town is gridlocked between 330 and 630 every weekday

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The answer is to build more homes.

I could cry.

This. Our legislators need to prioritise non-vehicular transport yet if you examine Jesse Norman's speech at the Tory conference, this isn't happening.

Fun fact. Jesse Norman is MP for Hereford, which has the second slowest traffic speed after London.

How he is responsible for Transport is a wonder.

People have to live somewhere. What do you propose?

There's huge amounts of "brown" land in most towns and cities that is just derelict where shops, warehouses, factories etc have closed down. Lost of empty property above High Street shops. There's no need for the "shopping" areas in towns to be so large/spread out - it could be condensed freeing up massive amounts of land/building so that people could start to live in town centres again. It's just a reversal of fairly recent trends - only a few decades ago, most people lived and worked in town centres - the growth of town centre shopping meant that people moved out as shops moved in and grew. If people lived and worked in town centres, a lot of the traffic problems would disappear. As it is, many town centres are dying and are virtually ghost towns, especially outside shopping hours. Just need government and local councils with some vision to start rejuvenating town centres with homes rather than coffee bars and charity shops.

Nettletheelf it's not that people don't want the houses, just that if they are built they want the infrastructure to support the extra people to be added. If you build another 2000 houses that means an extra 6000 or so people in the area, and probably around 500-1000 more children. That's a full school's worth of children, but no new schools built to educate them in. GP surgeries/dentists already full, but no new GPs or dentists to look after their health. 2000 or so more cars on the local roads. No new bus routes to serve the new estates meaning people have to drive. 2-4000 more commuters, as there won't be lots of jobs on the new estate.

Just think how much money would be saved if we had a massive program of school buses (like America) which would take cars off the roads meaning less need to spend millions on new roads, road improvement schemes, saving of costs of police/nhs dealing with accidents etc. But will never happen because governments, local authorities, etc aren't capable of looking at the bigger picture and won't work together.

No new bus routes to serve the new estates

Well said. Near our city, we have a major retail/industrial estate which has been there 50 years and is one of the major employment areas. There wasn't a single bus route serving it until about 10 years ago, so everyone working/shopping there had to drive, walk or cycle. Even now, there's just a single bus route with an hourly service so it's still not viable for most people.

I live in a big village (5,000 people) on the main A road into the nearest town and our bus service is poor. An hourly bus just to the city centre bus station which takes 30 minutes despite being only 5 miles away (goes a very obscure route involving other villages). So unless you actually want to go to the city centre, it means changing at the bus station and getting another bus to where you really want to go. 3 of the 4 schools in the city are outside the city centre, so the bus isn't really feasible as not only is there a long journey, there's also then a long walk right through the city centre and out the other side where the schools are (no suitable buses from bus station to schools). Yet, there are plans for 1,000 new houses in our village - that's another 2,000-3,000 people, with no new school, GP surgery, no new buses proposed. It's crazy!

Sounds like 'market forces' aren't working, I thought they were supposed to give everyone the best public transport, housing, schools etc?

Maybe if we reversed some of the more stupid decisions of the past decades, such as privatising buses & trains, and went back to proper town-planning led by people's needs rather than developers desire to make a profit we might be able to sort this lot out in 20 years or so?

Meanwhile, we can do something about it ourselves by getting involved in local issues, demanding safer pavements and cycle routes so at least some people don't feel they have to use the car for every journey and objecting to all planning proposals that don't upgrade infrastructure.

We've seen what happened if we leave things in the hands of people with vested interests, whose sole aim is to make a quick profit and have no understanding of words like society, service and needs. They've had their chance and have clearly fucked up, time to step aside.

I see! Build new homes on the site of old asbestos factories near city centres. Or make them live in flats above shops. Because that will help with traffic problems in the city, won't it? Or are you expecting the people living in the new houses built on the brownfield sites not to have cars because they won't need them?

Allergic, there are plenty of people on this thread saying that they don't want new houses near where they live because of extra cars ("it's not that people don't want the houses...")

Also, bus services will reduce if people don't flipping use them. If more people did, and campaigned to their local authorities, they might get a better bus network.

Interestingly, in the OP's home town of Warrington there were several local campaigns in the wealthier areas to stop buses coming down their roads, which led to bus services being changed, I.e. reduced. This was at least 15 years ago: somebody I knew was involved in it.

Their reasons for wishing to scale down the bus services were (1) so that they could all park their second and third cars on the street, which prevented buses getting down the road and (2) somewhat spuriously to justify their real reasons, that children wouldn't be knocked over by buses, although it appeared that it was ok for them to be knocked down by the many cars continuing to use those roads.

People really don't help themselves.

May I ask something odd;
Do we actually need new homes? The reason I'm asking is, I've lived in lots of places in the UK from the north of England, London as far as the welsh valleys. I have lived in some towns where council and housing association homes are available to rent to the general public on eg, rightmove. Small apartment blocks for rent at £250-£350per month per flat lying empty for weeks. Caused by a lack of decent employment.

For a while I lived in a £300 a month flat that was less than an hour from Cardiff city centre on one direct train journey, other public transport available but was poor (this was in the welsh valleys). But if I'd wanted a job in the local area I'd be stuffed!
That's not to say all of South Wales or the welsh valleys is like that but certain towns are (Aberdare, cwmbach, mountain ash, abertillery, ferndale, ebbw vale, to name a few i have this experience in) and there are other towns in the north similar and in pockets all over the uk.

Is there any reason that we can't provide incentives and focus business and building at a national level in these areas where possible? I'd be thinking big tax cuts/cash incentives/training programmes and business grants given to people in those areas.

I will state that I'm an average joe clueless dickhead so I'll understand if my idea has more holes in than Swiss cheese but I don't think focusing everything on London and the se and to a lesser extent other major cities eg Bristol Cardiff etc is the way to go these places just end up overpopulated overpriced and without the infrastructure to support it.

Jaqueshammer, I'm sorry but I completely disagree, you can choose your nearest school by putting it top of your list. I had a large choice of schools and chose my local primary - walking distance. We make choices in life all the time - where to live, where to school our kids, take responsibility for your choices rather than blaming the system

Buses are pretty useless and unreliable. We have a tram service in my town which is reliable and quicker than driving.

It serves limited areas but is slowly expanding. It's delayed by nimbyism.

So all of you saying

I need my car

Why wouldn’t a scooter, electric bike work for you?

Surely it would save time and fuel and ved

Also that old age problem of parking would vanish

Wholeordiced, it's not a stupid idea and it's been tried. 25 years ago a series of government departments were moved out of London to create employment in less buoyant areas.

The difficulty comes with persuading commercial enterprises to do the same thing. Investment banks aren't going to move their HQs to Middlesbrough, to use the same example. Although it sometimes happens: Nissan in Sunderland, for example.

However, the posts on this thread suggest that many smaller cities and towns in the regions are already gridlocked by cars.

such as privatising buses & trains

Oh gawd no! I old enough to remember when local councils ran their town's bus services and didn't allow competition! Being unable to get a direct bus from my town to the next one because each town had it's own district council bus service and they wouldn't cross town boundaries! You had to get town A bus to the furthest stop at the edge of it's area, then walk across the boundary and get on Town B's bus which ran to the edge of it's area! We're not talking acres of green fields between "towns" either - it was literally a grass verge with houses from Town A one side and houses from Town B on the other!

The only direct buses allowed to cross the boundary were "express" buses which didn't stop en route and just stopped at each town centre bus station.

At least deregulation stopped that kind of stupidity, not to mention the amount of strikes for piffling reasons when it was under the council control which made it a very unreliable service as you'd never know when a "flash" strike was called as they were literally at a moment's notice!

As someone said earlier, we need joined-up thinking about all these social issues, none of them exist in a vacuum.
I am lucky I live in a small community that has excellent train and bus links to two nearby cities good bus services.
However, if you want a job in another community, not in one of the city centres, you face a real dilemma. The jobs will probably be on a shopping or industrial estate on the outskirts of the town, you will have to face a long walk to get there on top of your bus journey.
The cost of public transport is prohibitively expensive; I really don't know how it is affordable.

I believe that the state should intervene to address these issues, relying on the free market and the supposed drip down of wealth has obviously had dreadful consequences for the vast majority of people in this country.

All I can advise is getting involved in local politics, get your friends and families to do the same. We can effect change but only by standing up and making our voices heard.

(Yes, I do know that local political parties and pressure groups have their meetings when families are dealing with bedtime in many cases, and I understand the time poverty that affects so many people. I am hoping that we can change how our society works so that everyone can be included.)

To be honest lakie i admire your spirit, I couldn’t be sat in a car for an hour a day, 5 hours a week to drive 2 miles a day to an office

I just couldn’t do it as it would drive me to distraction.

Why wouldn’t a scooter, electric bike work for you?

Fine for relatively flat towns/cities. Out in the Northern towns, there are usually some pretty hilly places, particularly those in valleys, where there are very steep gradients which make cycling/scootering impossible for average people. In our city, there is a 3/4 mile very steep uphill busy road from the city centre to one of the major schools, which means that virtually no school kids cycle to school! (Not just due to lack of fitness, before you try that argument - the school actually prohibit cycling up/down the hill on H&S grounds and kids seen doing it get an automatic detention!, so kids who cycle have to walk up/down the hill with their bike!).

That's a really interesting point WholeOrDiced I guess that it's due to shifts in industry- lots of old mining villages where the mine has gone and there is nothing else. Where I live (on the urban fringes of the north) there are lots of houses being built but prices have shot up crazily and they are all 300k+ we desperately need housing for people cheaper than that -rents are even higher than mortgages. 2x school teachers or nurses on a combined income of 60k would struggle to buy here now without a substantial deposit, let alone the people in average jobs, and yet they are claiming these are 'affordable'. (The 'unaffordable' ones are 500k+)
The result is that people end up commuting long distances taking a couple of hours each way, which has a knock-on effect on families needing longer childcare etc. Barmy.

Public transport isn't half bad in Middlesbrough, mind. Apart from the bits that the buses have all but stopped serving because the evening activities of some of the local kids consist of throwing bricks through bus windows.

Sounds like you need more people using public transport.

Except wheelchair users. You need far less of them on public transport.

I wonder if you live by me. I moved to a new build estate, none of the real local schools can take the kids on our estate, so the school that my daughter is now in, Is 2.8 miles from home.
its an absolute fucker of a drive there or back. the school run takes an hour twice a day.
building more homes without the right amenities only really compounds the problem, as many of the children from our area are in the same position where they are needing to drive their children to a school that they would not need to drive to if they didnt have such a trek to undertake.

Last night I set off at 8 am, I didnt get out of the town until 9.35 and this was only driving accross to get DD to school and out of town.
I picked DD up from school at 3:30 it took over half an hour to drive the mile or so to swimming. we left swimming and it took an hour to get home.

SusannahL...traffic is caused by immigration. You knob.

More sensibly, until public transport is nationalised, it ain’t getting any better.

Had this for ten years where we used to live- we were grid locked from 3-7pm due to traffic from schools and local businesses. Journeys took forever. Then we moved, my commute is now a walkable 50 minutes, bliss!

It is exactly the same where I live. I live a mile from the city centre and am basically marooned in my house until 7pm. I walk or cycle everywhere because of this as I loathe traffic jams so I guess it makes me fitter! But if I ever do need to go out in the car it's a nightmare.

I don't know what the answer is. Fewer people should drive short distances but people seem to think it's their right to drive and refuse to think of alternatives.

I'm sorry but I completely disagree, you can choose your nearest school by putting it top of your list.

Ha ha ha. My nearest school is about 550m away.** The catchment (or rather, last admitted distance year-on-year) is 420m. The same goes for my second-nearest school. So my children don’t attend either of those, because there was no space for them.