Targeting Rail Freight
The UK government published its long-awaited ‘Decarbonising Transport’ plan in July. It contains a commitment to ‘work closely with industry partners to develop’ ‘a rail freight growth target’. It would actually be better to set a freight modal split target because, in carbon terms, the division of freight between transport modes matters more than the amount moved by a single mode.
Before Brexit, the UK was covered by a freight modal split target, the one the EU declared in its 2011 Transport White Paper. It aimed to get 30% of freight travelling further than 300km onto the rail or waterway networks by 2030. This would have seen rail’s share of the European freight market more than double from 18.6% in 2011 to 39% in 2030. In fact it dropped to 17.6% by 2019.
With this rail percentage heading in the wrong direction, the EU has now replaced its modal split target a rail freight growth target. As part of its ‘sustainable and smart mobility strategy’ it wants rail tonne-kms to increase by 50% between 2015 and 2030. This would be 12 times faster than it grew between 2011 and 2019, casting doubt on the feasibility of the new target.
Recent history suggests that the UK target-setters should be more realistic. Between 2013 and 2019, rail freight tonne-kms in the UK fell by 27%, bringing rail’s share of Britain’s freight market down from 12% to 8% – i.e. back to its 1996 pre-privatisation level. The main reason for this reversal of rail’s fortunes has been the dramatic loss of coal traffic. It is ironic that the decarbonisation of our electricity supply is depriving our most carbon-friendly freight transport mode of what, for decades, was its core traffic.
Rebuilding rail’s freight market share will be difficult, particularly if we continue to measure it in tonne-kms. As a dense product, latterly moving relatively long distances from ports to power stations, coal generated billions of rail tonne-kms annually. Many of the lower-density, higher-value commodities, often packaged and palletised, which the railways hope will drive future growth would be better measured by volume than by weight. Research by Dr. Allan Woodburn back in 2007 showed how sole reliance on tonne-kms did ‘not provide a true indication of the nature and extent of change’ in rail freight markets.
So the choice of metric for the new rail freight target will be critical. Since modal shift is now largely justified on decarbonisation grounds, the best KPI would be CO2 reductions. After all, measures of the amount of freight moved by rail in absolute or relative terms are merely surrogates. What matters is the contribution of freight modal shift to Britain’s over-riding goal of being a ‘net zero’ economy by 2050.
Using CO2 savings as the main targeting parameter would also have the advantage of tracking changes in the average carbon intensity of road and rail freight operations through time. Rail currently has a 3 to 4-fold carbon advantage over road, but this gap will narrow as the next generation of lorries joins freight trains in being powered by low carbon electricity. The environmental case for promoting rail will then need to be regularly recalibrated.