erikvd28
Member
What will the max speed of the other parts be? Will Oxford - Bedford go to 125mph in the future?
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Labour Spending Review
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dk1
Veteran Member
Wasn’t parts of it cut back from 100-90 as an economy measure.
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I’ve never heard anything above 100mph mentioned for EWR.
Nottingham59
Established Member
If I remember correctly. the original design brief for EWR was for a 100mph railway.
aron2smith
Member
Likely costs a lot more to maintain than a railway too! This is the real problem the government needs to fix I think, ALL infrastructure costs way too much to build in this country in the first place. Then the government (treasury really) panics and chops and changes things, which costs even more to finish a project.Near Cambridge the Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet project is a bit over 10 miles long and is costing £1bn.
Works to start on major £1 billion transformation of Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet route
New dual carriageway to reduce congestion and improve journey times between Milton Keynes and Cambridge.www.gov.uk
Also the idea of new roads reducing congestion never fails to make me laugh!
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
yes. I think some people need to learn about “induced demand”.
Nottingham59
Established Member
Happens with railways too, of course.
Annetts key
Established Member
"We need to solve the traffic jams in the village of X. Let's build a bypass.
Bypass gets built.
"We now have traffic jams where the bypass ends near the village of Y, we need to extend the bypass" .
Bypass is extended. Rinse, repeat several dozen times...
Then: "all the new single carriage bypass sections along with the remaining original road can't cope with the current traffic levels". "We need central government money to build a new dual carriageway to replace this road"....
What next? A three lane motorway? Then a four lane "smart" motorway upgrade?
Railways thrive when passenger numbers increase, roads just get more congested
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Exactly. But with the railways that's generally a good thing because the environmental impact of each journey is much lower - and can even be an environmental plus for any part of the additional demand that comes from people swapping from cars. Plus if the extra demand makes it possible to run more frequent services, that usually improves the lives of people living locally whereas more traffic on the roads usually makes people's lives worse.
The just one more large theory, the only issue is that the one more lane should be a cycle lane or a bus lane.
Class 170101
Established Member
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And some people think we should buildf more roads as they are environmentally friendfly as the cars don't produce pollution, ie electric cars but they forget the road space problem hasn't changed and also electric cars can produce pollution just not at source, eg gas fired power station.
Even with lower carbon useage the emissions from EV cars (per person per km) are significantly higher (assuming both trains and cars are 25% loaded) than electric trains and on a pair with hydrogen trains.
Also, if someone uses trains then chances are more of their other travel is walking/cycling than those who use cars (yes not always, but overall it's likely that the overall emissions by those going by train would be a little better than the usage comparison implies).
Nicholas Lewis
On Moderation
In the news release on Transport for City Regions (TCR) settlements 2027-28 to 2031-32 there was the following commentary
Its allocation is yet to be determined but I suspect that largely because they will want to drip good news stories and a time of their choice with local MPs so Portishead could be a beneficiary.
styles
Member
Absolutely.
Difference being, we want to encourage people to use trains and discourage people using cars.
There'll always be a time and a place for car journeys, but if we can switch some of them to rail, that's better for congestion, carbon emissions, etc.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
styles
Member
Yup.
And for this reason I don't support every single railway station or railway line reopening. It has to be case-by-case.
But it should be done with consideration for the induced demand you mention, especially in areas which are primed for housing for example.
The Borders Railway has this - the Shawfair station previously served very few people, but it was a sensible decision to open it because there were huge house-building plans. The houses are partly built and the station, along with the whole line, has been a roaring success.
On the flip side we have messes like East Midlands Parkway - a massive station with huge overheads, which is barely used, not helped by the fact the airport buses stopped.
Clarence Yard
Established Member
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Sorting out the Black Cat roundabout will also help north-south (and vice versa) traffic on the A1. This is one scheme that will definitely help reduce congestion and journey times. The route from the roundabout & off the A1 to Caxton Gibbet is single and relatively slow and now the St Neots end is fast growing with a major housing development, something really needs to be done.
From Caxton Gibbet onwards, you are not just heading to Cambridge but also to the A14 so there are obvious other economic benefits in doing this work.
Quite! Another example from a few years ago was the Catthorpe Interchange (M1/M6/A14 junction). It was hideously congested due to the way the A14 was added to the junction in the 1990s. New interchange gets built and the congestion disappeared overnight.
aron2smith
Member
Seen induced demand for myself with both the Elizabeth Line and the reopening of the Okehampton branch line. The latter has seen improved cross-county buses from elsewhere in North Devon and even Cornwall as Okehampton has become a hub of sorts. Maybe because public transport is too often underfunded that it's more obvious to see the positive effects of the investment including induced demand for it. Roads are too often a sunk cost.
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I agree with this but I think we are coming to the point now where there needs to be a strategic review of the network to find the gaps and bottlenecks that persist. A more regional view that is tied in with buses/ trams and long term perspective linking transport with housing, jobs and services needs to happen for sure.
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I agree in specific cases, fixing the bottlenecks on the road network is essential. The A602 improvements from Ware to Stevenage seemed to have made a big difference to traffic flow, for example. I was more mocking the attitude that governments are way more liberal with new roads than other infrastructure including railways. I think alongside these new roads, motorists need attractive alternative ways of travelling. I live close to the A10 out of London, that could never be widened without demolishing 100s, possibly a few 1000 houses along it, so if we can't widen it, a more effective public transport system is needed, unfortunately where I live the administrative boundaries really get in the way!
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I'm not so sure that road building is needed.
For example CPRE have suggested that rather than road building we could use the same money to create a rural bus network which has an hourly bus service from 06:00 to 00:00 to every village in the UK.
That would be a game changer for public transport, as it would be possible to get everywhere. Yes it may take a long time but it would be possible.
With an aging population it would mean that fewer people would become isolated when they can no longer drive themselves.
Likewise, others have suggested that for the cost of the all the upgrades to the A303 we could redouble and electrify the West of England Line through Salisbury down to Exeter.
That would allow 2tph (with Crossrail 2 it could be upgraded to 3tph), make it so the lines are bi directional and the potential to have a faster service than currently exists could mean that in some situations it's at least no slower than the GWR services to get to Exeter.
For a real game changer you could even extend the Basingstoke Stoppers (2tph currently, 3tph post Crossrail 2) to Yeovil and then the "existing" services would only need to serve Andover, Salisbury and Yeovil at the Eastern end and (due to the Devon Metro) Honiton, Exeter Central and Exeter St Davids at the western end. Yet the other stations over those sections would still see a better service than they currently do.
There's times when I take (due to the activities of my children) about 2 hours of my time to take my children to do an activity, if there was a viable bus route (as they are of a suitable age) I wouldn't need to do that, giving me more time.
Cus to services (non transport) mean that people have to step in to fill in the gaps. For example, locally the settlement I live in organises a litter pick. The crazy thing is, due to the size of the place the extra cost in council taxes to have a full time handyman who would do much more than just the picking up of litter would likely be less than £10 per household (and probably less than that as they could do tasks which are currently given to paid contractors).
I'm sure you could but that would still leave the A303 just as busy. Most traffic on any road isn't doing very long journeys, except freight. Getting to a railway that runs 10-20 miles further south isn't very helpful for a lot of journeys. People choose their means of transport based on cost and convenience. This is why central London flows are by predominantly by train, whilst going to the supermarket is predominantly by car.
Many journeys are simply not transferable in anything like enough scale to have any measurable impact on road traffic. Of course we can and need to do better but cars are the rational choice for a huge range of journeys
Annetts key
Established Member
We are going way off topic, but the solution for the A303 is to take active measures to reduce the traffic on this road/route. Not to spend billions trying and failing to "fix" it.
I'm not in favour of road pricing via tolls or other means. I would much prefer to use the carrot approach and put in place public transport alternatives. And as much long distance freight as practical needs to be moved to the railways. But I do think that where there are long distance roads/routes, where there is a lot of traffic joining it, there should also be a system for limiting the number of vehicles that can enter it in these areas (with measures to limit people trying to bypass the restrictions). Yes, this would cause uproar, but once people get used to it, it would change people's behaviour long term.
I'm not in favour of road pricing via tolls or other means. I would much prefer to use the carrot approach and put in place public transport alternatives. And as much long distance freight as practical needs to be moved to the railways. But I do think that where there are long distance roads/routes, where there is a lot of traffic joining it, there should also be a system for limiting the number of vehicles that can enter it in these areas (with measures to limit people trying to bypass the restrictions). Yes, this would cause uproar, but once people get used to it, it would change people's behaviour long term.
Bus have got cut back because of low usage, not the other way round (though there is an obvious feedback loop). Running lots of empty or near empty buses as per the CPRE proposal would achieve nothing (other than a colossal waste of resources).
I've come to think that 'induced demand' is a somewhat overrated concept. It may be the case that building more roads often doesn't help with congestion, but it still increases capacity and allows more people to make journeys. There may be other reasons to oppose road building (eg, environmental reasons), but congestion isn't really one of them I don't think.
I'm not sure there's an efficient way to reduce congestion without introducing some kind of road pricing. What's happened in NYC this year has been super interesting - congestion is way down since pricing was introduced. What's even better is that the reduced congestion means the buses can run faster, and so you can run more buses with the same number of drivers (I don't know if they're doing this in NY yet, but it absolutely can happen as a result of reduced congestion), so you'd probably see some modal shift take place esp in cities.
I'm not sure there's an efficient way to reduce congestion without introducing some kind of road pricing. What's happened in NYC this year has been super interesting - congestion is way down since pricing was introduced. What's even better is that the reduced congestion means the buses can run faster, and so you can run more buses with the same number of drivers (I don't know if they're doing this in NY yet, but it absolutely can happen as a result of reduced congestion), so you'd probably see some modal shift take place esp in cities.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Much as I agree with the principle of wanting more bus travel to be possible, that suggestion doesn't make sense, so I'm struggling to believe that's what the CPRE actually said. The money you spend building a road is one-off and then the road is built. The money spent supporting a bus service is continual expenditure that has to be repeated each year. It's not mathematically possible to say one is the same as the other - unless you qualify it with something like, the for the cost of building a road, you could run a bus service for X years (with no indication of how the support would continue after the X years).
Also, every village???? Yes you could, for a significant subsidy, provide an hourly bus service to a lot more villages than today, but not to EVERY village: There must be thousands of villages in the UK that are not located on any reasonable route between larger settlements, and which could therefore only get an hourly bus service if you provided or diverted an hourly service specifically to that village. There's no way it's going to be worth while doing that unless there's a pretty big population in the village - but often we're talking, villages with < 100 inhabitants. Just not going to happen in any sane World! (Of course, instead of an hourly service, you might conceivably provide a dial-a-minibus service, which would probably end up looking rather like a shared taxi, for those villages).
I'd expect btw there would also be hundreds of villages that are not connected to any road that you could plausibly drive anything bigger than a minibus along.
Topological
Established Member
To be fair, there is a halfway house solution where all villages over a certain size / accessibility threshold get a bus. There are definite societal benefits to offset against the costs of buses.
Likewise, there needs to be road investment. It is not possible to simply reduce demand. Where you use money as a way of reducing demand you are simply ensuring that the richest can do what they like. Not using tax is especially important where we are talking about linking communities that would struggle for rail and may not have access to bus solutions.
Investing in rail is a good idea too. There are some obvious areas where the cost-benefit does not quite stack up, but where a bigger picture would say spend. However, rail remains inefficient for accessing areas that are off-network. Heaven forbid anyone tries to insert extra stops in the "fast" trains too.
What successive governments need to do is have the bigger picture.
The recently opened dual carriageway section at Sparkford has removed all the congestion that used to regularly happen along there. It has absolutely not failed to work.
Annetts key
Established Member
But what about the non-dual carriageway sections?
They need doing too. Road transport isn't going to go away; our road network is far worse than in most neighbouring countries. Rail is getting vastly more capital expenditure at the moment, despite carrying far, far fewer passengers and goods. Future governments might not consider that sensible
Annetts key
Established Member
Which gets us back to...
Building more and more roads, expanding existing roads, none of this can ever solve the fundamental problem. Over time, we, as a nation of people, are wanting to travel more frequently and further than we have traditionally done in the past.
Especially as national government, local authorities and councils can't even manage to maintain the current road network.
We, as a country need to consider the wider picture. That includes considering the young (both children who are not allowed to drive a car, and young adults who either cannot afford to drive or choose not to) and older adults, who either for medical reasons can't drive or choose not to.
Believe it or not, not everyone can drive and not everyone wants to drive.
That means having better public transport. That means spending tax payers money on buses, trams, metro systems and trains. Not playing whack-a-mole trying to remove pinch points in the road network by putting in lots more asphalt.
Now, not everyone will want to use public transport. And in some cases, using a car or van may be the better option (say, transporting goods, e.g. taking your child to university with a boot full of their stuff).
Similarly, not all journeys are practical by public transport. It's very unlikely that every village and hamlet will get a public transport service. And staff that travel at night (shift workers, on-call staff etc.) may have to use a car, van, motorbike etc.
But if we can encourage more people to use public transport, running the service will in time become more cost effective, it will be better for the environment and it may even reduce the pressure on the road network. But only if a good quality service is offered. That means clean, reliable services at times that the people want. Not the rag-tag mess we currently have.
Some of the new railway lines and stations that have opened up over the last 36 years have shown that there may well be unrealised demand for more public transport.