Tomorrow’s rail passengers

18 April 2018

Why not hop on a train?

This is what the independent watchdog asked some infrequent and non-users of rail.

Recent rapid growth in passenger numbers, which saw a record 1.7bn rail journeys made in 2016-17, is starting to slow down. Transport Focus has already explored passengers’ priorities for improvement – today it publishes Tomorrow’s passengers: understanding how to make rail travel more attractive to infrequent and non-users.

Passengers with disabilities, younger passengers, frequent car users, older and retired passengers were the least likely to be rail passengers.

Much like existing passengers, improvements they highlighted included:

• value for money
• more trains arriving on time
• less-frequent unplanned disruptions
• fewer trains cancelled.

The watchdog will share this research with governments and industry to help open up rail as an option to even more people.