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

[Outandabout43]

Have drove for the last 15 years so not really used public transport, however since moving area and now in walking distance to a train station have started to use this more.

It's actually cheaper to use the train to visit family if it's just myself and DD then it is to drive, and also takes an equal amount if time. Also cheaper to use the train into city centre then to pay for parking.

However, everytime I use the train, the train is either cancelled or delayed meaning we miss the connecting train and have to sit and then wait over an hour which is not fun with a 3 year old. Also nearest bus stop into the city is a 40 minute walk away.

Now I actually prefer public transport to driving, but not so much when an hours journey ends up taking 3.

We are being encouraged to use public transport more, but is there any wonder people don't.

I live in London, and I have to say , that public transport is a million times better than where I grew up , there are still issue . Buses often don’t go where you need them and can also be unreliable. I also live in a very pro cycling borough, and there have been a lot of road closures.

The trains where I am are a joke, there is multiple excuses daily as to why the train is cancelled or delayed. Just this week there have been several electrical faults, driver not available, more trains than normal requiring maintenance. Sadly at least 3 people have been hit by a train this month alone and yesterday trespass on the line caused delays.

My parents retired to London and now they are in their 80s have retained independence due to the great buses and tubes (both stopped driving due to health and confidence). They simply would not have had that in their rural home town. They have adjusted brilliantly to city life (zone 3) and love it.

Our small city has made all bus journeys £2 and it’s worked really well. Now far cheaper than parking if just 1-2 of us. Our trains are good too though not cheap but then sitting in traffic jams is my idea of hell

When I moved to my current city 7 years ago, I'd get the train to and from work (25minutes to a different city. Work and home a ten minute walk at each end). Due to the increasingly dire service (esp later at night when I finish work), I've started driving more and more. I hate this as it's so bad for the environment but the infrastructure has just fallen apart.

The service vs what you pay for is non existent.

I had to try to get the bus a few times when I was having the car fixed. I say try because more often than not it was cancelled or late and I was late to work. I can’t risk that on a daily basis.

Trains are worse. Often late so missed connection. Or cancelled/on strike.

Transpenine in particular. LNER is better but as I have connections via smaller local services I’m often in danger of missing that too.

Not to mention times and frequency- the local train for my area to the nearby cities is one per hour. One. Which is often late or cancelled.

I now try to avoid public transport on principle - I refuse to be stung for a shite service.

The last time I was delayed by an hour on a train with no working toilet, then missed the connection due to the delay so had to wait another hour on a freezing platform I was offered something like 40% of my ticket which was about £8. Not good enough.

Ds travelled home from Uni yesterday evening on the train. It cost £100 for the ticket and he phoned us part way through the journey because when he had to change trains, it was cancelled. No warning just cancelled. The nearest he could get to home was a city miles from us and dh drove off late to collect him. I don’t know if they’d laid on a bus but if they had he’d have been hours on it late at night.

Ds is a strapping young man and was okay and had his dad to meet him, but it’s surely a safety issue for more vulnerable passengers.

With two dc at university we’ve rarely had smooth train journeys for either of them. It’s expensive, unreliable and frustrating. I’d never trust a train for an appointment or an onward connection. It just gets so you expect it to be a disrupted awful trip

DH and I both commute to work by bus and train, and DD will commute to college in September.

It’s fine when it works. Good even. The bus lanes mean it’s much quicker from the edge of the city to the city centre.
Buses run every half hour. There’s an app that tells you when your bus is due, so theoretically you can plan when to leave the office.
It only costs £2 each way compared to at least £10 to park.

But often the tracker isn’t working, so you just have to turn up and hope the bus is coming.
It’s usually fairly on time in the mornings, within about 3 minutes, and about 10 minutes late in the evenings. Sometimes it’s a minute or two early and just whizzes past the stop. Sometimes it’s just really late.

Occasionally the bus just gets cancelled. Maybe once or twice a month on average. Sometimes it says so on the app, other times you’re just waiting and waiting. If it’s in the morning, I can run to the station, get the (three times more expensive) train, and still arrive on time if I walk briskly.

At the work end, you can either wait another half hour for the next bus - sometimes it’s so full with the previous one being cancelled it doesn’t even stop to let more people on.
Or you can get the train again.

DH usually gets the train as marginally more reliable. If it gets cancelled, he resorts to the bus.

Really the only reasons we can make it work is we are fortunate to have the option of flexible start and finish times, and we can get both trains AND buses. If it was just one or the other, it wouldn’t be reliable enough. If we had rigid start and finish times, we’d have to always get an earlier bus or train to make sure we got there on time, and we’d spend a lot more time stamping at bus stops having just missed one.

When I visit London, I am always struck by how (relatively) amazing their public transport is. Coming with a mindset of 'if the next bus/train is cancelled I will have to wait an hour for the one after' and having them rolling up every few minutes is mind-blowing.

It's rubbish where I am. E.g. a town DH and I like to go to that's 20 miles away. By car, 40 minutes each way - in our small 78 mpg car, fuel costs less than a fiver, parking about £3 when we get there.

By train, journey time 1 hour 35 mins each way, including 1 change, fare £12.50 each, and that is the off-peak fare assuming we would normally go at the weekend. In the week, we would have to pay peak fare if travelling before 9:30 or returning after 4pm, which would be £14:40 each

ETA: there is also a 20 minutes each way, not flat walk to the railway station, adding another 40 mins to the overall time to get there by train - or, driving and parking for the whole day would add £6 to the cost.

Train reliability for the operator is only 61% meaning the change isn't guaranteed.

Great for them, but not everyone has the option to live in London.

Public transport needs to be much better outside the M25 than it currently is.

Yes, YANBU. My son got his first proper job last Summer after graduating, which was in a different city. It was a city he actually chose as his preference because it's relatively easy to travel between home/work city for occasional weekend visits etc - just 2 hours and one change. When we looked for flats, we were looking around bus routes so he could get in/out of town easily for work and also for socialising.

Out of the 10 weekends he's tried to get home by train on the Friday evening, he hasn't made it 7 times, and had to go back to his flat after a wasted/abandoned journey. So many cancelled trains on Friday nights "due to staff shortages" or a broken down train, or tree on the line, etc. The "last" train home from the intermediate station is a ridiculously early 7:20!! It's either cancelled, or the train from his work city is late/cancelled meaning he got there after 7:20. He started having to have the afternoon off work and leave mid afternoon to increase his chances of the trains actually working.

Buses are also useless. At least twice a week the scheduled 815 doesn't appear and he ends up late for work because the next is 845 and takes longer than 15 minutes. The earlier one is 7_15 so gets him to work far too early.

He';s bought a car!

The buses between towns in my part of the SE are a bit like that.

I could get a bus from the main road, 15 minutes walk from my house, all the way to the end of the road where my SIL was living. I thought this would be brilliant: green, free (I'm a pensioner) and I could have a drink!

Then I looked up the timetable and found it took over 2 hours. It took 40 minutes max by car, so I carried on driving and not drinking.

Exactly why I don't use it. Waiting around for ages when they've took a metro off again or for buses that don't turn up. Taking the car means I get to work on time. It's just the way it is.

I currently have no choice for work and have to take public transport (north west England) but dear God it's stressful and unreliable and over half the bus drivers appear to think they're on Top Gun or something, judging by their VTOL attempts at takeoff from every stop. I have a disabled partner and it's even more noticeable if we try to go anywhere together. The morning commuter buses are all right ish but the teatime ones are almost always cancelled or delayed and I swear the road planners here were non driver eighteen year olds on crack with a box of Lego given the number of bottlenecks and lack of filter arrows on lights.

And don't even get me started on Avanti, Northern and Transpennine trains in particular. For our first few months here I thought they were a mirage until I managed to book one that wasn't cancelled. Beautifully clean and about eight passengers on the entire bloody train.

We moved back here a couple of years ago and the transport is so bad it's a major reason for buyers remorse.

Yes-I would use the bus to get to work if I could. Parking is a nightmare and we only have one car so it seems daft for me to take if it I can get the bus. BUT, whenever I do, the bus is full, massively late or cancelled altogether. It is totally inconvenient.

Yep. I live less than 5 miles from my place of work, they're always trying to decrease the number of people driving in by increasing parking charges and refusing permits for those who live in a certain radius. For me it would be one bus taking an hour, as it goes all round the houses, or changing which has take 40 minutes at best, over an hour at worst. It's under 20 minutes early morning/school holidays to drive, under 30 other times. I suck up the parking charges twice a week because my office days are long enough without having to factor in 2 hours of traveling to somewhere so close to my house.

I must be lucky, I'm between three different bus routes with busses from 5.30 am to 11pm or midnight for one bus.

Yes buses are very hit and miss the more popular routes are not too bad becsuse.they are quite regular ,but the less popular ones can be appalling ,it can literally take hours ti travel a relatively short distance.

I live semi rurally outside Norwich - the council seem determined to make it hard for people to drive into the city - closing roads / putting up car park costs significantly - and tell people to use public transport.

Except buses only go through our village once an hour (and stop very early evening) which I can’t make work with school runs and work and the park and ride works out more expensive and less convenient than just driving in. Luckily our work recognise that and pay the parking in city costs.

Councils need to make public transport reliable, frequent and cheap if they actually want customers.

I've paid a jaw-dropping amount for return tickets by train for a UK holiday later this year and not only am I getting alerts saying some of the legs may be cancelled due to strike action but also if I go by a different route "these trains are likely to be extremely busy". Put some extra carriages on then, surely, if you already know it will be packed?!

Went for a short break with my daughter earlier this year to nearest city and had return tickets by train. Discovered we would have no return train as every single one on the day we planned to return had been cancelled due to strike action. Had to return on National Express which made DD extremely travel sick (neither of us do well with road travel) and the coach was an hour late too.

Added to that our local buses are frequently late or cancelled, and public transport is a complete farce.

We're in rural Cumbria.

We have one bus a day to the nearest "big town" - doesn't leave until 9.45am and has to be back by 2pm or so to be available for the school run, so it's completely useless for anyone who works. It also doesn't run on weekends or bank holidays.

The trains are (on paper) decent but at least two trains a day get cancelled, and a huge part of the line was shut for a month recently due to a derailment. The replacement buses took twice as long and often never showed up anyway.

DH and I both drive everywhere and neither of us could do our jobs without our cars.

I also remember looking at train costs when I worked in the Lakes (we're about 40 minutes drive away). I started work at 10am and finished at 6pm.

There was no way of getting to work by train. At all. The earliest train was at 6am and would get me to work nearly five hours later. To get home the same day, I'd need to leave work at 2pm, and even then I wouldn't get home until gone 7pm 😂and it would have cost me around £50 a day in fares.

Driving cost me £40 a week in fuel, give or take. Parking was free at work.

Without a proper coherent public transport infrastructure, that’s reliable and affordable, people are always going to opt for independent travel, to ensure they can get to their destination in a timely manner.

Buses and trains, aside from being unreliable , are often dirty and unpleasant environments, so, as much as anyone would want to support caring for the environment, many things need to change before using public transport outweighs using independent transport.

I used to commute 28 mi by bus/train and it took 3 hours each way. Local buses here are reasonably priced but the experience is grim (sat behind someone sinking a succession of beers and in front of a vaper yesterday, regularly have to dodge abandoned half-eaten takeaways) and routes are patchy. The price of train tickets is just mad and you can't rely on them to turn up/get you to your destination - I can be in SW France quicker, for a tenth of the cost and more reliably than I can be in my London office. I'd like to cycle more but the infrastructure is appalling (the few metres of cycle lane that exist flood, are full of broken glass/spent hubcaps etc and/or have cars/skips parked in them) and (as every cyclist-bashing thread on MN demonstrates) motorists are on the whole absolute tools.

I'm disabled and flights are the only public transport I take. I find stations are really inaccessible and the unreliability of trains and buses makes life impossible. I just can't risk a train being cancelled or not having a seat.