Karen Heppenstall, Head of Integrated Transport, Midlands Connect

Every mode – and that includes the car – can be part of an end to end journey

One of the first things I did at Midlands Connect was to establish our Access to Rail programme because I recognised this is a problem that wasn’t being addressed. I come from the rail industry and I can see how insular and how inward looking it is. We will only fix this problem if the rail industry becomes better at facing outwards.

My perspective is that we, at Midlands Connect, want to expand the reach of the rail network, making is easier for people to make that decision to use rail as part of their end to end journey.

The different angle I’m going to take is that every mode – and that includes the car – can be part of that end to end journey. While we musn’t lose sight of the ambition to get people out of their cars and on to trains, rail doesn’t always reach everywhere and sometimes the car has to be part of the end to end journey. It’s difficult to supply public transport to every single community around the country – we have to acknowledge that car will be part of the solution.

The most polluting journeys in the West Midlands are the long distance car journeys, not the journeys to the station. We must make a distinction between long distance car journeys and car journeys that are part of an end to end multi-modal journey.

And because people use cars to get to railway stations we need to provide space for cars at stations that doesn’t cause severance and is not at the expense of buses, bikes and walking.

People have been using the word passenger, which to most in the train sector means how we become better at reaching what we refer to as the near market – that is those people we want to capture. Yes it’s about ridership on the railway and farebox revenue, but actually we should also be thinking about the bigger picture and trains’ vital contribution to decarbonising transport and giving people access to jobs, education, etc.