And try driving down it on a summer Saturday and you'll find it quicker to walk...
Exactly my point. To add another lane would might help but at what cost? Outside the peaks there would be even more spare capacity and so ad infinitum .....
Trains, on the other hand, are pretty good at moving lots of people around without inconveniencing the rest of the public in general. The Swansea area is a prime example of relying, almost wholly, on road transport. I have family living on the Mumbles Road which can be solid with traffic for hours on end. On fine days I have watched the cars crawl by on their way to Mumbles and watched the same cars crawl back after half an hour or so because all the car parks are full. On the opposite side of the road is trackbed of the Mumbles Railway which used to convey thousands to and from Swansea every day. Those double decked railcars, running in multiples of two would be carrying over 200 hundred passengers at a time with no exhaust fumes and a minimum of fuss. What a tragedy that it was allowed to close.
Where there is no train, the only alternative is often the car, particularly away from urban areas where bus services can be very patchy or, more often these days, non existant. In a city like Swansea which has no local train services, it can be a nightmare. The contrast with Cardiff is startling, which has frequent rail services to places like Barry; Penarth and The Valleys.
The point of this thread is whether or not the railways have improved since privatisation. There have been some improvements but there have also been some backward steps. The franchise system has led to a lot of disunity between services so that it is no longer a 'national' system and scant regard is paid to connections between different TOCs and 'late running penalties' are often responsible for missed connections within TOCs.
State ownership should not result in poor service. That lies at the door of state interference. We are left to wonder what the vast amount of money poured by successive governments into the 'private' railway might have achieved for British Rail. We would, at least, still have a joined up system.
I am not wearing rose tinted spectacles and BR was not perfect but neither were its political masters who were forever dreaming up re-organisations and turning the investment tap on and off at will. Having said that Inter-City was a success story and, towards the end of BR, was profitable. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for local services to make money and everywhere in the developed world they are subsidised, often to a much greater extent than they have ever been in this country. The real gain from such services is their social value, just like winding country roads that might see a dozen vehicles a day but are invaluable to those who depend on them.