Service quality and price are all up in the air

Should every passenger pay the same for their journey, and get the same

Mark Cartwright

07 July 2011

Mark Cartwright is a founder Director of Centaur Consulting Limited, a Surrey-based company which provides strategic technology and policy services. He is a mathematician by training, and a Chartered Engineer. Mark began his professional life in the academic world, where he taught mathematics at the Universities of Oxford and Nottingham. As a consultant, Mark has worked for clients in defence, telecoms, broadcasting, finance and energy sectors, at European, national and local levels. For the past fifteen years, his main area of interest has been transport technology, and he is currently involved in the management and development of numerous national initiatives: UTMC for traffic management, the public transport community RTIG, and RSSB’s Operational Communications programme for GB Rail.

From Concorde to low-cost. The airlines have constantly sought to offer different levels of service and price to segment the market.

In my last piece, I mused on the way in which governmental approaches to regulation of passenger transport can have some unintended consequences; specifically, the difficulty in providing incentives for transport operators to innovate and even – in the name of competition management –how ‘steering’ an open market hobbles their ability to drive efficiency. It was rather apposite that since I wrote about that subject, the UK Competition Commission Report on the UK bus...