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 must say I use it every day all day and it's 95% reliable. The odd cancelled train/bus.

My biggest complaint is lack of routes. I have to travel an hr into a city and an hr out in another direction to get somewhere that would be so much easier if there was a direct route across. They are major towns in travelling from and to, but no connections at all, have to go into the city. Both bus and train need more routes to get people using them more. More buses using the motorway too.

I just don't think those running the railways (Dept of Transport) actually think like that. It seems to take years to get timetables or services changed. There's just no "business sense" in that it's common sense for someone business minded to run more/longer trains on potentially busy days, but with a Government run system, the bureaucrats just aren't interested. It's always the same whether it's Ascot races, Wembley football matches, Pop festivals - barely any change to the scheduled timetables nor train allocations.

Privatisation should have solved that, but even the privatised firms where hamstrung by the Dept of Transport in terms of what trains they could operate, what routes they could use, what stations they could stop at, what fares they could charge, etc. It didn't have the most important aspect of successful private business which is flexibility and entreprennieurial aspects.

That's a typical "wheel spoke" scenario, very common. Where you can readily get routes from the outskirts into the centre but can't go "around" the wheel, so you have to do two journeys, one in, and one out because it's impossible to go around the wheel.

My son suffers that in his city of York. Best part of an hour to go into York and then out again just to go a few miles around the ring road to get from his flat to the retail park/superstore. That's a journey that now takes him less than five minutes since he bought his car!

Councils need to realise that not everyone wants to go "into" the town centre. Most people shop in the out of town retail parks, most workers work in out of town industrial sites etc., yet they're not being properly catered for.

So true I would love to use public transport. I would love to sit and read instead of battling traffic. But the services just aren't there.

In a similar vein, I would love to ride my bike to work. However, the bike lanes we build are unusable, and traffic is terrifying. So I use a car.

When I moved here the bus went into each village on way to the town. Now the bus sticks to the main road except for school pick up and drop off times. It's nearly 2 miles to the main road from the centre of the village where all the people live. Not much help to the elderly who are mostly likely to use it or those with small children. Then they wonder why hardly anyone uses it.

Well, Thatcher deregulated public transport everywhere except London.
My dh was telling me when the local council was in charge you got off the metro and the bus you needed would be there waiting for you. Now? Forget it, the bus will be far in the distance if it ever turned up at all!

We don't have the infrastructure to cope with more frequent trains. That was the original idea when they introduced Voyagers to replace HSTs on Cross Country - didn't work. They tried it for a short time and it led to multiple delays and cancellations.

For your DD - you could try booking assistance. If she has a disabled person's railcard, she will get a discount on First Class as well as standard class and First Class gives better chances of a seat.

It's rubbish, though, and in your shoes I would consider going by coach instead.

ETA - disabled railcard also gives discount to 1 x person accompanying disabled traveller.

Round here (East Sussex) the buses are absolutely terrible, but the trains not so bad. Yes cancellations and delays do happen but I'd say 80% of the time they're fine. I always get trains that arrive 20+ minutes before my shift is due to start just to be on the safe side.

I'm in zone 4 London, I have to take a shuttle to connect to the mainline into London. Used to be 4 an hour with connections hat worked, now it's 2. The mainline trains are usually delayed, and on the way out of London they miss the connection with the shuttle they've been timetables with 3-4 minutes to change. Complete PITA.

I use the DLR and no complaints on that.

As soon as you move away from London the provision is awful.

No, we need HS2. The West Coast Main Line (Euston to Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool/Glasgow) is the busiest mixed-traffic railway in Europe. It's creaking at the seams and desperately needs relieving.

Regional transport should be funded in addition to HS2, not instead of.

W

DD college is 2.5 miles away. She will often walk but during bad weather / exam days I've been taking her - it takes ten minutes to drive. A bus would take a 5 minute walk then 55 minutes on the bus plus a 9 minute walk and is £4 each way.

Well, going on how totally rammed the buses are on the routes local to me,I don't think many people are bothered about them being unreliable. The bus that serves the road I live in is meant to be every 8 - 10 minutes at peak times,but it's a common occurrence for there to be waits of 25 minutes between buses.

It really seems that the will to get cars off the road is faltering badly at a national level, although some local councils are keeping at it. I've not noticed any mention of transport policy in the run up to the election. Public transport is now so broken that it may well be unfixable.

I take the bus home from work but daren't get the bus in as it's so unreliable I could not guarantee arrival on time. DH gives me a lift in.

I stopped using the bus because I couldn’t stand the people. Obviously the majority were fine, but over the years I was groped, sworn at, had men press themselves against me, and often got jammed next to people who stank. The lack of personal space in this country is awful. I’d rather sit in traffic but have my own car, just as I’d rather have a tiny private garden than a giant communal one.

Ultimately the people running the railways now are HM Treasury. If you told them that you could invest £1 for a guaranteed return of £1.20 they'd just say that they'd rather that you didn't spend the £1.

I'm getting the bus more now all buses no matter how long the journey is is £2.
Making use of that and hoping it stays!
Trains on the other hand are an utter joke.
They're always on strike/cancelled and cost an absolute fortune.

@PracticallyYesterday you're right, I should book assistance. Hopefully I still have time to do that but also we don't always travel on the specific train we had intended to (not my fault she is so anxious she ends up chronically late or wanting to leave early). As for coaches as I said previously, she is very Very travel sick.

For me it's cost. Time is similar
Train £145
Flight £68 + £16 local train to airport
Driving £100

They've changed the zones by us, it would now be £10 return for DS and I to go to our nearest town by bus. A 15 minute journey that's walkable in 30 mins if I'm on my own, probably more like 45 with DS but DS can't always manage the walk.

When we found out the new cost a couple of weekends ago DH just drove us and joined us for lunch.

Train would be nearly half the cost but there's no direct route so we'd have to catch two trains with a 20 minute wait between then so whole journey would end up taking closer to an hour probably - if they were running on time.

I'm lucky that I live in outer London so still benefit from TFL. My children had free travel until 18.
Our trains and buses are quite reliable, affordable and run often (trains into central London every 20 mins) My elderly parents have free passes after 9.30 for train, buses and tubes.
From where we live, we can get to a lot of towns by bus easily, running 10-20 mins until after midnight.
We can get back from central London after midnight in 30 mins.
Then we have night buses.
I can travel on and off buses for 2 hrs for £3.10, Every route on TFL.
Parking in central London is so expensive so we never drive in.

My elderly mum was unfortunately in St Thomas' (Waterloo) for three months at the beginning of the year and it was interesting to travel by TFL with my 82yr old dad by train three-six times pw to visit her as he couldn't cope driving into central London, and neither could I.
He hadn't used public transport for 50 years.
Trains were mostly on time, off peak and every 25mins. He saw places on route that he knew before they'd moved out to Z5 and hadn't seen for decades. He was rather upset how the areas had changed (not the trains).
He actually enjoyed using his contactless card through the train barriers and tubes, learning how things work now. I was ill one week and couldn't travel to see my mum and my dad did it alone, bless him!

Where we live (fairly rural) public transport just isn't adequate. There are regular buses but to get to most places would mean changing bus at the nearest big town, there is only one bus that goes directly to the supermarket. Going to work on the bus would mean 2 buses, going miles out of my way and a journey taking over twice as long, plus time to walk from bus stop to work plus morning buses being unreliable and sometimes being too full to stop.
Also expensive, for me and 2 DDs it is more expensive to get the bus to town than drive and pay for parking.
Then there's all the places we literally can't get public transport to because they're not on a bus or train route.
People won't use it unless it's reliable, convenient and cheap!

But there were issues with local authority transport. Mainly that they didn't run into other LA areas. In our town, if we wanted to go to the next town, we got a bus which terminated at the edge of our town and had to walk quarter of a mile across the boundary to get a bus belonging to the next town which also terminated at their boundary! Yes, there were "county" buses which went across town boundaries but they were basically town centre to town centre stops with very few stops in between. When they were deregulated, we got a much better service that actually went from the suburbs in one town through to the next town so was far more useful.

Yes, we needed a new route North, but we didn't the ruinously expensive and disruptive all singing, all dancing HS2. We could have used some of the old Central route and made it a "normal" speed line with curves etc. We didn't need a straight line brand new route that was only needed for the highest speed trains. A lower spec line, lower speed, maybe only for freight (meaning even lower speed) would have cost a fraction of HS2. As it is, because it was started and now won't be finished, the huge problem of Crewe isn't being addressed and we're stuck with a massively compromised barely fit for purpose link between the Northern end of the shortened HS2 and the original WCML.