To think our public transport system needs a complete overhaul?

[creatorofthecoastguard]

I’m currently on holiday in southern Europe, and on an intercity train.

So far I’ve encountered trams that are a flat rate of €1.70 a journey, buses that are €1.50 a journey, trains that are actually affordable (£9 for a 45 minute journey across the border!), it’s all been amazing. Every train has been clean, spacious, yes busy in places but only when it’s to be expected (going to popular destinations). The intercity train I’m on now isn’t oversold, isn’t rammed full of people, there’s enough luggage space.

It’s really eye opening to how poor our public transport actually is. Expensive, poorly maintained, and poor conditions.

AIBU to think it needs an overhaul, and soon? I know it wouldn’t be cheap, and that a lot of our issues stem from post-WW2 when we didn’t upgrade our risks compared to most of Europe, but it needs doing!

It’s just the same as any other form of transport:

-use car / bicycle / walking as (part of) a leisure activity = spend money on coffee & other refreshments

-use car / bicycle / feet to travel to shops = spend money buying stuff

If we want transport to work better, then the bicycle needs to be recognised as a practical & convenient form of transport for short journeys (1-5 miles). It’s just not used as much as it ought to be due to a lack of safe routes.

I can’t put a figure on how much I spend when shopping by bicycle - it could be anything from a few pounds (loaf of bread type shopping) to much more (clothes or proper grocery shopping). It’s a just a convenient & pleasant way for me to travel to go shopping.

I buy loads

Of course cyclists buy things, what a strange thing to say. I've done my shopping by bike for years, even taking a trailer when I want a 25kg sack of spuds (I could carry two sacks in it, but I wouldn't manage to use 50kg of spuds before they went manky).

I gather that there was a big push to recruit cheaper, unskilled labour on the London Underground in the early 1980s. Then the Kings Cross fire happened, the Underground workers didn't have the training to deal with it, and a lot of people died. So they started paying and training their staff better again.

I can fly to Ireland from Stansted if I wanted for £40 return in November. I went to book return journey Norwich to London later that month and it was £68 which is average cost.
WTAF

Assets are not the same as income tax, no.

And the point of a land value tax is to get those who have stuffed all their money into huge estates to pay their fair share. A well designed land value tax is not going to go after someone's primary residence, unless it's a Jacobean mansion with 300 acres.

We live in one of the most unequal countries for land ownership in the world.

Motoring is heavily subsidised. Cars are an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Copenhagen found that the cost of car driving to society is €0.03 per km, whereas cycling results in a profit for society of €0.42 per km. Keeping people healthy and active saves money in the long run.

I don't disagree (although profit, really? I mean I suppose those Rapha kit-outs don't come cheap 😂) but retro fitting cycling infrastructure is also incredibly expensive.

As a country we would also need to take a long hard look at our online delivery habits to get traffic off the roads (and the semi-legal motorbikes). Not all of the clogging is private cars. It costs me £12.50 every time I get the damn car out (thank you ULEZ) but that doesn't magically make cycling safe nor fill some of the weird gaps in public transport.

Admittedly I live in an area with excellent public transport which I use a lot, and it's not too expensive. Although it's hard not to conclude no-one ever intended anyone to travel from SE London to SW London without going via the centre.

Public transport outside London definitely needs an overhaul.

Nurses are unionised too. It's not the fault of the unions that costs spiralled.

Privatisation is the reason for inflation in train driver wages. BR was a monopoly employer (just as the NHS largely is), which meant that it could pay poverty wages to its staff (you couldn't feed a family on a BR wage without working a lot of overtime). Privatisation comes along, the cost of training drivers went up following the Ladbroke Grove disaster, and companies realised that it would be cheaper to poach drivers from their competitors than to train them themselves.

Unions save lives. They hold unscrupulous employers to account.

Cycle routes vary in cost depending on what you want to do - Embankment style routes will be expensive but others less so. But then roads for cars are also much more expensive yet people don’t tend to complain about those.

There are some very useful streets safe for cycling that I use that were cheap to create as they just needed bollards to stop the through traffic - they weren’t intended as cycle routes as the bollards were put in due to the dangerous driving, but they have been very effective in expanding the cycle network.

@DdraigGochis right about Copenhagen - Sustrans Scotland also did some research into cycling a number of years ago that found that enabling people to cycle is the equivalent of an 8% pay rise.

We should have the best public transport in the world. Every major city or town should have it's own underground or monorail, and there should be bullet trains between every major city and fast trains to all the smaller cities and towns.

Sometimes. But plenty of counterexamples.

After Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, the Home Office wanted to make gross misconduct grounds for automatic dismissal from the police, and give chief constables power to sack those who fail vetting. Both opposed by the Police Federation.

Unions may sometimes improve safety for the public, but that's not what they are there for and they are happy to oppose when it suits.

US seems far worse admittedly. Strong evidence that police unionisation causes higher civilian fatalities. And unions opposing self-driving cars even though they appear to be safer. Pilots union opposing post-incident drug and alcohol testing, opposing videoing of cockpits, etc. They are doing their job, which isn't public safety.

On the plus side, GWR almost always give you some of all of your fare back as they're so late 😂

Thank you! We sound like we travel in a similar way (walking to shop in Glasgow sounds great - queuing in a shopping centre highly tedious).

I agree about the venom - it’s very unpleasant and ill-informed and it needs to stop especially as there are some awful cases where cyclists are the victims of violence (eg being pushed of a bike) just because people are prejudiced against them. I have no idea of why people feel like that, as most children love cycling. Bicycles are simply a practical form of transport & people are not defined by them.

The radial routes are a real problem & a good argument for regulating public transport. They are also a good argument for bike routes to link different suburbs to fill the gaps in the bus network. They would be particularly useful for secondary age children as catchments / intakes etc mean that a lot of students travel between different suburbs.

Yes! The difference between transport in the capital and public transport where I am in South Yorkshire is light years apart and frankly, embarrassing.

I arrived into Zurich three minutes late in February, and the other passengers were looking at their watches and tutting.

The thing about Switzerland is that they put a considerable amount of investment into their infrastructure and operations. They spend around six billion francs every year on their railways. Across a population of nine million people. That's £600 in subsidies per head.

How does the UK compare? The DfT's rail budget for the last financial year was £27.6bn. £400 per head. So the Swiss spend 50% more per head, is it any wonder that it produces results?

And that's not just a flash in the pan, they started seriously investing in modernising their operation 40 years ago (back when the UK was dithering about who should pay for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link rather than getting on and building it). In the meantime, the Swiss have build up a well-organised, well-run network. We chose to privatise it, balkanising our railways into little fiefdoms with no cooperation.

I’ve just bought four return train tickets for a journey of an hour and a quarter for £43. Which I think is really reasonable. We’ve done this journey multiple times and only once had an issue.

I realise that, but at the time I needed to travel and hadn't got my Senior Citizen card, I had to suck it up

This year I've had £8 fare to Birmingham ( the dreaded sardine line, and as a family or couple have had some bargains into London

The ski resort probably provides a tourist justification for the slightly better service. The state of TER services varies a lot depending upon the region. It's got better in recent years, it used to be that SNCF would take the money from the local government, and then run services at its own convenience.

In somewhere like Nouvelle-Aquitaine, you'll find much poorer rural services.

Reagan tried that with Air Traffic Control. Despite having experienced controllers available to him in the military (you won't find many in the military who can run a railway, and those who can will be reservists who already do run the railway in their day job), the disruption was long-lasting, and American ATC still has issues today.

You reckon that you can trust some randoms who've just come from the Job Centre to run a safe railway?

I've just checked, and to travel tomorrow it's £36 one way - 40 pence per mile. I've also checked the systems and no £13.50 fare exists, the cheapest Advance tier is £18 and good luck actually finding any advances actually available for less than £30.

Think about the public health benefits, and you'll see how a km of cycling saves the taxpayer money in the long run.

We don't have a "system". We have a load of private companies to whom the Thatcher and Major governments sold off our public transport and left us this awful mess.

See also: water, electricity, gas.

@VickyEadie The companies bid for franchises don’t they? They are awarded contracts. They don’t own the rail network either. Do you know who does? Oh yes, the government. Get your facts right. You want more railways, it’s tax (no chance) or borrowing (at vast expense and adding to the £3 trillion we already owe). So hopefully no chance of that either.