In your opinion.
As ever it does, I’m afraid, come down to cost and benefit. I’m now going to make some numbers up to illustrate the point.
Let’s imagine that we arrange a new a bus service to a poorly connected town that provides a certain level of benefit, and costs (say) £5million pounds up front and £1million a year to operate. An alternative is to provide a new railway service, which provides twice the benefit, but that costs £500m and £4m a year to operate. So although it the benefit of the rail service is twice as much, it also costs four times as much to operate, and 100 times more up front. There must be a point where the cost gets too high for a rail service, at which point the alternatives must be considered. In the case of Wisbech, that ‘cost too high’ point is way below £200m.
I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I think you judge the benefit of a rail service to be several orders of magnitude higher than it is actually deemed to be in the socio-economic assessments, when compared to public transport generally (eg buses). These socio economic assessments are built on decades of primary research, and whilst not perfect it is recognised worldwide as amongst the best there is. Nevertheless, I do agree wholeheartedly that a rail connection is usually better than a bus connection for journeys over around 5-10 miles; indeed the socio-economic assessments bear that out. However, this extra benefit can not, and indeed must not, come at any price.
On another point, I disagree that buses are not a reasonable choice for short-middle distance travel (up to, say, 20 miles), if the quality of the service and the vehicle is suitable. On these pages we tend to assume that a bus service alternative to a new line in middle England is going to be like bus services we see day in / day out in middle England: poor frequency, often poor vehicles, slow, dirty, often expensive. But it doesn’t have to be like that. A bus service could be specified (as it is in London), to be frequent, covering all hours, quick (ie not stopping at every wayside halt), with new and clean vehicles. With fares integrated to other forms of transport. Which brings me back to Wisbech.
Such a bus service from Wisbech - March could be specified in a long term concession, either as part of a rail concession or a bus provision concession, very easily. I agree it would not have the same level of benefit as a through rail service to Cambridge. But it would get most of the benefit, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and crucially it could be up and running in a matter of months rather than waiting (at least) 6 years for a train. (I’d also argue that a 4 per hour bus service would have broadly the same benefit as a 2 per hour train service if the latter was limited to March, which is the best bet at present).
A final point, not directed at you yorksrob, but level crossing rules are definitely not ‘gold plated’. It’s the law.