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Government - Increase use of public transport

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NotATrainspott

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I broadly agree with this but please don't forget tyre particulates. Brake particulates may largely disappear due to regenerative braking, but as an EV is heavier than the equivalent IC vehicle the tyre particulates will probably be more (also meaning shorter tyre life and more road wear).

In the absence of a road pricing system I think a mileage charge is an acceptable compromise - the rate per mile could be made dependent on the vehicle weight. Or perhaps even a tax on tyres - although that might encourage people to keep them in use longer than is safe.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/states-move-closer-to-taxing-you-by-how-far-you-drive/

Oh yes, very much so. That's one of the reasons why vehicles with a larger mass need to be taxed more, since they'll generally produce more tyre particulates. I'm sure there will need to be some recognition of different tyre types in future too, but it's easy to create a mass-based tax today.

A mileage charge in itself won't work, because you need to tax the 2 mile school run in central London far more than a 20 mile jaunt across the Western Isles. Arguably we should also include a time factor too - there's not much problem driving about at 2am when the roads are empty.

In China, all electric vehicles must be fitted with a level of information reporting to the government which will enable this sort of pricing. It's somewhat inevitable that the same tech will be trivially possible everywhere else too. Once it's the car's own GPS signal being used, you can be as precise as you like with a charging scheme. It would even be possible to remove physical barriers to car movement like bollards and bus-only sections, and just have very high charges for driving through them.

This will be especially important when urban areas try going car-free. If you've got a flat in the Old Town of Edinburgh in the proposed car-free area, then a system which makes it still possible to do occasional trips to a superstore in a private car (rented or borrowed) and drive all the way to your door is going to be very useful. If it cost £5 for the privilege that would be little barrier to occasional use but it would pretty much guarantee no one would try doing it every day unless they had some very good reason.

Intelligent charging like this can help with all sorts of otherwise intractable problems. For instance, you can effectively toll NOT driving on a motorway or trunk road, to minimise through traffic in traditional urban centres. You don't need to have any crazy system based around the address stored on file for the car registration (which will never work, because people's lives are complex) to ensure people aren't over-charged for living somewhere.
 
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edwin_m

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I do think charging systems should be kept relatively simple in terms of how the rate varies by time and place. People need to be able to decide on their route, and indeed whether to use the car at all, before they start their journey and the charges should be fixed and clear enough for a satnav-type system to give them a pretty accurate estimate at least. If the system adjusts in real time and people are hit with a big charge as well as a long delay because they end up in a tailback from an accident, then public support will be even harder to sustain.
 

The Ham

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Another way of taxing cars could be to have a car parking space/car registration tax. This could then tax rural areas lightly whilst taxing urban areas more.

You could even at the tax so that the first space isn't a lot (say £200 a year) with extra spaces getting more expensive (say £500 for a second space and £1,250 for a third space and £3,125 for a fourth space and £10,000 for the fifth or more space).

That would mean that few people would be able to justify the cost of lots of car parking spaces/cars registered at a single address.

Rural areas could see those rates halve whilst very busy urban areas (say London) would be double that. Where there's two or more homes owned the spaces are taxed at the lower rate first and then working up to the most expensive with the split being shared between the rates, but where this isn't an equal split the remainder vehicles allocated to the most expensive house first.

Therefore if you owned 3 cars over 2 homes one in London and one in a very rural areas you'd be taxed £100 (Rural), £1,000 (London) and £2,500 (London).
 

squizzler

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I do think charging systems should be kept relatively simple in terms of how the rate varies by time and place. People need to be able to decide on their route, and indeed whether to use the car at all, before they start their journey and the charges should be fixed and clear enough for a satnav-type system to give them a pretty accurate estimate at least. If the system adjusts in real time and people are hit with a big charge as well as a long delay because they end up in a tailback from an accident, then public support will be even harder to sustain.
I disagree with the need for people to 'decide on their route', beyond perhaps choosing from various options trading price or speed or comfort. The idea behind 'Mobility a a Service' is to de-skill public transport riding to a point that even a motorist can do it:) The transport operator's pricing might be dynamic, but the software and your subscription plan to the service should in some way ameliorate that.

Whilst there are those who scoffed at the notion, it must be bound in mind that we are on a rail forum and there are people out there who don't know their way round an ABC railway map, for whom MaaS will be a game changer.
 

Bletchleyite

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Another way of taxing cars could be to have a car parking space/car registration tax. This could then tax rural areas lightly whilst taxing urban areas more.

That will just result in more street parking. The UK isn't set up for a change to the approach of "you can't park unless it says you can" as some countries do - it would be a huge project to change it - a pavement parking ban is going to require enough bay-marking work, let alone that.
 

Dr Hoo

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I disagree with the need for people to 'decide on their route', beyond perhaps choosing from various options trading price or speed or comfort. The idea behind 'Mobility a a Service' is to de-skill public transport riding to a point that even a motorist can do it:) The transport operator's pricing might be dynamic, but the software and your subscription plan to the service should in some way ameliorate that.

Whilst there are those who scoffed at the notion, it must be bound in mind that we are on a rail forum and there are people out there who don't know their way round an ABC railway map, for whom MaaS will be a game changer.
Another way of looking at it might be ‘accidentally’ making road pricing, charging, parking, vehicle registration, etc. so complicated that public transport suddenly seems relatively straightforward.
 
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The often mentioned growth in the unemployment figures, resulting from the current problems, will be reduced by implementing some of the over-complicated ideas being suggested here to reduce car use. Thousands of people will be employed creating such schemes. The old saying "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" comes to mind.
 

Railwaysceptic

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To be fair, London already has a very high proportion of public transport usage. I would have thought that any effort to encourage modal shift would have to focus on everywhere else instead.
Yes, I agree with that. In London people who don't travel by public transport are mainly those for whom public transport is not relevant to their requirements; e.g. someone who lives in an northern outer suburb and who works in a different northern outer suburb and for whom the car is far more appropriate.
 

edwin_m

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I disagree with the need for people to 'decide on their route', beyond perhaps choosing from various options trading price or speed or comfort. The idea behind 'Mobility a a Service' is to de-skill public transport riding to a point that even a motorist can do it:) The transport operator's pricing might be dynamic, but the software and your subscription plan to the service should in some way ameliorate that.

Whilst there are those who scoffed at the notion, it must be bound in mind that we are on a rail forum and there are people out there who don't know their way round an ABC railway map, for whom MaaS will be a game changer.
I think we're actually agreeing - I'm not suggesting that everyone has to add up the costs of alternative routes by hand before choosing one. The satnav or similar would do that for them and give a choice, much as they do today for the shortest versus the quickest etc. What I'm concerned about is the dynamic pricing element that means that by the time someone reaches a particular piece of road in question the price originally quoted has changed, and they would have been better taking a different route. So if dynamically priced the prices should be set far enough in advance to avoid that, which effectively means they are priced by road type and time band without being adjusted in anything near real time. Even time bands are questionable, as they could change the price if the driver has an planned or involuntary delay.
 

The Ham

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That will just result in more street parking. The UK isn't set up for a change to the approach of "you can't park unless it says you can" as some countries do - it would be a huge project to change it - a pavement parking ban is going to require enough bay-marking work, let alone that.

Which is why I also talked about vehicle registrations as well as spaces, so that you couldn't just pay the tax on one space and park your car on street (or even those ~40% who don't have any off street parking).
 

RT4038

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Another way of taxing cars could be to have a car parking space/car registration tax. This could then tax rural areas lightly whilst taxing urban areas more.

You could even at the tax so that the first space isn't a lot (say £200 a year) with extra spaces getting more expensive (say £500 for a second space and £1,250 for a third space and £3,125 for a fourth space and £10,000 for the fifth or more space).

That would mean that few people would be able to justify the cost of lots of car parking spaces/cars registered at a single address.

Rural areas could see those rates halve whilst very busy urban areas (say London) would be double that. Where there's two or more homes owned the spaces are taxed at the lower rate first and then working up to the most expensive with the split being shared between the rates, but where this isn't an equal split the remainder vehicles allocated to the most expensive house first.

Therefore if you owned 3 cars over 2 homes one in London and one in a very rural areas you'd be taxed £100 (Rural), £1,000 (London) and £2,500 (London).

This is simply a non starter. So those people who live in urban areas are financially penalised to 'incentivise' them to travel by the second rate, inconvenient public transport, whilst those in rural areas can drive from the rural areas to swan around the urban areas in their cars for a fraction of the parking tax. No, sir! How about taxing and thereby 'incentivising' rural dwellers (by far most of them living in rural areas as a lifestyle choice rather than because have a connection with farming) to move to the urban areas so they can be reliant on this public transport too? It would cut down all that rural car mileage!
 

underbank

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How about taxing and thereby 'incentivising' rural dwellers (by far most of them living in rural areas as a lifestyle choice rather than because have a connection with farming) to move to the urban areas so they can be reliant on this public transport too?

So you want to relocate even more people into already overcrowded areas where public services such as schools and hospitals and GP surgeries are stretched to the limit, where housing is expensive, where buses/trains are already full, and leave behind places with plenty of infrastructure, close down hospitals and schools due to lack of locals, etc. Wouldn't that actually makes things worse in the cities and south east?? Do you really want more housing built on the few remaining bits of land left in cities or increase urban sprawl into the surrounding countryside?
 

Deepgreen

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I've only just come to this thread, so apologies if I'm repeating others' posts.

This Government has 'announced' this now knowing it would get utterly lost in the melee surrounding the virus. Similarly, when they formulated and announced the budget, they MUST then have known that the virus was spreading to an extent that rendered any financial commitments nul and void, but while appearing to the electorate to be caring and willing to spend.

The economic crash that will follow the present 'crisis' will dwarf all previous ones, and there will be no investment available for pretty much anything, let alone new railway infrastructure/equipment. The many, many years it will take to recoup the trillions lost to the economy will not be characterised by the provision of new infrastructure of the kind that transport's systemic transformation will require.

The cynicism of this shower would seem OTT in a dystopian drama!
 

PG

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Nothing is going to change - irrespective of the taxation regime - until the true elephant in the room is dealt with and that is: a car gets cheaper per person as more people occupy it, while public transport gets more expensive for those same people when they travel together.
There's also the way some people view their car fixed costs as being cheaper spread over more journeys. Thus additional journeys end up costing less per mile as they've (in their view) already covered the fixed costs of ownership.

Another way of looking at it might be ‘accidentally’ making road pricing, charging, parking, vehicle registration, etc. so complicated that public transport suddenly seems relatively straightforward.
I like your way of thinking - the politicians can probably manage to make it pretty complicated without any further assistance :D
 

Deepgreen

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So you want to relocate even more people into already overcrowded areas where public services such as schools and hospitals and GP surgeries are stretched to the limit, where housing is expensive, where buses/trains are already full, and leave behind places with plenty of infrastructure, close down hospitals and schools due to lack of locals, etc. Wouldn't that actually makes things worse in the cities and south east?? Do you really want more housing built on the few remaining bits of land left in cities or increase urban sprawl into the surrounding countryside?
What is the "plenty of infrastructure"? Public transport infrastructure (which is the point here) in rural areas is known to be thin, at best.
 

RT4038

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So you want to relocate even more people into already overcrowded areas where public services such as schools and hospitals and GP surgeries are stretched to the limit, where housing is expensive, where buses/trains are already full, and leave behind places with plenty of infrastructure, close down hospitals and schools due to lack of locals, etc. Wouldn't that actually makes things worse in the cities and south east?? Do you really want more housing built on the few remaining bits of land left in cities or increase urban sprawl into the surrounding countryside?

Most of the public services mentioned are already in the urban areas, whereas rural areas generally do not have this infrastructure, and residents are required to travel to the urban areas to access. If rural dwellers get some special privileges towards private transport ownership/use, this will encourage more to move from the urban areas to rural areas, such is the lifestyle difference between private transport and reliance on public transport.
Is housing really more expensive in the nearest urban area to any given rural area? Only where this is a long distance away. In many areas it is quite the reverse. Increasing urban sprawl or building more executive houses in rural areas is a bit of a muchness as far as countryside landtake is concerned, but public service provision in urban sprawl will likely be more cost effective and reduce travel.
 

Taunton

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Yes, I agree with that. In London people who don't travel by public transport are mainly those for whom public transport is not relevant to their requirements; e.g. someone who lives in an northern outer suburb and who works in a different northern outer suburb and for whom the car is far more appropriate.
This actually goes a long way in. We are in inner London, a normal morning of doing a school dropoff, then an office dropoff, then onward that takes me 20 minutes requires an hour and a half by public transport on mornings I am away on business, when the others have to leave the house at 0720 instead of 0830. Incidentally, quoted journey times are only part of it, because I calculated more than half that overall time is walking and waiting for the next one. In fact, it can be more than those 20 minutes before even departing the first station.

One aspect of modern life is that public services now provide choice. You no longer "have to" go to the nearest school, you are allowed a choice. Same with medical facilities, you no longer must go to only the nearest, but can choose. This means the old public service aspect of local provision breaks down.

And with the standards in our nearest school, walking distance, thank goodness for that ...
 

The Ham

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This is simply a non starter. So those people who live in urban areas are financially penalised to 'incentivise' them to travel by the second rate, inconvenient public transport, whilst those in rural areas can drive from the rural areas to swan around the urban areas in their cars for a fraction of the parking tax. No, sir! How about taxing and thereby 'incentivising' rural dwellers (by far most of them living in rural areas as a lifestyle choice rather than because have a connection with farming) to move to the urban areas so they can be reliant on this public transport too? It would cut down all that rural car mileage!

It depends on how far from an urban area you go before it becomes rural.

For instance if you said that you only got the reduced rate of you were 10 miles from the boundary of any settlement with more than 10,000 people (government definition of rural is less than 10,000) then you'd find that quite a lot of areas wouldn't qualify for the reduced rate and not that many within a reasonable distance of London or most major cities.

Anyway the difference for the first few cars would be small enough that it's not really worth doing (not when you consider that you'd add a lot of extra costs for going into urban areas, probably at least an extra 15 miles each way - which would soon rack up if you were doing it more than once or twice a week) and you'd probably limit the discount to the first 3 vehicles.

Anyway, you could pair it with major towns and cities having congestion charges (say, any urban area with over 150,000 people), which would further limit the desire to drive into urban areas
 

underbank

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I think people misunderstand what "rural" actually means. It doesn't mean an isolated hillside cottage miles from anywhere. I live in a "rural" village of 6,500 inhabitants with numerous shops, garages, a school, 3 churches, pubs, restaurants, a GP surgery, etc. Yet we don't have anything like a usable bus service to the nearby towns and city, hence most people have cars.

The last remaining bus service through the village was scrapped under Labour around 2005, but it had already been made virtually useless before then as it didn't run before 10am nor after 3pm - so completely useless for workers, commuters and school children. Our bus service now runs via the village by-pass road, which is as much as 2 miles away from most of the village, and even then it still a pathetic hourly service with nothing in the evening nor Sunday!

Do people really want 6,500 people moving into the cities? Someone above asked about infrastructure - isn't a school, GP surgery, shops, pubs, restaurants, garages, churches, etc enough for you?? Do you want to close an over-subscribed village school that gets extended every 2 years with yet another new classroom to try to keep up with demand?

Like I say "rural" doesn't mean old Mrs Miggans in her 1800s cottage with no electricity! From what I remember, towns and villages with under 10,000 inhabitants are classed as rural. That's a lot of people you want to relocate to already congested cities - hundreds of thousands of people! In fact, I've just googled it and found that 11.4 million people live in predominantly rural areas - fancy half of those moving to London and SE? No, thought not!
 

johnnychips

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I am sure there was a thread in ‘Buses and Coaches’ about the largest settlement with no public transport. I think your ‘village’ would be the winner.
 

NorthernSpirit

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In order to achieve this, they need to ensure that no fares rise more than inflation.

If they want to make fares "fairer" this cannot be done by increasing the cheaper fares, as some people propose under a "revenue neutral" (in other words, most people pay more) scheme.

Current pricing policies appear to be aimed at pricing people off rail on most routes (there are some exceptions where fares remain reasonable), for example York to Leeds is priced very high, which is presumably designed to encourage people to use other modes of transport.

It's a nice idea, but I can't see it actually happening to be honest.

Would encouraging local authorities who currently don't have a "day rover" type ticketing scheme to introduce one to help promote and encourage the use of public transport?

One fare, one ticket and as many journeys in a single day on as many of the participating operators.
 

The Ham

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I think people misunderstand what "rural" actually means. It doesn't mean an isolated hillside cottage miles from anywhere. I live in a "rural" village of 6,500 inhabitants with numerous shops, garages, a school, 3 churches, pubs, restaurants, a GP surgery, etc. Yet we don't have anything like a usable bus service to the nearby towns and city, hence most people have cars.

The last remaining bus service through the village was scrapped under Labour around 2005, but it had already been made virtually useless before then as it didn't run before 10am nor after 3pm - so completely useless for workers, commuters and school children. Our bus service now runs via the village by-pass road, which is as much as 2 miles away from most of the village, and even then it still a pathetic hourly service with nothing in the evening nor Sunday!

Do people really want 6,500 people moving into the cities? Someone above asked about infrastructure - isn't a school, GP surgery, shops, pubs, restaurants, garages, churches, etc enough for you?? Do you want to close an over-subscribed village school that gets extended every 2 years with yet another new classroom to try to keep up with demand?

Like I say "rural" doesn't mean old Mrs Miggans in her 1800s cottage with no electricity! From what I remember, towns and villages with under 10,000 inhabitants are classed as rural. That's a lot of people you want to relocate to already congested cities - hundreds of thousands of people! In fact, I've just googled it and found that 11.4 million people live in predominantly rural areas - fancy half of those moving to London and SE? No, thought not!

About 15% of the population lives in a rural settlement, however many of those would already be within the South East, as an example I'm aware of quite a few within Hampshire locally to where I live. In fact estimates put the risk population of Hampshire at 300,000 (about 2.6% of the total rural population).

Extend that to Kent, East and West Sussex, Surry, Berkshire, and so on and so forth and there's already doing to be quite a significant number of people already within the South East who are already classified as rural.

Many of those would have railway stations and/or bus services.
 
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Yet we don't have anything like a usable bus service to the nearby towns and city, hence most people have cars.
Or - Most people have cars, hence we don't have anything like a usable bus service to the nearby towns and city. It is the classic chicken and egg, but if 6500 people woild sustain a regular "usable" service would the likes of Stagecoach, First, Go Ahead etc not be on the case?
 

HSTEd

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So you want to relocate even more people into already overcrowded areas where public services such as schools and hospitals and GP surgeries are stretched to the limit,
These things are overcrowded because of a Governmental choice, not necessity.

Providing schools, hospitals and GP surgeries (if such a thing should even exist in a modern city) is far cheaper for a concentrated population than a dispersed one.

where housing is expensive,
Housing is only expensive because the state deliberately restraints the growth of cities with things like green belts.
Otherwise they would sprawl.

close down hospitals and schools due to lack of locals, etc.
A lot of housing, schools and hospitals are old and decrepit and are not really suitable for the modern era.
If we want to hit our energy decarbonisation targest then a lot of the housing stock is going to have been rebuilt, possibly to the extent of just being torn down and built again.


[ Wouldn't that actually makes things worse in the cities and south east?? Do you really want more housing built on the few remaining bits of land left in cities or increase urban sprawl into the surrounding countryside?
One continuous sprawl is preferable to dozens of sprawls scattered across the entire country.


But really if we want a city optimised for public transport we have to abandon the idea of "compact city cores" and embrace a ribbon city (a so called 'linear arcology').
A strip ~400-800m or so wide with a railway system running down the centre.
It would have six tracks, three in each direction.
One would be a light metro, operating with stop spacings of ~600m or so. This ensures that no position in the city is more than ~360-500m from a station, a distance covered by many forms of transport including walking or even moving walkways.
The light metro will have a top speed comparable to the Paris Metro, about ~25km/h - slow but still beating buses in urban areas typically.

Then we have a regional line, with stops on order of every 3000m or so.
Judging by the example of parts of RER A, this line will average approximately ~75km/h.

Finally we have the trunk line, with Shinkansen style stock, stops every 30,000m.
Average speed will be on order of ~170km/h.

This cadence of interchange stations between teh Metro and Regional every 5 metro stations, and Shinkansen every 10 regional stations, allows the higher levels to take the load of longer journeys off without forcing people who do not want to change to change.
All three lines would be effectively continuous over the entire length of the ribbon settlement.
If developed to city like densities we could have a linear park strip on both sides of the city, which would be able to route all traffic onto this extremely simple system with minimum timetabling or other problems.
The capacity of the lines woudl be calibrated using train lengths to maximise practical frequencies, but with the enormous capacity of modern rolling stock the potential loadings are huge.
Conventional steel rail is not necessarily the best for all three options and maglevs and rubber tyre systems might get a peak in, but thats for later optimisations.

It is nothing like a city that exists today, but it seems best able to handle the world we now live in.
Travelling long distances on electrically powered public transport has very low impacts, and a linear formation maximises use of public transport resources.

An 800m wide strip from Barton-upon-Humber to Cambridge would include ~150sq.km, which at the density of Paris would be 3 million people!
 
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PG

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One continuous sprawl is preferable to dozens of sprawls scattered across the entire country.
Yes, it's quite laughable that some areas run pretty continuously with only the name signs delineating one from the next. Clearly previous planners have failed...
But really if we want a city optimised for public transport we have to abandon the idea of "compact city cores" and embrace a ribbon city (a so called 'linear arcology').
A strip ~400-800m or so wide with a railway system running down the centre.
It would have six tracks, three in each direction.
Reminds me of coming into Nottingham on the Robin Hood line with the trams running alongside from Hucknall.
It is nothing like a city that exists today, but it seems best able to handle the world we now live in.
I'm dubious if (in Britain) anywhere would get enough politicians at all levels to agree to the necessary remodelling required as it is so different to what exists today.
 

yorkie

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Can we please stick to the topic Government - Increase use of public transport

The forum has plenty of spare capacity for threads to be created on other topics in the relevant area of the forum; there is no need to cram loads of different topics (even if slightly related) all into one thread ;)


Some posts have been moved to: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...d-by-vehicle-data-reporting-be-viable.202981/

Thanks! :)
 
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thenorthern

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I am sure the government wants people to use public transport more and I am sure the Labour Party wants people to use public transport more but the problem is outside their London bubble rail options are often poor or sometimes non-existent.

People will only use trains if the option are there. It's also not simply a case of having an open station as many towns such as Mansfield do have an open station but usage of trains within the town is relatively low and there are no direct connections to Chesterfield or Sheffield meaning that unless one wants to go to Nottingham or Worksop it's pointless.
 

Llandudno

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I am sure the government wants people to use public transport more and I am sure the Labour Party wants people to use public transport more but the problem is outside their London bubble rail options are often poor or sometimes non-existent.

People will only use trains if the option are there. It's also not simply a case of having an open station as many towns such as Mansfield do have an open station but usage of trains within the town is relatively low and there are no direct connections to Chesterfield or Sheffield meaning that unless one wants to go to Nottingham or Worksop it's pointless.
I don’t think people use the bus to travel from Mansfield to Sheffield either, there are six buses per day taking around 95 minutes!

There is a bus from Mansfield to Chesterfield every 30 minutes, but this goes all around the houses, even though it’s called ‘Pronto’ and takes about 50 minutes!
 

edwin_m

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A Mansfield-Chesterfield rail service would cost in the hundreds of millions to build essentially a new railway between the two, and take many years to plan, design and build. That's for just one of the hundreds of pairs of towns that suffer from poor links between them, and it's clear that rail isn't the answer for these, other than a few where a line still exists or can easily be reinstated.

It would be far cheaper and quicker to fund a direct express bus, or for example along the A38 to Alfreton timed to connect with trains. This could also have fare integration with the train, and the local buses in both Mansfield and Chesterfield could provide the link to the ultimate origin and destination with timed connections and one ticket for the whole journey. That's the sort of situation there is in Switzerland etc where public transport is well-used despite high car ownership.
 
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