I was rung up by a reporter from the i newspaper the other day who asked me to comme
nt on the fact that ‘transport was so bad at coping with the hot weather’. I asked him for details and he said that the roads were very overcrowded and a couple of train lines were shut.
I questioned the premise of his story. Actually, I replied, things aren’t that bad. The roads were bound to be crowded at peak times and actually Network Rail had started painting some of its rails white in order to mitigate the effects of the heat. So I’m afraid that I did not contribute to his story and sent him off packing without giving him a quote.
As a former reporter, I know how these things work. It’s a slow news day and a desperate news editor who will have suffered a delay on their train journey a few days ago dispatched a hapless report to dredge up a story on how terrible it all is. It is lazy journalism and there is no shortage of such coverage. But there is a wider issue here too. Public transport gets a raw deal in the media while motoring gets a free pass.
Take, for example, a recent incident where a bus veered off the road into a river near Eastleigh in Hampshire and a lurid headline on the BBC, ‘two seriously injured as bus careers into river’. In fact, the bus did not end up being submerged but rather its wheels got wet and the passengers were able to disembark with not difficulty. This was, though, an incredibly rare incident and it is understandable that it attracted attention.
However, there was no context for this. The impression left by the reporting was that bus travel is inherently dangerous and this kind of thing is likely to happen all the time. In truth, billions of people travel on buses annually and in most years they all survive unscathed. Yet, every day in the UK half a dozen people die in road accidents with only the most serious ever obtaining coverage even in local media. In the US, the figure is even more staggering with 100 per day killed on average, with absolutely no analysis of how this terrible toll could be reduced.
I recognise it is difficult to report non-events – the fact that there have been so few accidents on the railways – but the improvement in safety on the national railway network is quite remarkable. Even when I started covering the industry in the 1990s, rail accidents were still relatively commonplace. Indeed, there was a series of four disasters – Southall, Paddington, Hatfield and Potters Bar – in the early days of privatisation but since the 2002 Potters Bar accident there has been an unprecedented period of more than two decades during which there has been only one which has caused multiple fatalities. That accident, at Stonehaven near Aberdeen in August 2020, was caused by a landslide and resulted in three deaths.
There have, of course, been near misses, notably when a steam hauled excursion train went through a red signal near Wooton Bassett in Wiltshire in March 2015 and missed hitting a 125 train by less than a minute, an accident which would clearly have been one of the worst ever on Britain’s railway. We are always a whisker away from disaster, and yet improvements, both technical and regulatory, have resulted in a far safer railway than ever before. Yet, whenever an accident, however minor, occurs, there will be media reports on ‘how safe are our railways?’ and the like. Instead, they should be stressing the rare nature of such events and putting that context over to the public. Unfortunately, they rarely do. And the death toll on the roads continues unreported.