Before I get on to this week’s topic, I must say thank-you on behalf of everyone at Alphabet to our customers who voted Alphabet as Service Supplier of the Year in the BusinessCar Awards.
Alphabet is certainly going places and it’s a great honour to be singled out from the whole of the fleet supply industry, especially as customer service will always be what Alphabet is all about.
Talking of going places, the Government unveiled its plans for Stage Two of its high-speed rail project on last month. It made me wonder whether it ought to appoint a Minister for Mobility. Because, looking at the lack of joined-up thinking in the plan, they seem to need one.
The two branches announced this week will take passengers from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds via new stations inconveniently sited miles from Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.
Admittedly, the fortunate few who will use HS2 if it’s ever built will enjoy far faster journeys. But building the whole thing will cost the country at least £33 billion over 20 years.
That works out at a bit more than £1,000 for every private car in the kingdom. The irony was not lost on the Daily Telegraph, which ran the HS2 story next to one headlined: “Cheap road repairs and budget cuts blamed for deeper potholes.”
It isn’t only pothole-dodging drivers who are unhappy about HS2. Years of stiff fare increases have left rail passengers as disgruntled as motorists. Just about the only person in the story with a smile on his face was George Osborne, who’s hoping the line will pull in passengers from far and wide and thus revitalise the economy.
After all, with road traffic declining and rail use rising, he could claim that he’s pushing at an open door. But while I’m all for faster travel, easier communications and better business, high speed rail’s backers may have missed the boat if you’ll excused the mixed metaphor.
Business professionals are already making increasingly-nuanced decisions about whether to travel. The RAC put out a useful report in December, subtitled “Making sense of car and train travel trends in Britain”. Its key finding was that one group of drivers – company car users in ‘professional’ roles – seemed to be responsible for the entire drop in measured car mileage since 2004.
Unfortunately for the HS2 promoters’ strategy, these middle and upper managers are not switching from car to rail travel. They’re keeping their cars but using the internet, mobile comms and teleconferencing instead of physical travel when it makes sense to do so.
For these drivers, ‘cyber travel’ and physical journeys are becoming increasingly interchangeable – as are their home, office and car too for that matter.
This issue will increasingly matter to fleet decision makers as well as rail bosses. As physical movement becomes more costly courtesy of rising energy prices, firms are finding that there’s a real need to capture the whole range of travel costs; work out which activities are most productive, and do something about the ones that aren’t.
Employers are chasing a moving target here, since technologies in and around business vehicles are also developing at the pace of…well, an express train. But whereas the rail project is still on the drawing board, companies in the fleet business, like Alphabet, are already getting on with the job of building the kind of mobility solutions fleets will need.
At this rate, forward-thinking fleets and their suppliers will have re-joined the dots for professional travellers and knowledge workers long before HS2 leaves the station.
