Free trains and buses

[Skullduggeryfizz]

If all trains and buses were free to use it would stop the vast majority of cars on the roads. Great for climate change. Make air quality so much better.

Would it though.......it takes at least twice as long to get to the same place on public transport as it does to drive. Personally I don't have that many spare hours in my week to add 5 hours a week just to my commute. Plus, the buses are hot, overcrowded and smell!

Would it?

If you can afford to run a car, you can probably afford fares.

Well... yes.

But they never will be free, because they're not free to run.

If they're free, where will the money come from to pay the drivers, pay for fuel, pay for the vehicles and their maintenance, pay for insurance - or will they all be free too?

@emmathedilemma depends where you live. the bus train combo or bike train combo takes half the time as driving from where I live. Ont eh way home the time advantage is greater.

The trains are squalid mind.

Ont eh = on the

it's actually quicker to get public transport than drive my commute.

I don't use the car because of the cost of buses though, I use it because it's convenient.

I think it's a good idea for cities where there is good public transport. It could be paid from local taxes. But in rural areas it wouldn't work and would be unfair, unless you had a massive expansion of public transport so that everyone could use it.

What bus?

I wouldn't have a problem taking the bus if it left my road when I wanted to leave and then left the town where I work when I'd finished work. Unfortunately it doesn't do either of those things. And it doesn't allow you to do a full day's work within childcare hours either.

It would make more sense if I car shared with the lady over the road who gets home pretty much exactly the same time as I do and walks up to the same school two days a week.

Community nurses, midwives, carers etc might still need cars.

I do agree that subsidies and improvements in public transport absolutely needs to happen to some extent.

But.

If everyone used public transport you'd need to at least double the number of trains and buses. But the infrastructure for that doesn't exist.

You'd also need to extend times they run.

Not to mention improve rural access.

So it isn't just about funding what already exists but extending it. And look at HS2, that ain't simple.

Possibly , pensioners get it free and they probably use it a lot . My in-laws hardly ever drive .
Where I live we have trams they are really convenient but not cheap and also the traffic signals are priority for the trams so to drive takes longer than the tram .
I've been told that people complained to council the response is that they want people to use public transport than drive .
I think if it was cheaper than maybe , the traffic near me is at a standstill during rush hour due to several nearby schools and the main route into the city centre . I'm not sure what the alternative is but unless public transport is a lot cheaper I'm not using it to commute .

Free station parking would do me, I don't use the train as much as I'd like to because of the car park charges (station is five miles away). That bloody annoys me, it's a fiver a day so really mounts up.

Rural areas would have to be served by better public transport in the first place. We’re not even that rural but;

Commute to work (major northern city), 18 miles - 40 min drive or 2 hours by bus/train/train/walk. One of the trains is only once an hour, so hardly handy for picking up dd from after school club.

Obviously this is only one journey I do, but every journey would be about 3 times the journey time as driving.

It could be paid from local taxes.

And where is the extra money in taxes that would be needed coming from?

And that’s not even thinking about the emergency response work I do, and the amount of site gear I need to carry around.

Don’t get me wrong, we have a great bus service round me but it’s a bit “all routes lead to the city centre”. If I worked in the city centre I wouldn’t even consider driving (there’d be nowhere to park) but otherwise it’s not that feasible.

Biggest factor is a reliable regular service going where you are commuting to.

Free transport would be great. If the government decided to pay for it. They don’t have any money so it will just be a dream for a while longer!

But think of the money saved on road expansion, time the police would save and because there wouldn't be so much traffic on the roads buses would run quicker. Money could be reinvested in electric buses and more trains. Yes we would have to spend more in the beginning. I'm not saying to ban cars, vans, lorries as sometimes people would just need to use them. But if you could get somewhere for free it would definitely make me think about how I would travel on a high proportion of my journeys.

We need better transport first. Where I live has great transport to London, but getting from one side of town to the other can take nearly as long (with a change of buses). And getting to some villages can involve a 1 or 2 hour wait, that is if there even is a bus.

I just wish more goods were transported by trains - but that would need better train infrastructure. Over Christmas period we travelled on local motorway which had quite busy with just cars but there was no lorries and even though the roads were busy it was so much less stressful.

Nope. I live on the border of the city, In a heavily populated area and the bus links are pants and stop at 8pm so rule out a significant number of evening workers.

I grew up in the countryside with the nearest bus stop 3 miles away, with 1 bus an hour.

It's not the price of buses that's the problem it's the routes and coverage.

Same with trains, our major train station has trains that go north and south only. If you want to go east or west you end up having to do multiple changes.

Coventry for example is a 45 minutes drive, or 90 minutes bus ride with 1 change or 2 hr train ride with 2 changes.

But if even 20% of people in cars swapped to public transport because of free travel, the roads would be so much easier to use.