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Time to re-think concessionary travel spending

2/27/2017

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In January, the Scottish Transport Minister Humza Yousaf announced that there would be a consultation on the future of Scotland’s concessionary travel scheme (1). The current scheme, which was set up in 2006, has faced criticism on the grounds of escalating cost - £207.8 million in 2016-17 (2) - and also from bus operators, who have seen reimbursement levels fall in recent years to a new low of 56.9% of the standard fare (3).

Update September 2017 - consultation on scheme open until 17 November 2017 bit.ly/2guM5Ag 

However the review is also timely in providing an opportunity - overdue at that - to review the value for money of the social benefits that the scheme provides. Leaving to one side wider issues of taxation and spending, the very considerable concessionary travel budget is currently poorly targeted at people who need it.
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Concessionary travel only make sense if it enables people to travel who could otherwise not afford to. So logic demands that it should be targeted at people on low incomes.  But most concessionary travel spending is not aimed at people on low incomes, but rather at an arbitrary age bracket: those over 60 years old. And yet, the ‘young old’ (people in their 60s) are one of the better off age groups in the whole of society (4).
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The increasing affluence of older people is not a new phenomenon; over the past thirty years, the old link between poverty and old age - once a justifiable basis for age-related travel concessions and other social security benefits - has not just reduced, but has disappeared entirely.  Older people (i.e. those who qualify for free concessionary travel on age grounds) are now one of the least-poor age groups in the UK as the chart below from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows (5).
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Audit Scotland has observed “research shows that [the National Concessionary Scheme] has had only limited impact on improving social inclusion, improving health or promoting a shift from car to bus” (6) - the key objectives of the scheme. In view of these limited benefits, the case for spending more than a billion pounds every five years on concessionary travel for over-60s is becoming weaker every year.
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Of course, concessionary travel is not aimed only at older people; the scheme has long been been open to blind and disabled people, and this aspect of the scheme seems well justified. However, it is important to acknowledge too that there is a major gap in the scheme. Thousands of disabled people who can’t use the bus - for example because it isn’t accessible or the bus stop is too far away - derive no benefit at all from the scheme as it stands.
So what are the options? Unless there is some change, it is likely that the scheme will become unsustainable, because of rising costs and/or insufficient payment to operators. What would happen if the scheme was abolished entirely? Far from seeing an end to cheaper travel, it is likely that the government scheme would be replaced by a new range of (less generous but privately-funded) discounted fare schemes marketed by bus companies at off-peak times, when the marginal cost of carrying a passenger is virtually zero. The fiscal savings would enable the Scottish Government to significantly compensate low income elderly people who would most lose out through the tax and benefits system, perhaps targeting especially the poorest age groups, like those over 80. 

However, there would be other consequences - despite the stated intention of concessionary travel arrangements to leave operators “no better nor worse off”, there would almost certainly be an adverse effect on bus services which are already experiencing a long term crisis in use (7). There is no question too that many people do benefit from concessionary travel and these benefits should not be dismissed lightly. It is politically inconceivable that the scheme would be scrapped entirely.
Depending on how much of the £200 million per year the Scottish Government is willing to potentially reallocate (and again leaving aside wider tax and spending questions) there are many options which could be considered. Increasing the age of entitlement to travel concessions, as has happened with state pensions, would save a lot of money, but it would also be a blunt instrument, affecting poorer and wealthier people equally. Another option to reduce the budget would be to limit the time that free travel is available under the scheme; applying concessions after the morning peak would especially save money as many buses are at capacity at this time.

Options for redistributing budget could include providing more direct support to bus services generally; however, as the current scheme is intended as a subsidy for passengers, rather than operators, the fairness of this switch is questionable. Offering free travel to young people (generally, a poorer age cohort than 60-somethings) could assist with job and college travel and encourage a sustained culture of public transport use; but of course that too would be a blunt (and expensive) instrument, like any other age-related eligibility criterion.

My favoured option would be to return to free travel concessions being principally aimed at encouraging local travel. In urban Scotland, this would mean free travel within local cities and surrounding areas while in rural areas, ‘local’ travel still often involves long distances. However, should the scheme pay for expensive long-distance leisure trips that many relatively affluent and mobile pensioners can currently enjoy for free? A study of the distribution of journey lengths funded by concessionary schemes showed that 19% of trips were over 25 miles long (8). The fares for longer bus trips are of course more expensive than for short bus trips; so it would be reasonable to assume that these longer trips make up at least 20% of the concessionary travel budget (perhaps considerably more). My guess is that, even allowing for the need to keep concessions for longer distance ‘local’ travel in rural areas, excluding of long-distance leisure trips from the free scheme might save 10% or more of the current budget; this would in itself provide some £20 million each year which could be used more effectively. 

For me, the unique opportunity is to address the long-standing anomaly of disabled people who have the most significant mobility restrictions being excluded from the benefits of concessionary travel entirely.  Community transport ‘Section 19’ operations could become eligible for concessionary travel and more ambitiously, a national taxi subsidy scheme for people who can’t use buses and need door-to-door transport could be established. Both of these could be easily achieved at a relatively modest cost. 

This is the time not just for tweaks to the current scheme but for fresh and imaginative thinking on how public money can best be used make travel truly inclusive. To do this, we must move away from outdated spending models based on arbitrary age groups and focus more on need.
References:
  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-38718556
  2. http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2016/12/6610/14
  3. http://www.transport.gov.scot/system/files/documents/tsc-basic-pages/Transport%20Scotland%20agreement%20letter%20to%20CPT.pdf
  4. http://www.poverty.org.uk/04/index.shtml. 
  5. https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/R107.pdf
  6. http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/docs/central/2010/nr_101007_concessionary_travel.pdf
  7. http://www.transport.gov.scot/report/SCT01171871341-05.​
  8. https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/concessionary-travel-customer-feedback-research-year-one-report/
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Involve disabled people early in planning driverless car revolution

2/13/2017

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“As a blind person, I am in favor of driverless cars…I really really really really want driverless cars right now! Free at last! Free at last free at last!”
Comment on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEebyt6G5kM
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Many disability advocates have begun to see the prospect of the driverless car or autonomous vehicle (AV) as a truly revolutionary mobility solution. Although it is entirely possible that predictions of an imminent driverless car revolution have been overhyped (1), let us assume that the model of ‘Mobility as a Service’ takes hold. In the future, it becomes the norm for people to summon a driverless (electric) car that meets their requirements at a moments notice through an app, ‘Uber-style’. Payment will be based on use and because of the economics of intensively-used vehicles, to own and use a private vehicle will become unattractive for most people.
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It is easy to envisage the advantages that on-demand driverless vehicles would offer to many people with a disability especially for those who cannot currently drive, such as people with visual impairments, conditions such as epilepsy and certain physical conditions (2). We can assume (perhaps rashly) that driverless vehicles are designed in order to be physically accessible to a wide range of people with various disabilities and mobility requirements (including wheelchair users). Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will appeal to people who need or prefer door-to door transport, while for drivers, problems with ‘parking’ should be greatly simplified, if not eliminated. There is also evidence (3) that some disabled people are discouraged from using public transport by the potential attitudes of other passengers or drivers, a problem which driverless cars would eliminate.
On the other hand, AVs may present a number of barriers for many disabled people. Those who lack confidence in travelling, or who experience high degrees of anxiety, may continue to want the reassurance of a human presence in order to travel. This may apply particularly to older people, especially the very elderly, people with dementia and people who require personal assistance even with mundane tasks like getting their coat on.  Another factor of course will be cost; we don’t yet know what the costs of AV use would be, but even if they are much cheaper than private cars, many disabled people may be unable to afford them. Availability (and cost) in rural areas may be especially problematic.
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How people access and use the AV’s themselves is not of course the only issue; the impact of AVs on streets and other road users - especially pedestrians - is another important element of the whole package. We know that safe pedestrian environments are important for many older people to travel with confidence (4). The speed and proximity of AVs to pedestrian spaces, the functioning of pedestrian crossings in an AV environment and the redesign of streets where parking is no longer required are other aspects that need to be thought carefully through.

Like any service under development, there is a risk that unless disabled people are involved early on, questionable assumptions about what they can or want to do are made; for example, in this an article on the driverless cars in the Huffington Post: “For obvious reasons, those with physical disabilities often cannot learn to drive cars, but it also extends to those with mental incapacities; for example, those with epilepsy” (5). 

The key must surely be early involvement of disabled people not only in technical design of autonomous vehicles themselves but also in the planning of the whole service model, so that an ‘inclusive design’ approach is taken at the outset. While it is encouraging that projects like GATEway have begun to explore this area (6), there was no discussion of the impact of AVs on disabled people  in the UK Department of Transport’s Pathway to driverless cars published last month (7). There is, as the Ruderman Foundation concluded last year, “an urgent need to develop a common agenda at the intersection between autonomous vehicles and disability policy” (8). This requires much clearer and more transparent engagement at all levels between disabled people, technical and regulatory agencies in both the public and private sectors.
References
1) Driverless cars: the road ahead is difficult, NESTA, July 2016 

2) Driverless driving for disabled people within the decade? Robin Christopherson, June 2016

3) Understanding why some people do not use buses, Scottish Government Social Research 2010

4) Importance of safe pedestrian environments to ensure older people travel with confidence.  Musselwhite, C, October 2016

5) Huffington Post, January 2017 

6) GATEway demonstrates how teleoperation and autonomy can improve mobility for disabled drivers, GATEway, January 2017 

7) Pathway to driverless cars, DfT January 2017

8) Ruderman Family Foundation, January 2017
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     “I hate the way everyone responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people” Bill Bryson, Neither here Nor there, 1991 p61

    Welcome to my occasional blog: mostly this is about making public places inclusive and attractive, but I may touch on other policy and governance topics…


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