A MONITORING STUDY OF RAIL COMMUTING ON MERSEYSIDE: 1974 TO 1976

The authors took advantage of marked changes in transport costs--in petrol in 1974, in rail fares in 1975/76--to examine their effects on the patterns of commuting. They were particularly interested in substitution to public transport effects of increased petrol prices from the viewpoint of their wider study of energy consumption in surface passenger transport. The paper describes the data collection procedures in the study area and the monitoring data collected over two seasons, autumn to spring, 1974/75 and 1975/76. Its major findings include a significant temporary increase in rail commuting in 1974 with a real increase of some 70 percent in the pump price of petrol, and travel decision evidence that a substantial majority of relatively new rail commuters had decided to commute by rail for more complex reasons than simple comparison of the time and money costs of travel by alternative travel modes. The monitoring data are also compared with those for rail commuting in the Merseyside conurbation as a whole. Factors which might have affected the monitoring data are examined, also the sensitivity of demand for rail commuting to increased out-of-pocket private transport costs, qualified estimates of cross-elasticities are presented. The study findings are discussed.