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!

I just think "profit" is the wrong word there.

It would be good to get more people cycling.

Then there's the mess that bus deregulation caused.

Maybe, but we're talking one of the small ski resorts in Occitane, not somewhere rolling in cash like they have over on the Alpes...might be the student traffic that helps frequency...whatever the reason it's pretty good and hopefully it will continue.

Many train operating firms are back in government control but services are no better, prices are no cheaper. Still under union control.

They're not going to repair 30 years of fragmentation overnight.

There's no sign of any improvements nor changes at all. They still can't get Northern to run a proper Sunday service because of the strength of the unions which isn't going to change.

100%. The whole thing needs renationalising and run not for profit with heavily subsidised fares. Only then will we get cars off the road.

Anecdotally, my DS lives around 250 miles from me and when he visits, he’ll book a flight that goes via Dublin which he”ll get for £30 or £40 as opposed to the £200 they want on the train. Yes, I appreciate you can pick up cheap fares if you book very far in advance but that’s not always doable.

When it works that’s actually a great route though because it’s not radial- ie you can go from Bournemouth via other major cities to Manchester “straight up” and not via London. We need more routes like that if public transport sport is to be more widely used and displace car usage.

i’m honestly sceptical about public transport in the uk though. I just don’t think most people really want to use it vs driving ( because hell
is other people and you’ll never have the end to end solution that driving brings) and you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. Our town has invested millions in a pretty impressive cycle lane network and hardly anyone uses it because our town is really windy and hilly and people don’t want to cycle uphill into a massive headwind in lashing rain.

From a climate perspective at least I think we’re better off focusing on cleaner cars.

Fares havn't reduced in the train operating firms that are back in public ownership.

We need more than "cheap fares" to get cars off the road. The entire infrastructure needs to be improved. We need more frequent services, more reliable services, a lot more routes, a lot more stations, etc.

Cheaper fares only works for the minority of people who live/work close to stations on suitable routes to where they want to go.

No sane person is going to give up their car when their daily work commute is 20 minutes by car but 2 hours by train!

What we really need is to improve train services AND improve roads, AND make cars/lorries more environmentally friendly/efficient. The genie is out of the bottle with road vehicles and there's no putting in back. Likewise the wholesale destruction of the train network in the 70s can't be reversed.

I don’t think nationalisation is a panacea. One of the main reasons the railways were privatized was because under public ownership they’d been starved of investment for decades and ridership had fallen and fallen. Under public ownership railways have to compete with schools and hospitals for funding, which is tough, and no competitive imperative to drive down prices (the reason you can get that £30 flight).

UK rail privatisation is definitely not perfect, but mainly because it’s an odd half-way house, not because there’s profit involved nor because public ownership was great for the railways either.

Hopefully posters are aware that the whole Rail network will be re-nationalised by the end of 2027, for better or worse?

Another factor is that the costs of car ownership are mostly fixed ( buy or lease car, tax, insurance, MOT, service ) regardless of mileage, so if you need a car at all, it’s often cheaper to use it all the time rather than running a car and paying public transport fares on top. I can’t justify getting a train if there are three or four of us vs driving even accounting for fuel and parking. The personal finances on car vs public transport only really works on a single passenger basis and if you don’t have a car at all.

Near me, there are several routes where the train is faster than the road at off peak, and considerably faster at peak - but there aren’t are enough local services so people drive.

This is poor for the people living out in commuter towns as their commutes take longer and poor for the people living in the inner city who have to put up with congestion & the bad behaviour of a sizeable minority of drivers “frustrated” that the traffic is not “flowing”.

Traffic needs to be managed - this doesn’t mean that no-one drives but it does mean that people are encouraged & enabled to take the most appropriate form of transport for their journey. There are lots of people who drive for relatively short journeys & many of those could switch modes if public & active transport were made better. It also means that people who have no choice but commuting by car into urban areas need to respect the Highway Code & understand that urban communities shouldn’t have to put up with speeding, driving whilst using a mobile, ignoring road signs etc.

This is also something where both politicians & business leaders could be better informed - there are some local to me who do champion public transport etc. but if even a small number of the rest informed themselves & swung their heft behind the local public transport & road safety campaigns then we would get improvements faster.

I mostly use the train but the same applies to ULEZ in London. I pay £12.50 whether I drive a couple of miles to pick my daughter up from the station on my non work day, or nip over to see my parents in Kent (approx 30 ish miles). So I may as well drive more that day not less.

It's got fuck all to do with the unions. Northern don't employ enough staff to run their services without recourse to overtime. To resolve that needs funding and time - because they need to hire enough staff and train them. They've had neither.

Ah yes, you reminded me the other thing about my local rural bus service - none of the bus routes even go to the nearest train station! 🙄

@DdraigGoch Isn't also that TOCs have relied on staffing Sunday trains using overtime rather than Sunday specific contracts and overtime has been sought after enough/generous enough to mean enough people were always keen to do it. However with an aging workforce that might be it is less attractive now.

Hell is sitting in a traffic jam in a small metal box

rail cards reduce fairs for families

Hell is also standing cramped in vestibules on delayed trains for a few hours.

But only marginally whereas the costs of using a car for 4 people is virtually the same as for one person, so makes more sense if you have a car. Even with a railcard, the fares will almost certainly be a lot more than the petrol and parking costs.

Cars aint cheap to buy or run

Thankfully not as common as traffic jams - in my experience

But once you have one, you work on the marginal cost basis rather than sunk cost or average cost. The decision on whether to buy a car in the first place depends on lots of different needs and other factors.

You don't live in "Northern Rail" land then.