Next Steps/Phase

Further survey work was scheduled for early June, but the announcement of a UK General Election means that Civil Service rules relating to this form of Social Research suggest that this should be postponed until the election is concluded. Survey work in July will allow it to be incorporated into the Final Evaluation Report.

The second wave of research will be refined in light of the challenges explained in this report e.g. repeated severe weather incidents, increasing the response rate across all groups but especially the harder to reach, group 3 – new to rail - to ensure a robust evidence base to inform the final evaluation of the Pilot.

The final evaluation will specifically pick up on the following issues raised by this report:

• Further exploration of the counterfactual of what demand would have been without the Pilot in place.
• A rigorous assessment of the impact on bus services as well as the extent of mode shift from private car.
• Examination of specific issues around ticket sales – for example, the non-use of returns inflating demand figures.
• The extent to which crowding is impacting on services – there has been no evidence of this to date.
• A final assessment of the Value for Money of the Pilot. This will include distributional effects that weight the impact by the groups who most benefit from the change and a projection of how the costs and benefits of the policy might change over time.
• Full additional costs to ScotRail over the full Pilot.