Dilemmas
Social safety: employees versus NS as a brand in the labour market?
NS raised awareness of the social problem of aggression in public transport across the Netherlands in 2024. We did this in response to a violent incident on 13 April that crossed a line. Under the heading #wijstaanstil, NS trains stood still for three minutes across the Netherlands on Saturday 20 April at 10.30 pm, while NS station shops closed their doors. Other public transport companies showed solidarity and also brought their trains, buses, trams and metros to a standstill. For a week, we drew attention to numerous stories from colleagues about the downsides of working in public transport. We wanted to give the Netherlands a realistic picture of the aggression faced by our staff at stations and on trains. We issued this strong signal at a time when we were also facing a considerable challenge on the labour market. We were looking for new employees in all areas and could not afford to miss out on good candidates. The #wijstaanstil campaign required us to carefully consider this potential 'disengagement trigger' for applicants prior to launch. Ultimately, we felt we had to go ahead with the campaign. The attention to the suffering we were voicing resulted in a demonstrable drop in the number of applicants.
The joint journey discount: adapt or abolish?
The joint journey discount enables season ticket holders to gift 40% discount to someone else. A condition is that they have to travel together during off-peak hours or at weekends. Before the start of 2024, fellow passengers only had to add a joint journey discount to their public transport card. Unfortunately, for many passengers travelling with this discount it was unclear who they were travelling with. This meant that the joint journey discount often led to arguments for colleagues on trains when checking tickets, regularly resulting in unpleasant situations. This presented NS with a dilemma: do we keep the joint journey discount, drop the product or adapt it? We opted for the latter. From now on, the season ticket holder will generate a code that can be shared with the fellow passenger. They need that code to buy an e-ticket or activate the joint journey discount on their own NS season ticket. Guards can then check on the scanner which season ticket holder the fellow passenger is travelling with. The new method makes using the discount slightly more complex, but improves safety for our colleagues and fellow passengers.
High-speed rail (HSL) timetable: more frequent travel or a more reliable timetable?
NS employees want to run trains and carry passengers. Preferably as often, as well and as punctually as possible. If this sometimes proves impossible, it is particularly annoying for passengers but also for NS employees. We ran into several issues on the high-speed line that caused us difficulties. NS had fewer new Intercity trains to run than expected because the supplier delivered fewer trains than anticipated. This meant that we had to run more older trains on the HSL, which require a lot of maintenance. On top of this, several temporary speed limits were imposed on the HSL. The high-speed travel the HSL was designed for was no longer possible. Trains were often in each other's way. There were also extensive works at Schiphol Airport. All these factors combined caused delays and a higher risk of unplanned train cancellations. We did and do consider that degree of unpredictability to be undesirable for our passengers. But scaling down our timetable, and with it our passenger offering, is not something we want to do either. We decided to remove one train an hour between Breda and Amsterdam from the timetable. We also adjusted the departure times of the other trains on the HSL, leaving a little more time between trains. This reduced our hourly offering, but made the HSL timetable more reliable.