Metrolink is no good because it doesn't serve the University corridor, MRI or the Halls of Residence. It is only any good for those in Chorlton or Didsbury travelling to he city centre. There hasn't been much change overall in provision, but First have started cutting their services - presumably due to the ongoing dispute with Unite and the fact that over a quarter of the Rusholme depot buses won't meet upcoming LEZ agreements.
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Would free public transport work in the UK?
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Metrolink is no good because it doesn't serve the University corridor, MRI or the Halls of Residence. It is only any good for those in Chorlton or Didsbury travelling to he city centre. There hasn't been much change overall in provision, but First have started cutting their services - presumably due to the ongoing dispute with Unite and the fact that over a quarter of the Rusholme depot buses won't meet upcoming LEZ agreements.
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That's unbelievable on so many levels:
1. Schools have no jursidiction over pupils outside the school gates - and around here both SChools and LEAs make it absolutely clear that pupil behaviour off campus "is nowt to do with us".
2. As criminal cycling ie. on footbridges, pavements, *in* bus station shelters; in shopping precincts etc etc is far and away the most volumnous crime in the UK, it is ridiculous to discourage LEGAL cycling. I take it when you say up/down the hill, you do mean on the road.
No space I understand, unless we bite the bullet and accept that more road space has to be given up to public transport. Maybe all those other countries with their street tramways might be on to something. As for business case, I note your inverted commas: how a corridor supporting that many buses, leading past thr universities and main hospital through student land to well-healed but high density suburbs with their own vibrant centres could have no business case, I do not know.
chorleyjeff
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London tube got very crowded in Ken's days and I guess it would be mayhem today if the experiment was repeated.
When we're talking about white collar service sector jobs, the continued promotion of out of town office parks with insufficient public transport is idiotic.
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Is it just about lazyness? What about walking a mile every day in the highly polluted areas?
For other points, in London there just isn't the same attachment to private car ownership. It's highly impractical. The tipping point is when kids come along. Before that, there are plenty of singles and couples who go the car rental route i.e. renting for weekend breaks. And plentiful delivery services negate the need for more local car usage.
But it wouldn't just be road space. Would you advocate building over part of the MRI land, given that the NHS is being centralised on fewer and fewer Hospitals, despite being overstretched now? Or would you encroach on Whitworth Park or Manchester University (one of the biggest in Europe), and then there is everything north and south of those locations which is actually more tightly squeezed at present.
I'm assuming there was no "business case", though in many ways it would probably have been the most logical of all corridors. Apart from high, all day, demand, it would have a natural customer base; young, healthy students with a simplistic, short-term view of how issues such as the Environment over-ride (no, pun intended) everything else.
When we have made most of the planet uninhabitable, I wonder if we'll be patting ourselves on the back for having made sure that concern for the environment did not override more important issues.
You don't need to knock down or encroach on anything. Just put the tram line down the road, as many other apparently civilised and advanced countries appear to have no problem doing. Traffic restrictions (with encouragement to use the much more suitable A34 and Prince's Parkway corridors) and priority measures can be installed to make sure it runs reasonably fast.
I should have expanded. We seem to have an attitude in this country that we have to find a solution that leaves some at a major disadvantage. So rather than tackle pollution, congestion and social exclusion holistically by improving ALL public transport to allow people to choose not to drive, we have adopted the idea that the principle role of Rail (especially light rail) is to replace Buses, not cars - therefore those that can't access Light Rail (due to remoteness of stops), have to choose between car, taxi or isolation. So, by taking a short-term "populist" solution you are storing up greater long term problems through increased congestion (an electric car still takes up many times the space of a peak hour Euro6/hybrid double-decker) and socio-economic exclusion (can't get to jobs, can't get to shops, can't get to the doctors etc) with all he health implications. Or to put it another way; to reduce lung disease, we'll find a way of increasing bowel cancer (poor food) and stomach cancer (often stress-related).
However, it is worth looking at the two parallel corridors;
Princess Parkway (not Prince's) is a fair distance west of Oxford Road, and is the one corridor in GM with more than 4 peak bph (each way) named in the top 10 pollution hotspots in the county. Not surprisingly, it is very congested, so could hardly take more car traffic.
The A34 is similarly congested, but is slightly better served by bus with 7 off peak bph, rising to nearly 12 in the morning peak. 6+ of these are provided by Stagecoach service 50 which is hybrid operated...............and, off peak at least seems to stick to hybrids more reliably than the 42/43 services on Oxford Road. The downside is that the 50 does not serve Piccadilly. Piccadilly only has the hourly (Arriva) 130, which is apparently much less punctual than it was even a year ago. Shame, as the MRI is actually closer to the A34 than to Wilmslow Road.
So, there is an argument that some buses to Piccadilly should use the A34, but obviously most won't switch. And I suppose for all my musings over the ethos of Students seeing Rail as more environmentally friendly than buses (irrelevant of how they are powered), everyone's principles are challenged by "the bottom line", and the bottom line is that MagicBus is cheaper than any existing or proposed alternative.
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Very likely. The bus is not a perfectly sealed environment with its own clean filtered air, so the air quality on the bus will be no better than outside. You have to ask yourself why the air is so polluted, perhaps because people think they need a ton of machinary to do the equivalent of a 15 minute walk.
Indeed. I used to walk to work and often walked via a slightly longer route along quiet residential streets, instead of along the main road. If I'd used the bus it would have gone along the main road.
Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
You'll find that these other countries' tram routes work because they have a decent part of their length either on segregated rights of way or roads from which traffic is completely excluded. Traditional tram routes running down the middle of the road are much less common than they used to be but historic memory of traditional trams in this country seemingly insists that is how they should run.
I really don't understand what you are trying to say here. Is it that because there aren't trams everywhere that somehow that should mean there shouldn't be trams anywhere? Or is it just that you would like to see public money spent on lots of shiny new buses for the private bus companies? As for the lack of holistic thinking among politicians that's what you get with an adverserial two-party system. As soon as we, as an electorate, elect a coalition government we kick the minority party for having the temerity to support the larger party only to then elect the same larger party with a majority, in spite of the fact that said minority party actually had a useful moderating effect on the large party. I'm afraid we largely get what we deserve from our collective unwillingness to support the idea that politicians from different parties need to co-operate with each other in the common good.
Sounds to me like the sort of thing that a school would do if there had been a history of accidents or near misses, although the problem with the detention is that the child presumably then has to cycle home in 5pm traffic rather than 4pm traffic. The school I attended had a sports field about a third of a mile from the main campus along an A-road, but we were obliged to walk along the main road and not along a parallel residential road which contained a sub post office which did very well out of selling sweets to us. The official reason given was to do with the school being responsible for us during school hours, but in reality was probably as much due to boys taking the whole of the lunch hour to dawdle and turn up late at the changing rooms.
Cambus731
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I haven't read through the thread so forgive me if I'm repeating anyone. I think it is a flawed concept for a few reasons.
It would attract undesirables who would insist they have every right to stay on the train or bus and it may mean staff having a difficult time to obtain the authority to remove them without calling upon either the BTP or regional police force. It would also be diffcult to track which routes or services have the most demand and which ones are running for little demand and therefore which routes are most or least deserving of upgrades or new or cascaded midlife stock.
It would be difficult for the, presumably state owned, rail way to justify projects to the department of transport or the treasury regarding routes deserving of re-signalling or electrification, as they would be no direct return on the investment in terms of increased farebox receipts. Yes there would be indirect benefits for the UK economy but that is always less apparent.
It would attract undesirables who would insist they have every right to stay on the train or bus and it may mean staff having a difficult time to obtain the authority to remove them without calling upon either the BTP or regional police force. It would also be diffcult to track which routes or services have the most demand and which ones are running for little demand and therefore which routes are most or least deserving of upgrades or new or cascaded midlife stock.
It would be difficult for the, presumably state owned, rail way to justify projects to the department of transport or the treasury regarding routes deserving of re-signalling or electrification, as they would be no direct return on the investment in terms of increased farebox receipts. Yes there would be indirect benefits for the UK economy but that is always less apparent.
I've lived in a city, in the former USSR, in the mid-1990s, that, temporarily (and for emergency measures - essentially the city couldn't afford to employ people to sell or check tickets) had free trams and trolleybuses. (They were a major part of the city's public transport system. Privately-run buses, which you did have to pay for, dealt with longer journeys, or provided a faster way from the city centre to the suburbs than the trams or trolleys.)
It really wasn't a good situation. Obviously with no income from fares there was no chance of any returns being invested in the system, so you had aging trams running around with windows missing (and in a country with very sub-zero winter temperatures), and suddenly enforced cutbacks of routes either when vehicles or infrastructure needed repair that couldn't be afforded. (Oh, and the inability to repair broken vehicles led to long gaps between services sometimes, too) And indeed the trams, in particular, became a haven for drunks to ride back and forth in somewhere relatively warm (if there weren't windows missing...). While it was nice to get around for free - it was no way to run a public transport system. And, indeed, as soon as the economy picked up (a bit) fares were re-introduced.
It really wasn't a good situation. Obviously with no income from fares there was no chance of any returns being invested in the system, so you had aging trams running around with windows missing (and in a country with very sub-zero winter temperatures), and suddenly enforced cutbacks of routes either when vehicles or infrastructure needed repair that couldn't be afforded. (Oh, and the inability to repair broken vehicles led to long gaps between services sometimes, too) And indeed the trams, in particular, became a haven for drunks to ride back and forth in somewhere relatively warm (if there weren't windows missing...). While it was nice to get around for free - it was no way to run a public transport system. And, indeed, as soon as the economy picked up (a bit) fares were re-introduced.
Notwithstanding what I said before about not everyone being fit enough to walk so far on a regular basis, the trouble is they are often using that ton of machinery to do the equivalent of a FIVE minute walk. OTOH, they've paid thousands of pounds for it, so there is no point in sitting on the drive (or more commonly, the road/pavement) with fuel so cheap.
Trouble is you are talking party politics and public v private. I'm talking OMNIbus (I take it you know basic Latin) v Remote Rail. Last time I looked Serco, RATP-Dev, Keolis Amey (and yes, Stagecoach) were all private companies, so if its unacceptable to use public money to provide Stagecoach with new buses, why is it acceptable to use it to provide Stagecoach with new trams....or even Trains (EMT)? The political (NOT party political) answer is because not only MPs and Councillors invariable have cars and are paid well, but the same goes for business leaders, lobbyists, floating voters and of course, the Media.
This opens up yet another debate, and I suspect illustrates just how different things are in different parts of the country. Here in Tameside, and to a lesser extent the other boroughs in the eastern half of GM at least, the idea of schools finishing at 4pm harks back probably 50 years. Typically finishing time around here is 1415-1430. From memory, these changes happened in the early 1990s. This has created major problems for not only the bus industry, but other aspects of daily life:
1. Afternoon peak traffic starts at 1400 not 1530ish
2. It also means earlier starts (albeit only c.30 minutes) meaning the school peak is right on top of the traditional commuting peak
3. Attendant costs to the bus industry of manning "triple peaks" and a double afternoon PVR.
4. Free or otherwise (see relevant thread), OAPs are dashing to squeeze their day into 4 hours to avoid both the ASB caused by schoolkids and the traffic delays caused by their parents (or rather, the other kids' parents)
Beyond the bus industry, this early finish means kids are either running riot around shopping centres (or indeed Bus Stations) between school finish time and their parents coming home from work OR (as highlighted by Granada over Xmas) is actually directly causing increased poverty because single parents in particular have to be home from work before 1500, or pay a large proportion of their (minimum?) wage on child care.
This prompts two questions:
1. Are there ANY advantages to this seemingly ridiculous policy?
2. Has the same happened throughout the UK, or does it vary massively?
The underlying difficulty, politically speaking, is the ethos that public services in this country should be a cash cow for donors to political parties, rather than actual services for thr public. Hence cities like Manchester having chaotic competing transit modes, rather than a co-ordinated network making it as easy as possible to get round the city.
I had misunderstood your earlier post and was talking about moving private traffic to corridors other than Oxford Rd. A tram route could co-exist with buses using the same roadspace. However, I would have hoped that a Metrolink route following that corridor would absorb most demand anyway - with a co-ordinated transport network and co-ordinated fares, it seems unlikely that people would take buses over trams.
Except buses (well, Stagecoach ones if not all First) have at least some cushioned seats. Metrolink just has plastic bum perches. That said, and as I think I said when something similar came up on the Franchising thread, the answer should surely be a compromise; eg. Trams replacing "shorts" between West Didsbury, but through buses continuing from points beyond eg. 42 from Stockport as well as 42A/42B & 43. I'm guessing the First Rusholme dispute will see the end of the 41 route anyway. This way, you would reduce the number of buses from the current 60-72 per hour to something like 12-18, but still maintain the option of not having to change when trying to get from beyond the Didsburys to MRI (and if preferred the University corridor) and for the sake of a few hundred metres from the city to Christies.
That's what I envisaged. Street trams will never replace every bus route. I envisaged a tram line down Oxford and Palatine Roads, with a service branching onto the East Didsbury line (in the expectation it will evtnually go on to Stockport), and a line continuing to Wythenshawe and the airport branch, but various buses to other points using the same corridor.
That's simply untrue. I have known quite a number of councillors who didn't have cars.
(And how do you define "well paid"?)
The difference is that TfGM and the DfT pay Stagecoach to run trams and trains on their behalf. The trams are still owned by TfGM. Trains are mostly bought by leasing companies and hired to the train companies. Whereas in Britain, most buses are owned by the bus companies direct, although some buses are owned by public authorities such as TfGM and TfL, usually for contracted services.
In most countries, there would be east west bus routes with few, if any, buses running along Oxford/Wilmslow Road. You would be expected to change onto the tram for the city centre if you are off Oxford/Wilmslow Road. This requires far fewer buses than the current network with the added bonus of making it easy to make journeys within south Manchester that aren't to the city centre. Not everyone wants to go to the city centre. Getting a high modal share for public transport means catering for trips other than those to the city centre.
This "licence to pollute" is a hidden environmental cost of having kids.
duffield
Established Member
A recent fairly widely reported study, if I remember correctly, showed considerably better air quality on the top deck of double deck buses, reflecting the fact that many pollutants are somewhat denser than clean air and tend to concentrate at the lowest levels.
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