To think people don't use public transport as its so unreliable

Yep.

I've been lucky enough to be able to walk to work or work from home for the last 20 years, but got a new job in feb that needs me in the office but if too far to walk.

Thought rather than get a second car I'd cycle some days and bus the others when the weathers minging. The buses are atrocious, its probably one of the flagship bus routes in the city and the percentage of time it just doesn't show up is ridiculous. Used the money for bus travel on a decent set of waterproof gear for me and my laptop and now I cycle every day. Not looking forward to the winter though!

"Roads" are also used by bikes and buses! Not to mention lorries.

The figures I was looking at state £25bn on railways, £4.3 billion on local public transport, £5.6b on national roads and £5.5b on local roads.

Our local small by pass costs around £25m and has a brilliant integrated cycle path system (separated from the road with kerb stones etc and with bridges built to get from one side to the other), trouble is you rarely see a bike on it.

For comparison, the UK spends sbout 2 pounds per person per year on cycling infrastructure in the uk

First of all, I was talking about bikes, not public transport. The amount spent on bike infrastructure is tiny.

Secondly, you are wrong. The government spends far more on car infrastructure (11 billion) than public transport (4 billion). That's without taking into account the health costs that cars cause.

The government (ie taxpayers) spend far more on public transport than they do on the roads. Yet, it's motorists who pay in far more in taxes than public transport users. The fact is that motorists are subsidising public transport to an alarming extent.

And yet we spend billions on roads for cars, which kill people (directly and via air pollution and inactivity), and are extremely inefficient.

Spending a tiny proportion of that cost on bike infrastructure would be a massive improvement on now.

The trains are OK when they’re running but the buses really aren’t, unless you happen to live in one town centre and want to go to another town centre. I can’t even reliably get the bus to the station!

You're not.

But even if you were, many places don't have pavements.

@Allfur not everyone has safe bike routes - my route to work is a 60 mph 1 in 4 hill with bends up then down- only 6 miles but there's been deaths on that road (bike and motorcycle) since I moved here 4 years ago, no way would it be safe to use an e bike too slow

I live in mid Sussex and travel around a lot and find the trains and buses very good all through Sussex really (apart from a patch in East Sussex that needs improvement) cost wise I spend similar a year to owning a car with all those associated costs and much prefer sitting with a coffee and reading than driving and parking. Think I'm lucky where I am though although on my street people never walk to the shop or station which is about a 15 minute walk. Timing is an issue I get but I count the walking as part of my commute and is exercise and I don't get out of breath on the stairs to my office which a lot of the people who drive in do so that's a positive!

To get to work I can drive 3.5 miles
Or I can get a bus into town, back out of town and then walk. Total 2.5hrs

Fair enough, I'm probably out of date.

Mind you, I bet there's some people in Shropshire who think that Manchester public transport is as amazing as TfL looks to you.

Manchester is certainly not "fine", especially the utterly crap train network.

A train broke down on the only train line in/out of our town at around 7am this morning and there are still no trains running on it. No wonder everyone drives!

Where I used to live it was so frustrating - I lived in a town that was on the map easy commuting distance of Manchester (about 40 minutes on the train and short walking distance station from my house) but there was only approximately 1 small train an hour and it was often cancelled / bus replacement service. It just became such a ball ache to try to get into Manchester from there and I'd often end up just driving and sitting in awful motorway traffic. If my town had been that close to London rather than Manchester there would be a stream of regular and reliable transport for commuters, but it was in the North so no money I suppose....Don't get me started on HS2.

I couldn’t agree more. As I said in my first post here:
I use public transport every day and it is fab in London. The tubes on the lines I use are rarely cancelled and buses are plentiful. It should be like this everywhere

Town in North Essex. Our bus is once every hour. Ooh apart from the first lockdown when it was once every TWO HOURS How they thought other essential workers were going to get into work fuck knows.

The trains had a very bad patch in the spring but are now much better. Having been wrestling with car parking apps and huge carpark charges ( plus potential fines for not understanding the app system and potential speed fines) and complicated city centre road systems and gridlock I think trains are much preferable

I didn't vote because it's neither for me. It's 'what public transport'. No buses or trains.

It's not really shocking that a city with a pretty dense population of nearly 9 million can sustain a decent public transport system while places a twentieth of the size find it difficult. Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester seem more or less fine too - I don't know Leeds, Sheffield or Bradford.

I'm not denying that access to lucrative sponsorship and a unified NFP system have given London a helping hand, but geography is also doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

This. I’ve used the tube recently and the overground is a pita (and packed) and buses generally are ok (SE London suburbs).

Trains are ok depending on the line, thameslink can be delayed and southeastern certain routes are diabolical especially Eden Park/Elmers End which would put me off moving there. My local station cut out the 8.15am train too. Don’t get me started on fare increases.

I’ve had nigh on 20 years of commuting into central London which is a test in itself.

You know it’s bad when an ex colleague of mine at a huge global engineering firm responsible for building and revamping train stations said he’d claimed approx £200 of refunds for delayed in a month and he was coming from Watford to central London.

I think we have to accept that people in London are very unique compared to the rest of the UK, and seeing as the majority of people don't live in London, it's not a particularly useful thing to mention how London people use public transport more. For a start, we can't afford London style public transport for the rest of the country! Ironically, until the 50s/60s, we had a really comprehensive train network throughout the country - it was massively scrapped or scaled back in most areas, but "strangely" managed to survive pretty unscathed in and around London. Funny that!

I live in London where everyone and their uncle is on public transport 😂

Good luck finding the billions of pounds that it would cost, not to mention the huge disruption it would cause and the years/decades it would take to go through planning, public consultations, etc.