Subsidy in the UK compared to Other Countries

[HSTEd]

Electric cars do nothing to solve congestion though.

Unfortunately it is unlikely that anything can solve congestion, beyond building so many roads that everyone in the country can spend all day and night driving a car and still not cause it - which is a rather unrealistic suggestion!

If, as the anti roadbuilding lobby claims, building roads doesn't solve congestion because of induced demand, then no public transport improvement can do so either. Because those reduce congestion and thus induce more demand until you are back where you started.

Public spending on road maintainance (which I think most of us can agree isn't keeping up with the rate repairs are needed) maybe. Then add in the cost of road policing, collisions, obesity, loss of potentially productive land to parking...

I'm not sure you can blame obesity on roads and cars..... It's more of a natural consequence in the collapse of the cost of food production as a fraction of GDP. People can eat high calorie foods to satiation now in a way they simply couldn't before.
And a large fraction of the land in the UK is woefuly unproductive anyway, I doubt very much real land productivity is lost to car parking...... Even people opposed to car parking only suggest areas of around 200 square kilomeres total.

 

[43066]

Let hope that the next time our overpaid rail staff are on strike they reflect on how much people on significantly lower wages are subsidising them via taxes

For one thing, people on “significantly lower wages” pay commensurately less tax. In fact (according to the IFS) 60% of all income tax in the ‘23-‘24 tax year will be paid by the top 10% of earners! Therefore the burden of funding railway subsidy, along with all other forms of public spending, falls disproportionately on high earners.

For another, the data (have you actually looked at it?) shows that, in terms of railway income received, subsidies account for rather less than fares in % terms than comparable countries - the decision to load more of the cost onto farepayers is an entirely political one. It has also previously been discussed that we subsidise our railway rather less in terms of € per passenger KM than other European countries.

No great surprise that the UK government’s approach of starving and defunding the railway (and other public services) is very much the outlier amongst comparable European economies, and the results of this strategy are all around us, with the UK increasingly resembling a second world country.

A wider question is how rail subsidy is justified verses buses - buses carry far more passengers yet get a fraction of the money rail enjoys and have been in decline for years.

It isn’t a zero sum game; perhaps both bus and rail sectors receive too little subsidy? You could equally ask how the government justifies the “triple lock” state pension increase, or the non means tested winter fuel payment, at the expense of public services (clue, it doesn’t justify it; it’s an entirely cynical policy choice, because bus users are less likely to vote for the current government than pensioners are).

 

[slowroad]

Of course it is. I have absolutely no control over whether a company opens its new shop next door to me or 10 miles away. Using distance travelled as the metric is meaningless

One more go. Replace one ten mile trip with two five mile ones. Other things equal, congestion and pollution impacts will be the same as the volume of traffic is the same. The impacts are roughly proportional to distance travelled, not the number of journeys. As another poster has pointed out, this proportionally is indeed rough - in congested conditions, congestion increase more than proportionally to traffic volume. But the relationship is still with volume, not the number of journeys.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 Dec 2023 ==

Not in a congested area, it's an exponential relationship then.


Good luck with that. You'll have everyone squealling about how it's just a "money-making scheme" and a "war on motorists", and how a charge would be regressive and favours Arab playboys in Lambos over John the plumber in his van.


Not necessarily, if you plan it properly traffic will flow better.

Not if the objective is to reduce traffic volume carried, and the objective is achieved.

 

[Krokodil]

Unfortunately it is unlikely that anything can solve congestion, beyond building so many roads that everyone in the country can spend all day and night driving a car and still not cause it - which is a rather unrealistic suggestion!

Well yes, "just one more lane..." has long been debunked.

If, as the anti roadbuilding lobby claims, building roads doesn't solve congestion because of induced demand, then no public transport improvement can do so either. Because those reduce congestion and thus induce more demand until you are back where you started.

Public transport provision can certainly induce new demand. It also poaches from private cars so it's not all bad. And yes, we cannot just build our way out of congestion - why do you think that there is now a movement towards walkable neighbourhoods? If more people can freely access the facilities they need daily (schools, shops, GPs etc.) without any kind of motorised transport then that takes pressure off of everything else. Before the conspiracy theorists start spluttering, no one will be preventing them from travelling further, it's just making sure that they've got the CHOICE.

I'm not sure you can blame obesity on roads and cars..... It's more of a natural consequence in the collapse of the share of food production as a fraction of GDP. People can eat high calorie foods to satiation now in a way they simply couldn't before.

20 minutes of exercise a day makes a massive difference to the odds of suffering from a variety of diseases. Someone who walks to a bus stop/railway station and then walks from the stop at the other end to their workplace is far more likely to be getting that exercise than someone who drives door-to-door.

And a large fraction of the land in the UK is woefuly unproductive anyway, I doubt very much real land productivity is lost to car parking...... Even people opposed to car parking only suggest areas of around 200 square kilomeres total.

Not all land is equal. Car parking is often provided where land values are at their highest. Say you remove on street parking and allow restaurants to provide extra seating - that's a much more productive use of the land. It has been very successful in Toronto. How high would parking fees be if you were renting the land at the full commercial rate? In Central London you'd probably be paying £5 per hour for a patch of tarmac in the open air.

The UK isn't as bad as North America of course, where swathes of Denver were demolished to build parking lots.

 

[renegademaster]

Well yes, "just one more lane..." has long been debunked

Except theirs been plenty of cases where one more lane has actually been enough and traffic problems disappear ( in my local case the dualing of the A21). Theirs a finite amount of people and a slightly smaller group of people who can afford a car so you will always eventually hit a ceeling and that ceeling isn't that high in many provincial parts

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 Dec 2023 ==

Not all land is equal. Car parking is often provided where land values are at their highest. Say you remove on street parking and allow restaurants to provide extra seating - that's a much more productive use of the land. It has been very successful in Toronto. How high would parking fees be if you were renting the land at the full commercial rate? In Central London you'd probably be paying £5 per hour for a patch of tarmac in the open air.

The UK isn't as bad as North America of course, where swathes of Denver were demolished to build parking lots.

Hardly any (perhaps single digits , the only one I know is the one on near the South Bank center) open air car parks exist in zone 1 and only a small amount in zone 2

 

[Krokodil]

One more go. Replace one ten mile trip with two five mile ones. Other things equal, congestion and pollution impacts will be the same as the volume of traffic is the same. The impacts are roughly proportional to distance travelled, not the number of journeys. As another poster has pointed out, this proportionally is indeed rough - in congested conditions, congestion increase more than proportionally to traffic volume. But the relationship is still with volume, not the number of journeys.

If you make a 200 mile journey you pull out of your residential street, go along a couple of distributor roads and then usually end up on a trunk road or motorway, reversing that process as you approach your destination. If you make a 2 mile journey you won't encounter a trunk road, instead you'll spend most of your time on streets and will pass through almost the same number of junctions as the car making the long journey did (junctions being where congestion happens). The other 99 cars all making similar journeys then add to this. What's more, the car making a long journey requires a parking space at each end. So do each of the 100 cars making a short journey.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 Dec 2023 ==

Except theirs been plenty of cases where one more lane has actually been enough and traffic problems disappear ( in my local case the dualing of the A21). Theirs a finite amount of people and a slightly smaller group of people who can afford a car so you will always eventually hit a ceeling and that ceeling isn't that high in many provincial parts

Where exactly do you think that the ceiling would be in the case of the M25? And do we need to demolish Windsor Castle?

Hardly any (perhaps single digits , the only one I know is the one on near the South Bank center) open air car parks exist in zone 1 and only a small amount in zone 2

Still a fair bit of on-street parking and believe it or not the world does not end at the edge of Zone 2.

 

[HSTEd]

Public transport provision can certainly induce new demand. It also poaches from private cars so it's not all bad. And yes, we cannot just build our way out of congestion - why do you think that there is now a movement towards walkable neighbourhoods? If more people can freely access the facilities they need daily (schools, shops, GPs etc.) without any kind of motorised transport then that takes pressure off of everything else. Before the conspiracy theorists start spluttering, no one will be preventing them from travelling further, it's just making sure that they've got the CHOICE.

People support these ideas because they want to return to an imagined halcyon past when everyone was close to all the services they could want and everything was lovely.
The problem is they forgot that that system required a vast underclass of people living in poverty to staff all those things. That underclass no longer really exists and it is impractical to put everyone close to the full selection of things they might want.

But we already did this in the thread in General Discussion, lets not do it here too.

Not all land is equal. Car parking is often provided where land values are at their highest. Say you remove on street parking and allow restaurants to provide extra seating - that's a much more productive use of the land. It has been very successful in Toronto. How high would parking fees be if you were renting the land at the full commercial rate? In Central London you'd probably be paying £5 per hour for a patch of tarmac in the open air.

Toronto is nothing like a European city though!
The number of open air car parks in the densified parts of major UK cities are rather small, and mostly put into places that would be impossible to use for anything else.

 

[renegademaster]

Where exactly do you think that the ceiling would be in the case of the M25? And do we need to demolish Windsor Castle?

I never said it was good idea to max out the demand of every single road in existence, however, many people, including the Welsh government, say that their shouldn't be *any* capacity improvements for roads and new road building should stop

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 Dec 2023 ==

Still a fair bit of on-street parking and believe it or not the world does not end at the edge of Zone 2.

You was talking about land in central London, I answered with the facts about land use in central London. The on street parking in Central London is very restricted and not much of it could be used realistically for any new building, the most productive usage would be some outdoor seating for restaurants that will get used for a few months a year.

 

[Tester]

(As an aside, I believe Switzerland now has no ticket offices.)

I'm not sure what the relevance of this aside is, but regardless, it is untrue.

Were you perhaps thinking of another, totally unrelated, European country beginning with Sw.....?

 

[slowroad]

I'm not sure what the relevance of this aside is, but regardless, it is untrue.

Were you perhaps thinking of another, totally unrelated, European country beginning with Sw.....?

Quite right - my mistake.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 1 Jan 2024 ==

If you make a 200 mile journey you pull out of your residential street, go along a couple of distributor roads and then usually end up on a trunk road or motorway, reversing that process as you approach your destination. If you make a 2 mile journey you won't encounter a trunk road, instead you'll spend most of your time on streets and will pass through almost the same number of junctions as the car making the long journey did (junctions being where congestion happens). The other 99 cars all making similar journeys then add to this. What's more, the car making a long journey requires a parking space at each end. So do each of the 100 cars making a short journey.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 31 Dec 2023 ==


Where exactly do you think that the ceiling would be in the case of the M25? And do we need to demolish Windsor Castle?


Still a fair bit of on-street parking and believe it or not the world does not end at the edge of Zone 2.

But there is lots of congestion and pollution on the trunk road and motorway network.

 

[Oscar]

These are shares for journeys, not distance travelled. And they are cities, not regions as originally claimed. At the regional and national levels, cars dominate across all countries, with a share in the UK that is broadly similar to other developed countries, including Germany and Denmark. Cars also dominate in Switzerland, but it does have a high rail share, probably reflecting its settlement pattern. (As an aside, I believe Switzerland now has no ticket offices.)

There are still ticket offices in Switzerland, though those at smaller stations have generally been closed over the last few years. Mostly, they are only used for complex purchases (e.g. travelcards, changes to bookings, international tickets), not for purchasing point-to-point tickets.

 

[Krokodil]

But there is lots of congestion and pollution on the trunk road and motorway network.

Not as much as there is in urban areas, and air quality in the vicinity of housing is currently a big issue.

 

[stuu]

One more go. Replace one ten mile trip with two five mile ones. Other things equal, congestion and pollution impacts will be the same as the volume of traffic is the same. The impacts are roughly proportional to distance travelled, not the number of journeys. As another poster has pointed out, this proportionally is indeed rough - in congested conditions, congestion increase more than proportionally to traffic volume. But the relationship is still with volume, not the number of journeys.

That makes absolutely no sense at all. Volume is the number of journeys. The number of cars passing a single point is the volume, it makes no difference if they have come from round the corner or from Inverness

 

[Roast Veg]

Except theirs been plenty of cases where one more lane has actually been enough and traffic problems disappear ( in my local case the dualing of the A21).

This would be the same A21 where a section at Flimwell was reduced back to a single lane in each direction, because it actually worsened traffic? I noticed this year that the speed limit has been further reduced from 60 to 50 over that section as well.

 

[jayah]

I've listed entire metropolitain areas in Europe where it is the case.

I haven't seen this list, but what I said remains correct. Metropolitan areas are not regions, and continental Europe is not relevant to this discussion. There is nowhere in the UK outside of the very centre of the very largest cities which will even get close to 80%.

Public spending on road maintainance (which I think most of us can agree isn't keeping up with the rate repairs are needed) maybe. Then add in the cost of road policing, collisions, obesity, loss of potentially productive land to parking...

As has been mentioned already, these externalities cannot accurately be calculated and are not relevant to a debate about public spending priorities. If you take parking and other forms or road charging for example, this is highly lucrative and parking is often is the most productive land use. When we discuss road taxation, the huge revenue from parking, permits, tolls and charging schemes is actually being ignored.

Subsidising public transport also creates many of the same externalities as a very large part of this investment generates more and longer journeys, none of which are free of pollution, congestion or carbon. HS2 for example will generate more urban car and taxi journeys to/from its out of town stations, than it will remove from modal shift.

 

[renegademaster]

This would be the same A21 where a section at Flimwell was reduced back to a single lane in each direction, because it actually worsened traffic? I noticed this year that the speed limit has been further reduced from 60 to 50 over that section as well.

I was talking about the Tonbridge Prembury section, filmwell was singled to stop people speeding ,not because of traffic, the area is on and off single carriageway so the dual section their was pretty pointless as it stood

 

[meld3]

"In 2008 total Government support was £8.053bn
In 2022 it was £21.1bn"

Now, I have an issue with all these Gov spending stats as they never say if they are nett (true) or gross (imaginary).

Eg, If DfT "spend" £21bn on rail but HMRC collect 50% of that spend in employment taxes, VAT, Corp tax, fuel duty etc, its not a £21bn spend, its more like £10bn.

Same applies to the "cost" of any pay rises to say Doctors. Its never mentioned, or questioned by Journalists, if the quite cost is gross or nett.
Nett cost is all that matters, anything above this figure is simply moving money around whitehall depts.

 

[Shaw S Hunter]

These are shares for journeys, not distance travelled. And they are cities, not regions as originally claimed. At the regional and national levels, cars dominate across all countries, with a share in the UK that is broadly similar to other developed countries, including Germany and Denmark. Cars also dominate in Switzerland, but it does have a high rail share, probably reflecting its settlement pattern. (As an aside, I believe Switzerland now has no ticket offices.)

There is another factor at play in Switzerland, the policy to promote social inclusion. I recently came across a case study (sorry, no link, I didn't bookmark it) covering public transport development in the Engadin region of Switzerland. This is in the far south-east of the country and particularly isolated from major population centres but still has a comprehensive and co-ordinated public transport network with buses forming a significant proportion of the whole. Ultimately it comes down to political will which stems of course from voters but political leadership is also important. Sadly that is mostly lacking in this country, certainly at national level where the important spending decisions are made.