THE removal of peak fares on ScotRail services did not occur for a long enough period of time to fully assess its benefits, a transport expert has said.
Peak fares are set to return on September 27 with the cost of some peaktime journeys set to skyrocket.
By next week, a peak return between Edinburgh and Glasgow will increase from £16.20 to £31.40.
While passenger numbers during the trial increased by 6.8%, Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop said a 10% increase was needed for the scheme to be self-financing.
Tom Rye is a professor of transport policy at Molde University College in Norway who has previously undertaken research on behalf of the Scottish Government.
He told the Sunday National that removing peak fares for less than a year was not long enough to accurately assess the impacts of the scheme.
“There’s this concept in transport economics called price elasticity,” he said.
“It’s about understanding how demand responds to a change in price.
“But there’s both short-term and long-term elasticity.
“Short-term might refer to how demand changes within a few weeks or months while long-term could be over several years or even up to decades.
“For example, a long time ago, South Yorkshire in England had very cheap bus fares.
“They stayed at the level they were at in 1972 for something like 15 years.
“It meant that by 1982, the level of bus bookings in South Yorkshire were much higher than comparable metropolitan counties because the fares were so cheap.
“But that response didn’t happen overnight. It can take a while for people to even notice such changes.”
Rye added that the changes in demand can be a great deal more dramatic in the long term rather than the short term.
“You definitely need more than a year in the case of rail fares,” he said.
The Scottish Government initially only greenlit the trial for six months in October 2023.
However, the scheme was twice extended by increments of three months, a method which Rye said was also likely to deter long-term change in behaviour.
“If it’s only a trial offer, people aren’t going to change their lives just to take advantage of that, particularly if they’re not sure it’s going to stay,” he said.
“It just adds to the problem of not having a long enough experiment.”
Rye’s comments come after trade unions and campaigners urged the Scottish Government to reverse its decision.
In response, the Scottish Government said it “would be open to consider future subsidy to remove fares should UK budget allocations improve in future years".
One of the main goals of the policy was to try and spur behavioural change away from private car use and towards more sustainable public transport.
According to the Scottish Government’s own research, the trial resulted in around four million extra rail journeys over the nine months from October 2023 “of which half of new passengers switched from private car” at the cost of £40 million per year in subsidy.
Yet Ric Lander, a senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said it was revealing that Scotland’s road budget didn’t suffer similar reductions due to the UK Government’s spending cuts.
“The Scottish Government must own its political choice to spend £4 million on just three road schemes when just 1% of this would have paid for the removal of peak fares for all train passengers in Scotland,” he said.
“John Swinney and Kate Forbes have consistently rolled back on climate since they came to power.
“Among all the devastating cuts made to climate protection, safer cycling and bus travel for asylum seekers, the obscene road expansion budget didn’t seem to lose a penny.
“Our roads can be repaired and made safer by encouraging people out of cars, without always trying to just make them bigger.
“The Scottish Government should resist the continuation of Westminster austerity but this does not absolve Scottish ministers of their responsibility to use their powers to raise the revenue we need for climate and social protections.
“There is a growing chorus demanding higher income taxes for the wealthiest, taxes on private jets and measures that ensure the polluter pays the full cost of the harm they cause.”
