Improving regional rail forecasting

Forecasting passenger demand for the diverse ‘regional flows’ (outside London and the South East) has long posed a challenge for the rail industry. Established demand forecasting guidance has consistently under-forecast the demand growth seen since the turn of the century. While a number of studies have been undertaken to assess the market and refine the modelling approaches and parameters, there remains concern that the current approaches may not facilitate forecasting of demand with sufficient certainty to robustly make decisions on future service specification and investment.

The COVID-19 pandemic will have an impact on the nature of the regional rail market, increasing the complexity of providing robust forecasts of demand. While the impacts of the pandemic are still uncertain, it is important that this study takes account of that uncertainty in its recommendations.

The study is comprised of two distinct workstreams:

1. Carrying out an infill to populate historical demand figures with Passenger Transport Executive (PTE) ticket sales.
2. Undertaking a number of case studies to understand how, and why, different regional markets have grown at different rates and whether existing guidance would have predicted this.

Based on this work we would expect the rail industry to have an enhanced understanding of the drivers of demand across regional markets that can assist in future market assessment and forecasting.

This study will aim to improve regional demand forecasting guidance by providing a more ‘complete’ dataset through the PTE infill exercise, and by providing some ‘real-world’ examples of regional rail markets. The case studies will aim to identify different regional rail classifications which can be investigated further in future studies.