(Replying here to a post in the Carmarthen-Aberystwyth thread as this is more relevant to this thread)
Look - if you want to tell people that a journey which should take 30 mins in a car should take over an hour by train and can only be done when the trains are running then fine - you go right ahead. Just don't be surprised if people don't fall into line with your expectations.
Personally I think it's quite understandable if someone chooses to drive if doing so knocks their journey from over an hour to 30 minutes. But the key thing is to ask
why driving is so much quicker in those cases. And in too many cases, the answer is: Partly because too much investment has gone on the road network and not enough on public transport, and partly because of idiotic planning policies that stick homes and industrial areas out in the sticks where the only practical way to get to them is to drive. There is no easy quick fix to that, but the only realistic long term solution is to reverse those mistakes by investing more in public transport and having more sensible planning policies.
The A5 is a major trunk route even now. That it's not been invested in and is now congested is not acceptable, but trying to claim that reinstating a long closed railway line to a town of 17,000 people will solve this is deluded. And therein lies the problem -
That the A5 is congested is crap - and no doubt frustrating for all who are caught in it. But investing in it to increase capacity is not the solution. And unfortunately, there probably is no easy and quick solution. Doing something like duelling the A5 will just pull more people into cars and lead (after a couple of years) to more congestion in the towns etc. that people are driving to/from: It won't solve the jams, it'll just shift them to other places along people's routes. Reinstating the line to Oswestry also will make not much difference. But the key point is that: It will make
some small difference by allowing a few people to avoid driving - and it will do so without simply moving the congestion elsewhere. Sorting out full doubling of the Chester-Shrewsbury line so you can run a clockface half-hourly service on it would probably help more (although even that will only make a small difference).
As I've said before, I don't think opening to Oswestry is a particularly good rail investment: If you could spend money anywhere in the country, then there are loads of places that would see a much better return for the investment. But if you had some money to spend, and you had to spend it in the Oswestry area, then reopening the rail link would be a good deal more sensible (if you prefer, less silly) than doubling the A5.
you want to force people to behave in the way you think they should and they should pay for the privilege, unless you think there is this mythical group of "rich" people who will just pay for all your mad whims.
That's an ironic thing to say when earlier in the same post you gave a (hypothetical, but typical) example of someone having been, for all practical purposes, forced to drive because the public transport options take so long. In the UK, far too often, the problem isn't people being forced to use public transport, it's people being forced to drive whether they want to or not, because of decades of transport and planning policies that favoured roads and driving over all other travel options (thankfully, over the last 20 years or so, the focus on motoring has become a lot less)
