The Psychology Of Transport - Rory Sutherland

In fact, there are so many railcards that they should just say, "Okay, we're gonna get rid of all railcards and we're gonna give middle-aged men a white bastard middle-aged man's railcard, which means you've got to pay 33% extra." Because, I mean, everybody except the middle-aged gets a bloody railcard nowadays. (wind blowing)

You've been looking at transport a lot recently. What have you learned there?

Yes. Sorry, sorry. Okay, so the book's coming out on Thursday, it's being launched on, on Thursday, and it's called, uh, Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? And it's co-authored, and I have to say he's probably authored rather more of it than I have, um, uh, by my colleague Pete Dyson, who was my colleague in the behavioral science practice in Ogilvy and now works for the beha- Department for Transport as the head of behavioral science there. And it's a very, very interesting, uh, area for exploration because transport, even more than most areas of kind of business and governmental behavior, tends to get dominated by reductionist metrics. And as a result, uh, it gets over-optimized around what you can easily measure, things like speed and time and capacity and duration and punctuality, and under-optimized a- around things that humans care deeply about, but which you can't actually measure because we don't have quantifiable SI-derived units for.

What, like?

E- enjoyment, regret, fairness, okay? There's a very useful, actually, guy called, um... I was gonna say Chris Rock, but he's obviously not called Chris Rock. Um, there's a guy called David Rock who's a neuroscientist. He's a Kiwi but based in New York, and he has a model which he calls SCARF. And SCARF stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Now, I don't think it's a complete list, I think there are other things like regret, avoidance, although you could put that under certainty, I suppose. But his contention is these are five things that humans have evolved to care deeply about, but which economists, or for that matter, transport planners, don't really understand or factor into their equations at all. So I'll give you a very simple example, okay? Um, and Daniel Kahneman has actually done work around this. It's much more annoying to miss a train or a flight by five minutes than it is to miss a flight by 25 minutes or half an hour or an hour. Um, now, you know, to a, you know, reductionist metric, it shouldn't matter because you missed the plane. You didn't miss the plane. The degree of annoyance and upset you might experience should be pretty much exactly the same in either case. There's also much more regret, I think, if, uh, if the flight was delayed and left five minutes before you arrived at the airport. It pisses you off more than if the flight wasn't delayed. There are all sorts of interesting psychological things going on here. Now, the point about that kind of thing is that, for instance, barriers like queues at ticket machines and, you know, problems getting through ticket barriers or a delay at a gate prior to boarding a train are likely to create disproportionate annoyance because they cause a large number of people to miss a train by a very narrow amount of m- m- n- narrow amount of time. Um, (coughs) another thing would be, which is a particular rant of mine, uh, you know, they spent, you know, hundreds of millions on new rolling stock for Thameslink. Now, Thameslink, because it's a penetrating service, you know, it'll go from places like Brighton to Bedford, for instance. It is potentially, although it's mostly used probably for commuter rail, it is potentially quite a long-distance rail service. And the trains, by the way, are very, very good. I think they're extremely well-designed with one extraordinary failing. There aren't seat back tables. So if you're on a one and a half hour journey from, let's say, Brighton to, I don't know, you know, w- just north of London, Kentish Town or something, okay, you can't work on the train. Okay? Now, that kind of thing, everybody is basically stipulating their, um, and they're assessing transport proposals based on their objective characteristics of time and speed and capacity. And yet that's based on the assumption that time spent on a train is a disutility. And that's, in fact, the justifiable, th- that's the case used to justify High Speed 2, that everybody on a train is economically useless, so the less time they spend on a train, the more productive these people are. Now anybody-