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

It really seems that the will to get cars off the road is faltering badly at a national level, although some local councils are keeping at it. I've not noticed any mention of transport policy in the run up to the election. Public transport is now so broken that it may well be unfixable.

I take the bus home from work but daren't get the bus in as it's so unreliable I could not guarantee arrival on time. DH gives me a lift in.

Well, going on how totally rammed the buses are on the routes local to me,I don't think many people are bothered about them being unreliable. The bus that serves the road I live in is meant to be every 8 - 10 minutes at peak times,but it's a common occurrence for there to be waits of 25 minutes between buses.

DD college is 2.5 miles away. She will often walk but during bad weather / exam days I've been taking her - it takes ten minutes to drive. A bus would take a 5 minute walk then 55 minutes on the bus plus a 9 minute walk and is £4 each way.

W

No, we need HS2. The West Coast Main Line (Euston to Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool/Glasgow) is the busiest mixed-traffic railway in Europe. It's creaking at the seams and desperately needs relieving.

Regional transport should be funded in addition to HS2, not instead of.

I'm in zone 4 London, I have to take a shuttle to connect to the mainline into London. Used to be 4 an hour with connections hat worked, now it's 2. The mainline trains are usually delayed, and on the way out of London they miss the connection with the shuttle they've been timetables with 3-4 minutes to change. Complete PITA.

I use the DLR and no complaints on that.

As soon as you move away from London the provision is awful.

Round here (East Sussex) the buses are absolutely terrible, but the trains not so bad. Yes cancellations and delays do happen but I'd say 80% of the time they're fine. I always get trains that arrive 20+ minutes before my shift is due to start just to be on the safe side.

We don't have the infrastructure to cope with more frequent trains. That was the original idea when they introduced Voyagers to replace HSTs on Cross Country - didn't work. They tried it for a short time and it led to multiple delays and cancellations.

For your DD - you could try booking assistance. If she has a disabled person's railcard, she will get a discount on First Class as well as standard class and First Class gives better chances of a seat.

It's rubbish, though, and in your shoes I would consider going by coach instead.

ETA - disabled railcard also gives discount to 1 x person accompanying disabled traveller.

Well, Thatcher deregulated public transport everywhere except London.
My dh was telling me when the local council was in charge you got off the metro and the bus you needed would be there waiting for you. Now? Forget it, the bus will be far in the distance if it ever turned up at all!

When I moved here the bus went into each village on way to the town. Now the bus sticks to the main road except for school pick up and drop off times. It's nearly 2 miles to the main road from the centre of the village where all the people live. Not much help to the elderly who are mostly likely to use it or those with small children. Then they wonder why hardly anyone uses it.

So true I would love to use public transport. I would love to sit and read instead of battling traffic. But the services just aren't there.

In a similar vein, I would love to ride my bike to work. However, the bike lanes we build are unusable, and traffic is terrifying. So I use a car.

That's a typical "wheel spoke" scenario, very common. Where you can readily get routes from the outskirts into the centre but can't go "around" the wheel, so you have to do two journeys, one in, and one out because it's impossible to go around the wheel.

My son suffers that in his city of York. Best part of an hour to go into York and then out again just to go a few miles around the ring road to get from his flat to the retail park/superstore. That's a journey that now takes him less than five minutes since he bought his car!

Councils need to realise that not everyone wants to go "into" the town centre. Most people shop in the out of town retail parks, most workers work in out of town industrial sites etc., yet they're not being properly catered for.

I just don't think those running the railways (Dept of Transport) actually think like that. It seems to take years to get timetables or services changed. There's just no "business sense" in that it's common sense for someone business minded to run more/longer trains on potentially busy days, but with a Government run system, the bureaucrats just aren't interested. It's always the same whether it's Ascot races, Wembley football matches, Pop festivals - barely any change to the scheduled timetables nor train allocations.

Privatisation should have solved that, but even the privatised firms where hamstrung by the Dept of Transport in terms of what trains they could operate, what routes they could use, what stations they could stop at, what fares they could charge, etc. It didn't have the most important aspect of successful private business which is flexibility and entreprennieurial aspects.

I must say I use it every day all day and it's 95% reliable. The odd cancelled train/bus.

My biggest complaint is lack of routes. I have to travel an hr into a city and an hr out in another direction to get somewhere that would be so much easier if there was a direct route across. They are major towns in travelling from and to, but no connections at all, have to go into the city. Both bus and train need more routes to get people using them more. More buses using the motorway too.

Also inconvenient- ds school is 3 miles away in another village - buses are infrequent and there is no direct route so he could get 2 buses and have to leave home super early due to bus times to spend an hour travelling to school which would also be expensive, or walk for an hour (crossing a busy dual carriageway) or it is 9 minutes to drive him - I drop him a short walk from school.

The thing @maddening is that 3 miles ought to be perfect for him to cycle to school, it's a little less than my ride to work. Except that I wouldn't let a child ride on the country road I use because of the poor standard of driving, and I presume that his journey would involve similarly hazardous roads. This is why we need safer infrastructure.

Fair enough, but if you know it will be packed then the tickets are selling and maybe put on more frequent trains when there's an event on? Obviously I've no idea if that's possible but my daughter is disabled and with a likelihood of no seats it's just very daunting.

Yep, we need a lot more carrot and a lot less stick.

Far too many councils waging war against motorists without putting in place proper public transport alternatives. All they do is throw down a bus lane here and there which causes untold delays and misery. And usually, the buses themselves end up delayed even more as they get caught in the congestion caused by the extra bus lanes!

My commute by public transport is pretty good. Reliable, if a bit too crowded/busy at times.

But I’m going to a wedding in Yorkshire in Sept and the cost of return train travel from Devon is absurd. Cheaper to drive, so I will drive. If Labour are serious about the environment they need to review the national rail service.

Couldn't agree more. All this patronising cooing from the govt about 'coaxing motorists out of their cars' would make a lot more sense if there were reliable alternatives. For very many people there aren't.

going against he grain - I rarely use my car

central London
free 60+ travel😁

sorry!

I used to commute on public transport, for years. Grim.

I moved and now mainly use my car. However, on the odd occasion I have tried to use trains, there is generally a strike on, delays, cancellations...and it's expensive. Load of shite.

They've also reduced the length of many station platforms which prevents "multiple" units being attached. Our nearest station used to be able to cope with 10-11 coach trains, but they deliberately demolished most of the platforms leaving it unsuitable for anything more than a 2 coach DMU!

We've really screwed up the UK over the past 50 years - so many areas where we just threw out the baby with the bathwater when we really didn't need to, whether it's education, healthcare, social care, public transport, national service, etc etc. We should have been thinking longer term and "tweaked" things to make them more suitable for the changing world rather than being far too keen on just trashing them.

Back to trains, some train lines were deliberately ripped up within days of Beeching/Marple closures for no reason at all. They were ripped up deliberately to stop them being used again!

Like others, where I live it's far cheaper to drive than take the bus, even taking all car costs into account. Not to mention, despite being on a main bus route, it's not actually possible any more to get the bus to where we need to go (mostly places less than a 20 minute drive away). DD can't even get a bus to school now as they cancelled the direct one and the change would make her late every day. Busses are mostly empty, and it's unsurprising. The trains are actually a bit better normally, but we don't often need to use those.

You should be able to claim.a refund as the train is now not stopping where it said on the ticket

I don't recall saying that they were "good" anywhere. Just that on measures of delays and cancellations they are twice as vad in North Wales as they are on their other routes.