Britain’s busiest railways should be converted into roads carrying express buses to save money and end the “sardine-like” conditions for commuters, according to a think-tank.

A national network of “busways” should be built to reduce fares by 40 per cent while cutting taxpayer subsidies to the rail industry, it says.

A report by the Institute of Economic Affairs claims that coaches running on specially-built lanes segregated from other traffic could carry 75,000 passengers an hour into central London. This compared with 10,000 on each of the capital’s busiest commuter rail lines.

It says that the system has already been successfully introduced in parts of Latin America and Asia, taking buses off busy streets and allowing cars to move more easily. In Britain the system has been adopted on the 16-mile Cambridgeshire Guided Busway using old rail routes to link Cambridge, Huntingdon and St Ives.

The report’s conclusions come amid growing concerns over the amount of money being pumped into Britain’s railways, with an estimated £6 billion of annual subsidises in addition to £38 billion being spent on improving the network in the next five years.

A survey of passengers published last week showed that levels of dissatisfaction are rising, with growing numbers of travellers complaining about poor value for money, cramped conditions and late journeys.

Richard Wellings, head of transport at the institute, said that the transport system had to be “liberalised from rigid state control” to allow more efficient alternatives to be considered.

“Interference by politicians in the rail industry has led to everyone getting a raw deal. “Passengers face increasingly expensive fares only to fight their way onto trains during peak times, and taxpayers continue to prop up an industry whose importance to the country is disproportionally small relative to the level of resources it receives.”

Busways have been adopted across the world as a cheap alternative to rail or tram networks. They typically run on dedicated roads segregated from other traffic.

Under the system, coaches can also “feed in” from the conventional road network, offering direct services to city centres from towns and villages not currently served by trains. The Colombian capital, Bogotá, runs bus lanes carrying 56,000 passengers an hour.

The study suggests that trains could be scrapped altogether on routes into Britain’s towns and cities, with only long-distance networks remaining.

Trains, Buses and Sardines

A plan to rip up our transport infrastructure should be applauded for its boldness

Times leader, 3 February 2015

The plight of tinned sardines is rarely taken into account when formulating transport policy. The time might have come when it should be. A report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) has found that on the busiest commuter railways into London, passengers are paying over-the-odds, on overly subsidised railways, while crammed into insufficient carriages. It is, as the proverbial fish involved know, an expensive, inefficient, failing attempt at mass transport. The IEA has come up with a radical if counterintuitive proposal that could be rolled out across the country: pave over those railway lines and run electric buses instead.

The numbers make for interesting reading. At a national level, maintaining railways costs £5 billion a year, £4 billion more than it costs to maintain A-roads and motorways. Roads, however, carry three times more passenger traffic than railways and four times more freight. Up to four bus lanes could be created on each railway track, on which 1,000 coaches an hour could carry up to 75 people each. While the rail network can bring 10,000 people per line per hour into central London, coaches could raise that to 75,000. Although the £20 billion conversion cost is undoubtedly substantial, operating and infrastructure costs would be considerably lower. A new 50-seat coach costs £200,000; a new train carriage £1.5 million. Fares could be cut by 40 per cent.

Any discussion of transport policy in this country is dominated by politics more than economics, and hobbled by subsidies, powerful vested interests and the deadening hand of state control. Too often it is in no one’s interests except those of taxpayers and passengers to challenge the status quo, let alone to dream up imaginative alternatives. The IEA is to be applauded for doing just that, and policymakers should pay attention. Sardines, after all, have dreams too. It is time they were heard.