robert Horton said in Railtrack’s annual report of 1998/99 that ‘rail is 27 times as safe as road (measured by fatalities and serious injuries) and is becoming steadily safer’. Since 1996 injuries to rail passengers have been defined as either fatal, or ‘passenger’ – meaning taken to hospital from the scene of the accident. That is similar to a serious injury by road, defined as spent the night in hospital or at the discretion of the police. Casualty costs per passenger-km may be estimated by adding the deaths and passenger injuries for the period 1996–2002, multiplying the totals by the government’s values for fatalities and serious injuries and dividing by the number of passenger-km. The value per million passenger-km for rail in the envelope bounded by the ticket barriers came to £2,000 (excluding those hurt falling over packages, hit by barrows, falling down steps or escalators or in the category ‘other’). The corresponding value for passengers in buses on non-urban roads, including an allowance for those hurt a short time before boarding or after alighting, came to £550. A caveat in the calculation is that the passenger-km by bus used in calculations depended on vehicle occupancy, set to 16. That compares with nine for the national average and with 25 for the occupancy claimed for coaches leaving Victoria coach station.

If staff, post office workers, those hurt at level crossings and as trespassers are added, then the system-wide casualty cost for rail rises to £7,000 per million passenger-km (excluding passengers hit by barrows, falling over or down steps etc. and excluding injuries to staff at trackside or in shunting accidents). The corresponding value for motorways came to £3,360. For all roads the value was £13,500, including £6,160 attributable to pedestrians, cyclists and people on motorbikes, classes seldom met with on railway alignments. If those classes are excluded, the value for all roads came to £7,300.

Hence it is clear that Sir Robert’s ‘rail is 27 times safer . . . than road . . .’ has no basis except in so far as the total number of selected casualty types may provide a spurious coat hanger. Like has to be compared with like thus, when coming to a view about safety. One should compare the casualty costs of rail with those of mass transit by coach.

Speed and service frequency

Before the introduction of speed limits on motorways express buses never hesitated to cruise at 90mph. Today they are limited to 60mph on dual carriageways and motorways and to 50mph on single carriageways, 10mph slower than cars. Lorries have the same limits as buses except that articulated lorries are limited to 40mph on single carriageways. In comparison, intercity trains achieve 110mph and aspire to 140mph. Hence, it would appear that express coaches would be slower than rail. However:

• The average passenger rail journey is only 25 miles long and 90% are less than 80 miles long. Over these distances the headline speeds of 110mph and 140mph seldom apply.
• Provincial services seldom average more than 40mph.
• The express coach would offer a service frequency up to ten times as great as rail.

Hence, coaches would offer comparable journey times except for the longest journeys.

Weather, pranks and accidents

The susceptibility to rail to ‘leaves on the line’ or the ‘wrong sort of snow’ is legendary. In comparison, road transport carries on in most conditions. For example, on the Monday after a weekend of flooding in November 2000 the entire rail network came to a virtual standstill. On the following Tuesday the Today programme interviewed a major road haulier. He said that his organisation had reached virtually all its customers. No doubt there was disruption but probably 95% of road journeys were unaffected compared with a completely paralysed rail system. Indeed, rail is so fragile that plastic hawks were installed to prevent birds nesting in the gantries – a falling nest could short the system, causing hours of delay on an entire route.(11) Even schoolboy pranks, such as a pound coin placed upon a rail track in the hope of obtaining a flattened one, can cause disasters. Meanwhile, an accident such as Hatfield or Ladbroke Grove disrupts rail for weeks, if not months.

In comparison, the disruption which arises when there is a major motorway accident seldom lasts more than a few hours.

The fundamental problem

There are technical reasons for the extra costs of railways compared with road transport. The steel-tyred wheel and steel rail leads to a stopping distance up to four times that required for road vehicles; (12) rail is an inflexible mode of operation offering no possibility of serving local destinations beyond terminals; very high point loads between wheel and rail lead to high maintenance costs; and there is a need for a meticulously laid and maintained track.

Railway conversion

The conversion of railways to roads is technically feasible. There may not be enough width to accommodate the verges required by standard roads newly constructed in green fields but the widths available to asphalt are adequate, the headroom sufficient for all but the tallest vehicles and the alignments are superb. The Hall/Smith Report Better Use of Railways (submitted in accordance with Contract 466/3 made between the Department of the Environment and the Department of Geography of the University of Reading on 29 August 1974) provides first-year rates of return ranging from 18% to 500% for six conversion schemes in and around London, except for one scheme where the value of surplus land exceeded conversion costs.(13) The study attracted vitriolic criticism from the railway lobby, criticism which is exposed as risible in the companion volume Comments and Rejoinders (14) Conversion of the costs quoted at that time to 2002 values using the Road Construction Price Index yields the range £52 per m² to £124 per m². The mid-range value is £88. Applying that to the 32,000km of track and a lane width of five metres provides an all-in conversion cost for the entire rail system of £14 billion. That is perhaps one-fifth the cost of the modernisation programme, quoted as rising to £73 billion. In fact, the actual cost of conversion could be cheaper than these estimates. A 7.3-metre carriageway built on a railway alignment at Southport through open country cost £140,000 per km at 1991 prices. (15) That yields £31 per m² at 2002 prices. If that should be the target for costs and if an asphalted lane width of 3.65m is selected, instead of 5m, then the estimate for conversion falls £3.6 billion.

Conclusion

The case for removing obstacles to the conversion of the national rail network to a motor road system managed to avoid congestion appears overwhelming. This article has concentrated on the accounting costs of different modes of transport; to conclude the argument we need to tie it into political economy. One conclusion of this work would be that all government subsidy to rail is wasteful and should be phased out. If that were to happen, because the road network is not properly priced, efficient mass transit alternatives may not develop. Thus the phasing out of government subsidy to the rail network should happen alongside the development of a national system of road pricing. If the road network were properly priced and rail subsidies halted, road users in congested areas, where the rail network is most dominant, would be charged economic prices for road use. Users of all forms of transport would have an incentive to find the most efficient method. There seems to be little doubt from this analysis that this would not involve rail travel. The government should ensure that there are no obstacles to the sale of land used for railway lines for conversion to roads. Such roads could be privately owned and priced and compete with the already existing network. Removing such obstacles would require the re-establishment of a system of private property rights in railway infrastructure and the removal of any statutory duties to provide rail services. Current policy and recent policy developments are inimical to the provision of an efficient and innovative mass transit service.

1. Transport-watch data: Subsidies to National Rail, submitted as Appendix 1 to the public inquiry into the WCMLM. Ref. railcon\Subsid02.
2. Transport Statistics Great Britain.
3. Transport Watch data: Government Expenditure and Taxes on Road Transport. Ref. railcon\roadexp.
4. Report in The Independent, 17 January 2000, quoting the Treasury.
5. Simon Maple for Railtrack during the public inquiry into the West Coast Main Line Modernisation Programme.
6. Financial Times, 4 January 2003, reporting the SRA’s ERTMS report.
7. Donald A. Morin, Chief, Public Transportation Branch, Urban Planning (US Department of Transport): The Hidden Potential in Freeways: Highway Progress, August 1970.
8. R. H. Pratt Associates, Low Cost Urban Transportation Alternatives, 1973 (Report for the USA Department of Transport).
9. Transport Watch data: Fuel Consumption Network Rail 2002–3 Ref. railcon\fuel02.
10. Transport Watch data: Casualty Cost Comparisons, Road Versus Rail. Ref. railcon\Acc02F.
11. The Daily Telegraph, cited by the New Civil Engineer 21 June 2001.
12. Transport Watch data: Providing Design Stopping Distances for Road and Rail. Ref. railcon\stop.
13. Professor Peter Hall and Edward Smith, Better Use of Railways (2nd edn.), Geographical Paper, Department of Geography, Reading University, July 1976 (in accordance with Contract DG 466/3 between the Department of the Environment and the University of Reading, 29 August 1974).
14. Edward Smith, Better Use of Railways, Comments and Rejoinders, Geographical Paper, Department of Geography, Reading University, April 1978.
15. A. C. Dalgleish, The Truth about Transport (1st edn. published by Centre for Policy Studies, March 1982; 2nd edn. December 1993, published by the now disbanded Railway Conversion Campaign).