To be so sad about our transport infrastructure

[HipTeens]

Twenty years ago I did a year abroad in Europe, split over three countries, one of which was Spain.

It was great, I didn't have much money but transport in particular was affordable and well provisioned.

I took trains all over to explore, and in Spain I took coaches. I couldn't believe how reliable and cheap a coach trip to somewhere like Gibraltar was.

Fast forward to now and I have just read a piece in the guardian about how well Spain has developed its high speed train network, and how low the fares are.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains-high-speed-trains-arent-just-efficient-they-have-transformed-peoples-lives

I am really pleased for them, but also really sad that our country manages to make such a hash of stuff like this. Dentistry and health care provision is going the same way, and I'm really really scared for our collective future.

I could blame politics, hut ither countries have politics too, arguments between right and left, occasional scandal, and so on.

How are we getting so much so very wrong?

€19 to leave the car at home and travel between Madrid and Barcelona - 400km in 2.5 hours? Yes please! I tried booking a ticket here across country here and they wanted £110. I had to take my car.

Unfortunately, whether you agree with rail strikes or not, people are using alternatives because trains aren’t reliable.

And why are they not reliable? Government cuts. Maintenance has been cut back so things fail more often. Staff have gone four years without a payrise (and are now being told that if they want one they'll have to give up all agreements that make family life possible for a shift worker). So apart from withdrawing their labour in protest, there is also a retention problem causing staff shortages and no one is minded to volunteer for any overtime.

Now the government has cut back a major infrastructure project that was supposed to relieve capacity on the most congested mixed-traffic railway in Europe. No extra capacity out of Manchester, Stockport and Crewe will remain congested.

A PP was talking about the cost of tickets between York and Derby. Well the government won't let Crosscountry lease extra trains so that there's more capacity, instead they've just told them to price off demand. HS2's Leeds leg would have meant an extra train per hour on that route, and an extra three coaches on each train. More supply equals lower prices. But they cut that.

It's not all rosy overseas, DB's long-distance services are currently as unreliable as Avanti. The fact though that the Swiss and the Austrians are building Alpine base tunnels for less than we're upgrading our infrastructure shows what happens when you've got an incompetent government in charge of procurement.

If you factored in the true cost of cars and driving, the economics would stack up a lot different. Environmental degradation, pollution and such like. Instead that cost is in a different set of accounts, and a lot of the cost has been offloaded to future generations to pay for.

The idea public transport and trains can never be economical and cheap is untrue. It's central premise, it's key feature, is efficiency transporting lots of people in bulk. It requires designing our built environment differently. Its currently optimised for car use, that's what makes it difficult if you focus only on transport. Beeching report was a step in that transition. The removal of those lines, instead of investment and improvements, crested large areas dependent on cars
And that entrenched car dependency, developments following that entrenched it further. Changes in transport and other areas of life are heavily intertwined with one another

Yep, all of those bus companies put in ambitious franchise bids on the basis that they'd be able to make loads of savings through efficiencies found that the business-led BR of the late eighties/early nineties was now a very lean operation.

I've stopped going into London because it's so expensive. Used to go all the time for meals, theatre etc. Stay local now.

'Public transport' we need to remember is mostly a for profit business. The days of public transport being a public service run for the benefit of the public are long gone. There was a village near us had its bus service reduced to one bus into the nearby town on Tuesday morning and a bus on Thursday Afternoon. Just the one bus, no return service on that day. After a while it stopped as it wasn't being used.

Sadly it's the service we seem to want. We want better train services, they need to close the line in order to fix it, can't have that. They need to fix the road, but what about closures. Don't know about around you but here they seem to have outsourced the repairs to the lowest bidders, pot holes get filled in one day and are back a couple of days later because it's done on the cheap, not the workers fault it's what they're getting paid to do.

YANBU. DS has just moved cities for his first proper job after graduation. It's "supposed to be" a good city for public transport. What a joke! Despite his flat being on a bus route, the buses don't run to the timetable - it's supposed to be every 15 mins, but they come when they want, sometimes he'd been stood there 30/45 minutes, then 3 literally come in convoy!

Both his city and ours have "big" main line railway stations, so we thought it'd be easy for him to come home for weekends etc. We're only 70 miles apart, but for some weird reason, the trains take 2.5 hours because they stop everywhere, and if that's not bad enough, the last train home on a Friday is a stupidly early 6:45. They only run every two hours and the earlier one is 4:45 which is before he finishes work! He'd been there six weeks as has managed to come home only once. 5 times out of the 6, the "last train" has been cancelled, apparently due to drivers working to rule and refusing overtime!

He's just bought a car as he can't do with the stress of not knowing if or when his bus will arrive in the morning, and can't do with the wasted time on a Friday hanging around at the station only to see the screen change to "cancelled".

This is the reality of the ultra crap public transport in the North of England. And no, HS2 wouldn't have improved any of it for East<>West commuters between the Northern cities.

It's not just lack of money, it's the total absence of any integrated transport system, train/bus operating companies that don't give a toss, staff who are incompetent and havn't a clue (i.e. train customer service advisers don't know as much as Joe Public looking at real time trains website!), all added to traffic hating local councils who screw up the roads, because they hate drivers, but by doing so, screw up buses who inevitably get caught up in the road chaos!

the "last train" has been cancelled, apparently due to drivers working to rule and refusing overtime!

The train companies should be adequately staffed that they don't rely on staff doing overtime. To many organisations rely on staff doing overtime to hide under staffing.

Transport in UK is overpriced and unreliable, but HS2 was not the answer. Shockingly ill-conceived route, environmentally devastating, few stops, out of town stations and hugely over-engineered for our small country.

www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/25/britain-paying-eight-times-more-eu-road-rail-projects/

This is an interesting read. Too much red tape, too much discussion, too much consultation, nothing off the shelf, everything bespoke, bridges and tunnels to conserve nature, lots of deference for archaeology, and newts. Some of those are laudable, others just frustrating. When it comes down to it, all countries use pretty much the same private engineering companies to do the work, they all go out to European tender, it just depends on what each wants, and the processes they go through to get there.

The main failure with Beeching was that it was based on an assumption that local bus services would be improved when a station or line was closed, to transport people to the next nearest station (for longer distance travel) or the nearby towns (for local travel). That never happened, leaving a vacuum of poor/non existent local transport, which meant people bought cars instead, and the rest is history.

We also have to remember that lines and stations had been closing for decades before Beeching, due to ever reducing numbers of passengers and massive decline in freight carriage. Pretty sure I saw some statistics that more lines/stations were closed before Beeching than his report caused to close.

The bigger catastrophe is that many of the lines that were closed were ripped up with indecent haste for no obvious reason, rather than being moth-balled in case of a need to re-open. Some lines literally saw the last train one day, and the workmen ripping up the line the next day. A cynic would say that the government of the day didn't want there to be a chance of a reversal of their closure policies!

It's all a massive shame. The UK had the best railway network in the World, yet the politicians were blinded by road transport and wrecked it. Even the bits we managed to keep are unreliable and grossly expensive.

It's well worth reading the book about the history of British Rail by Christmas Wolmar. It is very interesting.

It's also true that lots of railway lines closed way before Beeching.

But the mentality of the government always seems to have been the same - railways are too expensive and we would prefer everyone to drive. Although it was also amazing that we continued to build steam engines because we had plenty of coal, which is why we are so behind on electrification now. It was also interesting that despite the nationalisation of British Rail after WW2 the Big Four Companies that had existed before wanted to keep their fiefdoms and it was very inefficient. But by the time of privatisation, BR was actually working really well and it was a bit of a fallacy that it wasn't.

This thread has just answered a question I had though (and the answer was obvious in hindsight). You go on a British motorway, they are usually 4 lanes and fairly or very busy. You go on the motorway between Berlin and Dresden - it has two lanes and is largely empty (until we got to Dresden and it was a lorry park). Of course, the reason is the very good public transport (even though it's less reliable that it was). We got a Flixbus between Berlin and Dresden which was great and then trains for the rest of our trip (which weren't more than 5 minutes late).

As for joined up thinking, I sometimes collect my husband from the local railway station - busy commuter train from London. The bus leaves the station about a minute before it is due to arrive, so people can't get on it.

That was Italy.

There is a difference in price between high speed and regular trains in Italy but they're still loads cheaper than the UK, both of them. Even getting a ticket on the hoof. The people the contestants spoke to were Italian so weren't using the UK fare prices as a point of reference - if they had been, they'd have agreed with the contestants' remarks that travel in Italy is incredibly cheap compared to the UK.

High speed rail has completely changed how people get around between the Italian cities - it makes no sense to fly when you can get from Rome to Venice in a few hours for thirty euros, especially when unlike airports it means city centre to city centre - and you get a coffee and snack/sandwich thrown in with your ticket price.

Travelling by train in the UK is expensive and depressing, by comparison.

YANBU. Someone on the news said we have neither the quality of the US road network, nor the quality of the European public transport systems, we’re rather stuck somewhere in the middle. So true. Must add that I don’t effing want a US style anything, lack of food regulation, massive inequality, inaccessible healthcare, sadly it seems our politicians want these things for us.

Unless you live in SE public transport is crap. Britain will slip further and further behind as we still have Stephenson’s Rocket here

@smooththecat yes I'd agree with that. Realistically you have to have a car to get about in the UK (London aside) but the roads are in very poor condition and not set up to cope with the amount of traffic on them - even roads that are heavily used are crappy winding single carriage affairs that half the time aren't lit.

Plus if you go anywhere near a city you won't be able to drive in it, or half the streets are restricted driving/parking ... but getting in and out of it the public transport is crap and expensive, so you have to drive. It's the worst of all worlds, really.

Currently trying to organise a short trip to London to see friends. Admittedly we live in Scotland so it was never going to be cheap, but even with a couple of months notice to book the cheaper tickets it's going to cost us £several hundred to catch the train. On top of that there's the worrying possibility of our train home being cancelled at Crewe and being sent the rest of the trip home in taxis driven by people falling asleep at the wheel, if anyone happened to see that recent saga on Twitter. It would be cheaper to drive but I'd be so tired it would ruin the weekend. So it's looking like flying is the only feasible option but even that involves a massive faff and probably another £20 each getting across London by train.

Again, it's a long way but we don't live in the Outer Hebrides and London is the capital city - it should really not be that hard to reach! It would genuinely be cheaper and easier for us to get a flight to somewhere functional like Copenhagen and meet our friends there.

I have a five year old. After studying the methods of Thomas and his friends, and putting his wooden railway into operation throughout the downstairs, DS is now a much better transport planner than anyone in government. And he does it without causing any confusion or delay 🤪

@Emmalin yes, agree. I’m out of London in a smaller English city and the transport situation is absolutely dire here. I’m sure other similar sized UK towns and cities are the same. Every single day there is some form of event on the motorway system around here and everything grinds to a halt. Often it’s an accident, and it’s just not safe at all because the roads are so overcrowded. Building roads is just not an answer to this as the areas are built up and there are homes and historic buildings. The fact that Rishi Sunak jets everywhere when our country is relatively small kind of says it all really.

So I went to Sheffield last week, from Bucks into London, tube then to Sheffield and back £61!

I had a table to myself, nice sandwich little bottle of Prosecco, WIFi working!

So much nicer than driving up the M1!

The journey back the next day wasn't as pleasant, train before mine cancelled so packed, Wi-Fi not working!

But I thought that was pretty good value!

I live in Sheffield.

Ivr never found a train ticket to London for £61

This is the reality of the ultra crap public transport in the North of England. And no, HS2 wouldn't have improved any of it for East<>West commuters between the Northern cities.

It would have done. Stockport-Piccadilly is heavily congested and the services towards Sheffield have to pass through this. HS2 would have taken several flows away from this corridor. It would also have provided the starting point for NPR which would have massively improved Liverpool-Manchester services.

Just thinking about a relatively short journey of 80 miles as the crow flies to cross from Cheshire to Yorkshire. You have to take three trains. Three SLOW trains. It's crazy! The mountains of the pennines aren't even very big! Japan copes really well with such obstacles. Going by road takes 100 miles but is less than £20 in petrol.
I'm not arguing for higher petrol prices. I can barely afford it as it is. But how can any of us leave the car at home when the alternative is so awful.

Three miles to town is £4 return on the bus, and there are four in my family.

Someone mentioned £61 to go to London from Yorkshire. There are a lot of people for whom £61 is the best part of a day's wage.

It’s not just transport. This country practically looks like a third world developing nation.

Roads which haven’t been repaired and resurfaced for years.

Roadside hedgerows and general greenery around road infrastructure looking like an advert for weedol. The government have conned people into believing that it’s good for wildlife when in reality they don’t want maintain these areas.

Litter everywhere.

City centres which look like downtown shitsville.

The general level of disrepair, coupled with lower standard of living is fast turning this country into a major shithole.