To think our public transport system needs a complete overhaul?

@Oldraver It’s nowhere near that off peak!

I came back from 5 days in Switzerland last night, we did have a Swiss Travel Pass that did seen expensive, probably could of saved some money here and therebut the almost stress free travel in spotless on time trains was amazing. It covered all transport and some museums

We did have a little bit of delay on one journey due to a train being stuck and oh my the consternation from locals. We overheard someone phoning ahead to say he was stuck and laughed they wouldn't be believed

We use the trains about once a month and one particular route (Manchester to Southampton visiting Birmingham and Oxford is hell on earth we started to go another way. One journey from Oxford to Middlesbrough cost me £175, so my Swiss pass was a bargain

Last year I was in Luxembourg and transport is free

How nurses, police officers and the army aren't paid as much as train drivers is indeed, crazy. Their wages should be raised to that level, rather than having a race to the bottom though.

Good point. We should probably euthanise the poor due to their failure to prop the economy up.

(In actual fact, people on low incomes keep money flowing in a better way than the rich do, due to their tendency to spend it all, rather than shove it in offshore accounts and sit on it)

Strong unions are killing everything they get involved with. They first destroyed the UK manufacturing industry. Now they're killing public services, including the trains, NHS, local authorities, etc. We've got to the crazy stage where public services are for the benefit of the staff, not the public. It has to change.

It needs a complete overhaul. How train drivers can be paid more than nurses, police and army is crazy. It’s too expensive and too inefficient. Unions are killing the system.

@LadyChilli

The radial system means having to go into the city and back out for almost every journey.

Yes, far too many places like that, where all the bus routes take you into the centre and then you have to change and get a different bus out the other side. My son had that problem in York. Wanting to travel a few miles around the ring road from where he lived to the big shopping area. Literally a 5 minute drive by car, but more like 90 minutes each way as the bus from his flat took him into the city, where he needed to change to a different bus out to the shopping area, both very slow tortuous routes stopping every few minutes. Heaven knows why they don't have a bus route that goes around the ring road to link the shopping areas to the Unis and other areas of high population.

Ironically, part of the ethos of the Beeching cuts to the rail network was to have local buses connecting the stations that were closed to the nearest station that was to stay open, i.e. covering branch lines etc to get people to the main line station. Unfortunately, it simply didn't happen.

One of the issues is poor financial planning of big public sector projects. I used to work with a guy who was doing the same job as me but in HS2 and he was earning 5 times what I was earning. We would meet regularly and he was doing very little. There was no one to check what he was doing, I think the organisation wanted to tick a box to say that they had someone to do this job. He would attend meetings and speak a lot of nonsense about how great he was but would achieve very little. He could be quite aggressive with colleagues and so I am guessing that was a way to deflect. I think any public sector projects need proper accountability or suppliers etc.. take advantage.

Vape shops and turkish barbers and the like don't survive as genuine shops, most "survive" because they're money laundering. Charity shops survive because they're exempt from some taxes/rates and usually get very cheap rents from the landlord.

Because of high charges, our city centre car park are usually pretty empty. Long gone are the days when you'd be driving around a couple of times trying to find a space. As a result, the main shopping area is also pretty empty both people and shops (probably half are boarded up/derelict). There needs to be a better balance.

@crackofdoomWell they don’t spend money to they? Where is there a bouyant turn city centre in a run form area? Of course it’s a money issue! Vapes and charity shops abound because they can survive. No one else can. No spending money, no decent shops! Surely everyone knows this?

Too many poor people, how very thoughtless of them 😱

Won't happen in the UK, for the public transport to work you need an integrated system, look at HS2 - so many years, so much money and so little of it being built. Its the environmentalists that are the problem. Start building a decent rail system and then get feeder busses into that.

One thing that wasn't very sexy but seems to have worked well is the London Superloop buses, which seem to be a lot more evidence based than some other public transport - they actually fill gaps.

Outside of large towns/cities, public transport is diabolical.

I live in a small town in a predominantly rural county in the SE. To get to a hospital appointment involves either 3 buses or two buses and a train. There is a direct bus to one of the hospitals, but it only runs twice a day, so the chances of it coinciding with your appointment are slim. It's 2 buses or bus + train to the nearest town big enough to have an M&S or shops that sell such basic things as shoes and kids' clothes.

And if you want to use the train to commute to London, the first bus to the station isn't until 8.45am and the last one back is at 5.45, so it's a bloody long walk or pay £8 pd day to park at the station, unless you have a partner who can ferry you back and forth. When I first moved here, the buses ran from 7am to 7pm, so were well used by commuters.

Charging for parking is the easiest way to manage demand. Motorists always amuse me - there isn't enough parking and you have to pay. What do you think would happen in prime city centre areas or smaller spaces if there weren't charges?

Those countries no doubt put in a lot more subsidy?

How do you feel about the amount of tax you pay currently?

We also suffer in the UK from having invented a lot of modern transit systems. As a result we have got some very expensive problems to solve such as bridges only high enough for single decker trains, because double decker ones didn't exist when the bridges were built.

That's an interesting post. I usually walk to my local city centre (Glasgow) as it's only 3 miles. I had to drive to an out of town shopping centre a couple of times recently and the traffic getting in and out was horrific. I was surprised that people tolerate that, rather than jumping on a train into town. I wonder if a parking levy would make a difference. Drivers would be up in arms though, people are fiercely wedded to their right to use cars and these out of town centres are just businesses providing what the public want.

Glasgow is actually adding a lot of cycle lanes and the venom and hatred towards cyclists on social media is wild. As is the length of time it takes to build the lanes. Literal years to convert a lane of a dual carriageway to a cycle lane.

Our city centre is reasonably well served by trains and the prices are ok. The problems begin when you need to travel anywhere else. The radial system means having to go into the city and back out for almost every journey. Relatively infrequent services mean long waits, so you often have almost a half hour wait to connect two 10 minute journeys. The barrier system at each platform makes short timed connections impossible. The south of the city is served by one station and the north and Edinburgh by another, and the only way between them is to walk through the city centre. Lack of ticketing integration makes it too expensive to switch to bus or underground for part of the journey. More trains, more lines and cheaper trains would be wonderful but there are a lot of things that could be fixed with less investment.

Our everything needs a complete overhaul.

@Benvenuto It depends who owns the car park! They are not all council owned and run. Often out of town shopping ads privately owned and they can do what they want. The other issue is too much retail! Conversion to residential would be better. Many councils hate cars, have poorly planned shopping areas and in general too many poor people. They get the shops they might actually use which the rest of us don’t like ! I’ve not shopped in my local town for 20 years. Every aspect of it is horrible. It used to be a quite nice market town but now - just awful. Even a recent development of a £50 million theatre has had the adjacent multi story car park built right next to the canal. No nice landscaping or canal walks for us! So I avoid it.

Sorry a bit off topic but I’ve no public transport to get there either. Most villages have no late bus so it’s drive to the theatre or don’t go.

I think local transport is really good where I am, but intercity trains are expensive, even if you look in advance and are eligible for a railcard. I travel by train a lot. We don’t have a car. They are generally reliable, though. And there’s compensation if you are delayed.

Well cyclists don’t buy anything! Just get a coffee maybe? Definitely not doing a big shop!

City centre (& other) parking costs a lot to operate - potentially more in future as older multi-storeys may not be able to support the weight of heavier modern cars (the Institute of Structural Engineers has issued a warning about this). It’s not unreasonable to expect drivers to contribute towards this - just as we expect people to pay fares on public transport.

The problem re city centres are threefold - firstly if there is a out-of-town shopping centre nearby that has lower costs for both businesses (rents) & shoppers, then that is going to attract people away from the city centre because shops will locate there rather than in the centre. It’s poor planning & it causes its own problems (near me it’s traffic jams in the suburban housing estate next to the shops). Then there’s the shop & leisure offer & how nice the city centre is to attract customers - my local city centre does well on both so despite many predictions it isn’t declining. Then there’s how easy it is to get to buy walking, cycling & public transport - my centre is OK for PT but could easily increase customers via walking & cycling by making it a bit nicer & safer to use these forms of transport. There’s plenty of people who could walk / cycle in if it was more pleasant.

Unfortunately both in the centre & in suburban shops there’s a generally a failure to see cyclists in particular as “real” customers so as well as a lack of routes there’s a lack of cycle racks. It’s annoying - I can carry more by bike than in a rucksack & I’m not going to drive for a mile or two unless I need to buy something too heavy for my bike - but it’s also poor business sense. I can think of a couple of shopping areas that have improved things for walkers & cyclists & they are flourishing.

The narrative that free parking & easy access is essential for shopping centres is a really entrenched one, but it isn’t one backed up by traffic research - Waltham Forest being one of the most famous examples. Given the cuts to local authority services over the last decade, there’s for me a question about why out-of-town centres are allowed to keep their free parking when so many services have been reduced & cut. There’s definitely an argument for a small fee to help fund pothole filling.

Pretty typical for Transport for Wales. I should know, I used to work for the incompetent idiots.