To think our public transport system needs a complete overhaul?

I mostly use the train but the same applies to ULEZ in London. I pay £12.50 whether I drive a couple of miles to pick my daughter up from the station on my non work day, or nip over to see my parents in Kent (approx 30 ish miles). So I may as well drive more that day not less.

Near me, there are several routes where the train is faster than the road at off peak, and considerably faster at peak - but there aren’t are enough local services so people drive.

This is poor for the people living out in commuter towns as their commutes take longer and poor for the people living in the inner city who have to put up with congestion & the bad behaviour of a sizeable minority of drivers “frustrated” that the traffic is not “flowing”.

Traffic needs to be managed - this doesn’t mean that no-one drives but it does mean that people are encouraged & enabled to take the most appropriate form of transport for their journey. There are lots of people who drive for relatively short journeys & many of those could switch modes if public & active transport were made better. It also means that people who have no choice but commuting by car into urban areas need to respect the Highway Code & understand that urban communities shouldn’t have to put up with speeding, driving whilst using a mobile, ignoring road signs etc.

This is also something where both politicians & business leaders could be better informed - there are some local to me who do champion public transport etc. but if even a small number of the rest informed themselves & swung their heft behind the local public transport & road safety campaigns then we would get improvements faster.

Another factor is that the costs of car ownership are mostly fixed ( buy or lease car, tax, insurance, MOT, service ) regardless of mileage, so if you need a car at all, it’s often cheaper to use it all the time rather than running a car and paying public transport fares on top. I can’t justify getting a train if there are three or four of us vs driving even accounting for fuel and parking. The personal finances on car vs public transport only really works on a single passenger basis and if you don’t have a car at all.

Hopefully posters are aware that the whole Rail network will be re-nationalised by the end of 2027, for better or worse?

I don’t think nationalisation is a panacea. One of the main reasons the railways were privatized was because under public ownership they’d been starved of investment for decades and ridership had fallen and fallen. Under public ownership railways have to compete with schools and hospitals for funding, which is tough, and no competitive imperative to drive down prices (the reason you can get that £30 flight).

UK rail privatisation is definitely not perfect, but mainly because it’s an odd half-way house, not because there’s profit involved nor because public ownership was great for the railways either.

Fares havn't reduced in the train operating firms that are back in public ownership.

We need more than "cheap fares" to get cars off the road. The entire infrastructure needs to be improved. We need more frequent services, more reliable services, a lot more routes, a lot more stations, etc.

Cheaper fares only works for the minority of people who live/work close to stations on suitable routes to where they want to go.

No sane person is going to give up their car when their daily work commute is 20 minutes by car but 2 hours by train!

What we really need is to improve train services AND improve roads, AND make cars/lorries more environmentally friendly/efficient. The genie is out of the bottle with road vehicles and there's no putting in back. Likewise the wholesale destruction of the train network in the 70s can't be reversed.

When it works that’s actually a great route though because it’s not radial- ie you can go from Bournemouth via other major cities to Manchester “straight up” and not via London. We need more routes like that if public transport sport is to be more widely used and displace car usage.

i’m honestly sceptical about public transport in the uk though. I just don’t think most people really want to use it vs driving ( because hell
is other people and you’ll never have the end to end solution that driving brings) and you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. Our town has invested millions in a pretty impressive cycle lane network and hardly anyone uses it because our town is really windy and hilly and people don’t want to cycle uphill into a massive headwind in lashing rain.

From a climate perspective at least I think we’re better off focusing on cleaner cars.

100%. The whole thing needs renationalising and run not for profit with heavily subsidised fares. Only then will we get cars off the road.

Anecdotally, my DS lives around 250 miles from me and when he visits, he’ll book a flight that goes via Dublin which he”ll get for £30 or £40 as opposed to the £200 they want on the train. Yes, I appreciate you can pick up cheap fares if you book very far in advance but that’s not always doable.

There's no sign of any improvements nor changes at all. They still can't get Northern to run a proper Sunday service because of the strength of the unions which isn't going to change.

They're not going to repair 30 years of fragmentation overnight.

Many train operating firms are back in government control but services are no better, prices are no cheaper. Still under union control.

Maybe, but we're talking one of the small ski resorts in Occitane, not somewhere rolling in cash like they have over on the Alpes...might be the student traffic that helps frequency...whatever the reason it's pretty good and hopefully it will continue.

Then there's the mess that bus deregulation caused.

I just think "profit" is the wrong word there.

It would be good to get more people cycling.

@VickyEadie The companies bid for franchises don’t they? They are awarded contracts. They don’t own the rail network either. Do you know who does? Oh yes, the government. Get your facts right. You want more railways, it’s tax (no chance) or borrowing (at vast expense and adding to the £3 trillion we already owe). So hopefully no chance of that either.

We don't have a "system". We have a load of private companies to whom the Thatcher and Major governments sold off our public transport and left us this awful mess.

See also: water, electricity, gas.

Think about the public health benefits, and you'll see how a km of cycling saves the taxpayer money in the long run.

I've just checked, and to travel tomorrow it's £36 one way - 40 pence per mile. I've also checked the systems and no £13.50 fare exists, the cheapest Advance tier is £18 and good luck actually finding any advances actually available for less than £30.

Reagan tried that with Air Traffic Control. Despite having experienced controllers available to him in the military (you won't find many in the military who can run a railway, and those who can will be reservists who already do run the railway in their day job), the disruption was long-lasting, and American ATC still has issues today.

You reckon that you can trust some randoms who've just come from the Job Centre to run a safe railway?

The ski resort probably provides a tourist justification for the slightly better service. The state of TER services varies a lot depending upon the region. It's got better in recent years, it used to be that SNCF would take the money from the local government, and then run services at its own convenience.

In somewhere like Nouvelle-Aquitaine, you'll find much poorer rural services.

I realise that, but at the time I needed to travel and hadn't got my Senior Citizen card, I had to suck it up

This year I've had £8 fare to Birmingham ( the dreaded sardine line, and as a family or couple have had some bargains into London

I’ve just bought four return train tickets for a journey of an hour and a quarter for £43. Which I think is really reasonable. We’ve done this journey multiple times and only once had an issue.

I arrived into Zurich three minutes late in February, and the other passengers were looking at their watches and tutting.

The thing about Switzerland is that they put a considerable amount of investment into their infrastructure and operations. They spend around six billion francs every year on their railways. Across a population of nine million people. That's £600 in subsidies per head.

How does the UK compare? The DfT's rail budget for the last financial year was £27.6bn. £400 per head. So the Swiss spend 50% more per head, is it any wonder that it produces results?

And that's not just a flash in the pan, they started seriously investing in modernising their operation 40 years ago (back when the UK was dithering about who should pay for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link rather than getting on and building it). In the meantime, the Swiss have build up a well-organised, well-run network. We chose to privatise it, balkanising our railways into little fiefdoms with no cooperation.

Yes! The difference between transport in the capital and public transport where I am in South Yorkshire is light years apart and frankly, embarrassing.

Thank you! We sound like we travel in a similar way (walking to shop in Glasgow sounds great - queuing in a shopping centre highly tedious).

I agree about the venom - it’s very unpleasant and ill-informed and it needs to stop especially as there are some awful cases where cyclists are the victims of violence (eg being pushed of a bike) just because people are prejudiced against them. I have no idea of why people feel like that, as most children love cycling. Bicycles are simply a practical form of transport & people are not defined by them.

The radial routes are a real problem & a good argument for regulating public transport. They are also a good argument for bike routes to link different suburbs to fill the gaps in the bus network. They would be particularly useful for secondary age children as catchments / intakes etc mean that a lot of students travel between different suburbs.