Newcastle’s passenger transport executive sets itself pretty tough targets – and it meets them, according to Head of Corporate Communications Huw Lewis
Written by Ruari McCallion and produced by Paul Radbourne
“Nexus offers a high quality passenger travel system,” said Huw Lewis, head of corporate communications for Nexus, Tyne and Wear’s Passenger Transport Executive, which manages public transport in and around Sunderland and Newcastle , particularly the Metro light rail system.
“We regularly achieve 96-97 per cent punctuality, which puts us comfortably ahead of any other mainland railway operator.” Nexus measures its punctuality at 17 points across the network, not just at ultimate destinations, and ‘punctuality’ is measured as arrival within three minutes of timetabled time, not the five minutes more common across the overground network.
Connections
Nexus runs over 17,000km of train services each day, along interlinked railway lines that extend from Newcastle International Airport to the north-west, to South Hylton, to the south west of Sunderland.
The coastal suburbs of Cullercoats and Whitley Bay are at the eastern rim of Metro, which then swings south and west to Newcastle city centre, over the River Tyne to Gateshead and east again to South Shields. Naturally, Nexus runs the ferry that connects the two Shields to each other. There are few people in Tyne & Wear whose lives aren’t touched by Nexus, somewhere along the line. An increasing number are engaging directly, as fare-paying passengers.
“We carry more than 39 million passengers a year,” said Lewis. Which is good but, a few years ago, it stood at 40 million; it then dipped to 37 million and has actually recovered over the past eighteen months. “There has been a historic decline in Metro use since the mid-1980s, when the integrated public transport system we had in Tyne & Wear was broken up, through bus deregulation.” The trend has been reversed into growth since the beginning of 2006 and has been entirely like-for-like – there have been no new lines.
Private buses, public trains
“Passenger growth is, we believe, a response to higher quality and the value we offer,” he said. “An all-zone season ticket, for example, costs £399; it was reduced in price in 2006. We’re more than happy to challenge any urban rail operator to produce a ticket that represents that kind of value.”
Running the Metro itself is only one aspect of the challenge involved in Nexus, which had revenues of £97 million in the last financial year - £37 million from Metro fares, the balance from advertising, property rental and operational subsidies. Buses are an essential part of the local transport network but they’re all run by private companies. Integrating all transport methodologies is a challenge that Nexus is addressing with an innovative, quality-oriented approach…
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