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.

Manchester is certainly not "fine", especially the utterly crap train network.

Fair enough, I'm probably out of date.

Mind you, I bet there's some people in Shropshire who think that Manchester public transport is as amazing as TfL looks to you.

To get to work I can drive 3.5 miles
Or I can get a bus into town, back out of town and then walk. Total 2.5hrs

I live in mid Sussex and travel around a lot and find the trains and buses very good all through Sussex really (apart from a patch in East Sussex that needs improvement) cost wise I spend similar a year to owning a car with all those associated costs and much prefer sitting with a coffee and reading than driving and parking. Think I'm lucky where I am though although on my street people never walk to the shop or station which is about a 15 minute walk. Timing is an issue I get but I count the walking as part of my commute and is exercise and I don't get out of breath on the stairs to my office which a lot of the people who drive in do so that's a positive!

@Allfur not everyone has safe bike routes - my route to work is a 60 mph 1 in 4 hill with bends up then down- only 6 miles but there's been deaths on that road (bike and motorcycle) since I moved here 4 years ago, no way would it be safe to use an e bike too slow

You're not.

But even if you were, many places don't have pavements.

The trains are OK when they’re running but the buses really aren’t, unless you happen to live in one town centre and want to go to another town centre. I can’t even reliably get the bus to the station!

And yet we spend billions on roads for cars, which kill people (directly and via air pollution and inactivity), and are extremely inefficient.

Spending a tiny proportion of that cost on bike infrastructure would be a massive improvement on now.

The government (ie taxpayers) spend far more on public transport than they do on the roads. Yet, it's motorists who pay in far more in taxes than public transport users. The fact is that motorists are subsidising public transport to an alarming extent.

First of all, I was talking about bikes, not public transport. The amount spent on bike infrastructure is tiny.

Secondly, you are wrong. The government spends far more on car infrastructure (11 billion) than public transport (4 billion). That's without taking into account the health costs that cars cause.

For comparison, the UK spends sbout 2 pounds per person per year on cycling infrastructure in the uk

"Roads" are also used by bikes and buses! Not to mention lorries.

The figures I was looking at state £25bn on railways, £4.3 billion on local public transport, £5.6b on national roads and £5.5b on local roads.

Our local small by pass costs around £25m and has a brilliant integrated cycle path system (separated from the road with kerb stones etc and with bridges built to get from one side to the other), trouble is you rarely see a bike on it.

Yep.

I've been lucky enough to be able to walk to work or work from home for the last 20 years, but got a new job in feb that needs me in the office but if too far to walk.

Thought rather than get a second car I'd cycle some days and bus the others when the weathers minging. The buses are atrocious, its probably one of the flagship bus routes in the city and the percentage of time it just doesn't show up is ridiculous. Used the money for bus travel on a decent set of waterproof gear for me and my laptop and now I cycle every day. Not looking forward to the winter though!

So hardly an "alarming extent", especially when you think about how much of local road area is used for parking private cars.

If people aren't using the "brilliant integrated system", then it's not brilliant. These are usually built by people that don't regularly ride bikes, and are usually unusable.

Public transport spending 3 times more than roads - I'd say that's an alarming extent, especially when people wrongly claimed we spend more on roads than public transport.

Perhaps they aren't using the cycle infrastructure because they simply don't want to, or in the case of our by pass, it doesn't actually go from anywhere useful to anywhere useful, and probably never will. Just thrown a shed load of money to make a cycle path to tick boxes rather than there being an actual need for it in that location! Where a cycle path would actually be useful in our town would be ruinously expensive and involve demolition of various buildings as there's simply no space for a cycle track unless the road itself is closed as it's already narrow and doesn't even have pavements!

You can't include the biggest cost - railways - unless you break it down. What does that include? Freight trains?

Of course a bike path that doesn't go anywhere useful isn't used. I mean, what is even the point?

In many places, if you converyed some on street parking (storing private property on public land) you'd have plenty of room for a bike path, at very little extra cost.

The same can be said for roads - after all they're also used by lorries, vans, emergency vehicles, building supplies, even vans delivering bikes and workers/materials to build cycle paths! You really can't start splitting out such costs because you basically can't have one without the other. Even with the railways, staff get to/from their depots by taxi, maintenance crews take themselves and equipment by road to access points, trains themselves are often transported by road.

Yes, but it still does not support your original point.

Actually I think it does. Because the spending on public transport is ONLY on public transport. The spending on roads covers far more uses, including public transport.

To all those who think we have it easy in London:

in 2015-16 Southern cancelled trains from Clapham Junction to Kensington Olympia. So all the passengers on that line who travelled that way had to use the Ginger/Overground line which was packed as it had double the amount of passengers.

I was lucky as I spoke to my boss and asked if I could start 30 mins later and finish 30 mins later and he agreed, he did the journey the other way round so knew how bad it was. I was lucky, some people were fired because they couldn't make their journeys.

I've been at Clapham Junction where there's been flooding in the passageways/walkways between platforms and have had to get the bus from there to Hammersmith where I worked.

That's not counting the myriad number of times I've been late/delayed due to cancelled trains, weather conditions. There was one place I worked in Baker Street and we had to change at London Bridge for the tube and the queues at the ticket barriers were awful, no matter what time you arrived, if it was good it was fine but at least once or twice a week, forget it. Our boss (head of the dept) used to be unsympathetic, she travelled in from Peterborough. When there were at least 5-6 of us coming in late twice a week due to delays and ticket barriers, she realised we weren't lying and there wasn't much we/she could do about it!

An express bus (now called Superloop) which ran from West Croydon to Russell Square, fast from West Norwood to Waterloo - you'd get idiots who'd jump on the bus and try to get off on the fast service, which would delay the bus. And then don't get me started on speed limits and bus lanes with cyclists in them.

Where I worked before we had branch offices in both Birmingham and Manchester, everyone drove or cycled into these offices from home as the trains were so appalling in both cities.

But the amount you quoted for rail is not spent on public transport.

But public transport cost the uk goverment 4.3 billion in 22 - 23. That is a long way from 26 billion. As far as I can see, that figure doesn't account for the income it generates.

Also, the vast majority of road use is private cars.