Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-05-19 09:28:08 - Graham Ellis
Abstraction - the provision of additional goods or services in a new way, such that they take over goods or services already supplied, in spite of those other goods or services continuing to be supplied. Something I've come across quite a bit, and been thinking on recently. Perhaps my definition is a bit abstract (different use of word) and I should explain further, with examples.
If the West End supplies pub meals in Melksham, and The Bear opens its doors supplying pub meals in Melksham too, there's likely to be abstraction. In other words, some of the customers who've previously eaten at the West End will go to The Bear instead, and that will be trade lost (or abstracted from) the West End.This is the 'natural' way of commercial competition, under which multiple products are on offer, the customers choose which are best, the suppliers modify their offerings to improve them or perhaps cease to provide them. At times, such competition can be hidiously wasteful (multiple setup and marketing costs, businesses that don't recoup their setup costs, and so on). In a truely commercial, it's probably a good model but in a model with a social element it can lead to some very real poor decisions as the loosers who have to pull out or subsidise are doing so at the expense of the public purse. Ooops - I've got a bit theoretical again. Perhaps I should be more specific?
Melksham Campus
I'm helping with this many-million pound project in Melksham - the Shadow Community Operations Board provides a local voice into what we want for the town. The budget may sound high, but it could soon get frittered away and so we want the best bang for our bucks. There are a number of requests / suggestions that say "we would like a new XXXXX" facility, but we look around and see that such a facility already exists. Where it's part of our mandate to replace that facility (Christie Miller and the Blue Pool are life expired, for example), that's fair enough and exactly what we're there for. But where parallel facilities exist and will continue, and people are asking the Campus project to add anew, simply because they hope that the price will be lower, that's a very different thing, and I for one could not support the waste of public money on competing with private, or in some cases different public, organisations.
In the exploration work that's gone on already with regard to the Campus, and is ongoing, we have met many of the user groups of existing facilities. We'll be completing that task and also making sure we're aware of as many as possible ("every" would be ideal) current facility (where the facility is to be lost / replaced) and also we need to have a vision for areas where there is no provision at all at the moment. Part of that work has identified both short term and long term disconnections between current supply and demand. We've been able to alert the concerned parties to the extent that thay can work together to deal with issues. Those on short term facilities (such as Christie Miller) have to be done without major expenditure, and are outside our remit - in fact, they're someting of a distraction as user groups are looking for answers to the here and now, whereas we're concerned with the longer term, less visible but far less headlined question of what's needed from 2014 for 10, 20 years. Where there are disconnects we have identified on other faciities that have a long-term future, we can (again) facilitate discussions - and we have to be prepared to say to people "No - we're not going to duplicate that provision just because yyyyy needs sorting out".
TransWilts Rail Services
Would an improved rail service - our requested "10 trains each way per day" - simply abstract passengers from other train services? From other public transport? I read an interesting conjecture the other day that it would, almost exclusively, do so.
There's little doubt that immediate traffic on any new piece of transport is either novelty users or abstraction. The novelty users are a leisure traffic, and may indeed generate ongoing traffic too - people who would stay at home otherwise / not travel. Totally new business traffic and commuting will develop over a period, as businesses relocate or move into new work practises and markets which pull in extra visitors, and people move to locations from where they need to commute to work using a a method that wasn't previously practical for them. For this group, the reassurance that the provision will continue in the longer term is paramount, and reliabiity and affordability too are critical - pressing us towards the need for a provision that has a guarantee of quite a number of years. The 15 years of the upcoming franchise is right, whereas a commercial service that could close with just 6 weeks notice is totally unsatisfactory without a fallback alternative for the people who might otherwise be tempted to use it.
So - where would the abstraction come from on the TransWilts? Current Rail users from Westbury / Trowbridge to Chippenham / Swindon travel via Bath, and in considerable numbers too at times. The 19 minute ride from Trowbridge to Chippenham takes 40 or more minutes (it depends on connections) via Bath. Current rail users who are fortunate enough to have a car and who live in Melksham drive to Chippenham, park there, and catch the train. Again the numbers are considerable, and again the time penalty (and cost too in this case) on them is considerable. Visitors by rail to Melksham will usuaully leave the train at Chippenham, and have a lift arranged, or take a taxi.
Interestingly, only the first of those abstractions is really "rail on rail" [or is it??], as the other make for a shorter rail journey and then extract from private car or taxi. And the rail on rail example is pulling passenger off a service which is at times so overcrowded that people are denied boarding (I think extra carriages may have provided a temporary cure at present, but it's growing so fast ...). In fact, by providing a new service to Swindon rather than strengthening the Bath train as usage continues to grow, and having to provide a direct TransWilts service with it, you're providing relief on the overcrowded Bath train by giving some passengers a better option, and the negatives of overprovision associated with abstraction are cured. You have a real winner. You're just tuning the expanding train(s) to make a quicker and more efficient journey - and remember that a reduced journey time is very good economically, and leaves you with a train / seats that can then be used to raise other revenue (such as taking people from Swindon who have arrived from London down to Melksham and Trowbridge for business meetings, and commuting down there to work too).
So what about other abstractions? There's an awful lot of people who drive the "A350 corridor" and who've stated that they would use the train; undoubtedly, some of them have made the statement more in hope than in actuallity, but then we've only reached a tiny proportion of people, and of them only a tiny proportion have filled in the surveys, so in actuallity threre are likely to be even more than the very large numbers we have identified. Abstraction from bus? Very little. People who are travelling beyond the corridor don't use the bus to get to the station in numbers enough to be significant.
What's interesting is to talk to people too - and to learn that some of this abstraction from other transport goes far wider. Cambridge to Melksham. Would have been train, was actually car. Trowbridge to Edinburgh (Sunday morning, trial service). Would have been by air, was actually train all the way. And these are just samples.
Well House Consultants training courses
We didn't set up a "me too" business. We've set up something different. So competition is somewhat on the periphery much of the time. We specialise in niche courses that others don't offer, and we specialise in training people from a level that others don't cater for. As I write this, I'm away on holiday in Wales, and I return for next Saturday for customers arriving for a "Learning to program in PHP" course that starts on the Sunday. Is there a market for that - err, yes there is. But it's one that others simply don't cater for. We didn't set it up to abstract, but of course in our commercial world there's nothing to stop someone else setting up in competition with us.
Enough ... I'm getting back to my holiday. The welsh sheep are baaaa-ing, and the ground is drying. Looks like a fine day ahead!