Transport in London is shit

well there's the Acton Town-Hammersmith section and the Wembley Park-Finchley Road plus Metroland sections but not quite the same thing i know.

On underground trains, after passing a signal at danger, the brakes automatically come on, and the driver has to get out of the cab to reset them. This traditionally was not the case on overground trains, but I think it now is also necessary on a lot of overground stock.

(this also applies to all other trains running on LU lines, such as most of the trains in and out of Marylebone station; I'm not sure if it applies to LU trains running on non-LU routes, and I'm fairly sure it doesn't apply to the other services on those routes)

why is that a joke? i was just about to say the same. apart from the hellhole bit.

had a presentation today which set me thinking. theres a split in this country between buses as a service which is controlled by a public body and provided by service provision companies, simply fulfilling requirements of the contract, and a situation where buses are removed from their status as inherently political products, open to competition, with the hope that the market will improve the product- to drag buses away from the operations-heavy approach of the past - "we tell you when and where the buses run, and we make them run that way" towards a industry that responds to passenger demands and looks to increase business - ie improve patronage more actively. in fact, i think these aims are laudable, but unfortunately the majority of operators, and it would seem the bigger they are, the worse offenders they are, are stuck (quite happily) between the two - they do little more than operate buses below a desirable standard, pay seemingly little attention to customers needs/desires and communicate very poorly with them, and yet focus on profitting from other means eg acquisitions and monopolisation, cost cuttign etc rather than increasing patronage through better service provision.

these two directions diverge quite seriously, and whilst london is allowed to pursue the first model without the stringent competitive requirements imposed on othewr areas, DfT, OFT, bus operators and PTES/local authorities are going to have to do some serious thinking about the fundamental guiding philosophy behind the bus industry structural model that we need for this country.

I was under the impression that on a lot of stock the TPWS reset is outdoors, like the tripcock on LU stock.

in fact i've just looked on National Express website and you can go from Golders Green to Manchester in just over 4 hours, which is nearly twice the journey time of a Pendolino BUT coming back the train and coach would roughly take the same time (both around 4 hours, according to the timetables) which makes no sense to me at all. and the NE return is half the price of the train.

ridiculous. if it had worked out cheaper i would've just got the train up but the coach back.

I agree the coach time seems optimistic - maybe they should introduce a coach lane on some motorways ala bus lanes.

in this point, its again a question of expectations. why do we expect to get reasonable fares on walk-up for railways, but would neevr expect that for a plane? why are we happy to book in advance to get the plane and not the train?
on a wider note, to what extent can we demand public transport on a schedule overall - are we going to have to accept a new model of pre booked, pre determined trips rather than expecting to turn up at any "Public Transport Access Node" and get on some form of transport? how viable or important is it for PTEs to subsidise private companies to ferry around fresh air at a lunchtime round some suburbs of a city?

finally, what is it that makes public transport, "public"? if its mass transport, then why is air travel not considered one of the gang? you can fit many mroe people on a plane than a coach for instance. so if its not a question of sheer numbers, is it more a question of importance in peoples lives - as people move abroad and commute, more frequently go on holiday, or simply commute from one end of the ocuntry to another, is it time to reassess how "vital" air travel is to peoples lives, for example in comparison to train travel?

i think the treatment of air travel as a seperate component, distinct from other forms of maass transport, as one that has no impact other than a handy effect of developing local economy/growth blah blah blah is not a positive thing. it needs to be considered in the light of every other mode of inter city transport, and i get the feeling that there just isnt full strategic thinking devoted to what sort of air transport network the UK needs and how it is goign to be brought aboutm ratehr than just "you want to build an airport? awesome!!!!" type thing that i have a hunch predominates at the mo

(*so called because in order to endure the mind-numbing boredom of it, half the passengers were on Temazepam, which also had the happy side effect that they wouldn't:
a) Talk to you
b) Fight you)

Public transport means publicly-owned transport, not just mass transport.

Just out of interest, nd I don't mean this to sound rude, but how old are you? It's just that if you've never lived in a city with proper functioning affordable public transport...you might not be able to see its benefits, or at least have something to compare the present mess with.

surely plane journeys are bigger in every sense. more distance (disregarding duration), more things to worry about (security checks etc.), more energy consumption...i still treat plane journeys as a really big deal, more than a train journey, regardless of duration.

I think I believe that you should never be able to fly somewhere cheaper than to travel there by train, regardless of all the different factors that determine the price of a ticket (time of day, how far in advance you book, seat class).

2 of those i would consider to have excellent, fully functioning transport systems, one of them (BCN) is to my mind a model for fully integrated urban transport systems for a city of that size (approx 1 mill). london is pretty good, st petersburg is an example of a comprehensive but incoherent system where the holes are filled by the private/informal sector, leeds and sheffield are comparable in functioning but hardly excelling in public transport provision. im 25 so dont remember bus privatisation really but do remember rail privatisation.

what do you mean by publicly owned transport exactly? you mean infrastructure, or vehicles, or operations, or planning? as buses, coaches and trains have all been deregulated in various different ways in the past 26 years, the idea of a publicly owned transport system in the UK seems problematic. unless you are proposing full renationalisation of all these areas, then i believe mass-transit is the best way to describe the current set up. note that that is not what i aspire to - but at the moment "public transport" hints at "public service", which given that most buses for example in the UK with the objective (of those running them) of increasing profit rathetr than providing a public service, seems a poor description. unless the underlying ethos fundamentally changes and powers are brought in to re align the guiding principle of public transprot to be a public service (and yes 2000 saw those powers but by buggery its gonna be difficult to get there), we are kidding ourselves (and this is my main point) if we think that our transport system still exists along those lines.

as for rail vs bus, i was referring to the emphasis on this thread rather than stating a preference! i think rail and bus have different roles to play, not necessarily striaght competing, although coaches can provide interesting and perhaps useful competition to rail travel.

bus rapid transit refers to a sort of hybrid practised very successfully in curitiba, for example, in brazil (mainly cos they built the city round it, and the mayor was like an uber-ken) where high patronage corridors are given maximum road space and priority, flooded with vehicles running segregated, ghigh frequency running, high reliability and short journey times, running radially into city centres. feeder services connect suburbs to these radial routes. the effect is to create the effect of trams or trains but with buses - guess what? theyre a lot cheaper, which is why they are hot property in south america. NB this does not mean i endorse them over LRT like everyone else within that debate eg lightrailnow who seem to think that everyhitng is so fucking black and white. that site when ive looked at it has been set up to stop US cities plumping for BRT in place of LRT due to cost.

planes - these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, are they not, steve? i can easily envisage a world where security checks are imposed on train travellers, or taken off domestic flights, flying between leds and london is no further on a plane than on a train, and when people commute 3 hrs, from wiltshire to london, i think its time we reviewed our conceptions of what role each mode of transport can or should or will fulfil in the overall picture.

for the record, i think air travel playing a similar role to intercity rail services is unsustainable and undesirable in an ideal world but thats what is happening! if its cheaper to get the plane, why not get it? if its qwuicker to get the plane, why not get it? if its more reliable to get he plane, why not get it? if air travel can compete with intercity travel, why are we still syaing things like "Surely the plane would be cheaper and quicker." instead of gettign the plane?

in the example i've given re London to Manchester. in hindsight i think i would've taken the train up but the coach back. in this case Virgin would only have lost about £10. i'm not sure i like the way single tickets are the price they are with returns being just a fraction more. even if it amounted to the same price i'd rather it was £37 (if it must be that much) for a single no matter when, and double that for a return.

The subsidy is less obvious than with Rail or Bus, but it is there, and it's huge. The primary way in which air travel is subsidised is by exempting aviation fuel from the fuel taxes that every other form of transport has to pay. Airlines are also to a certain extent allowed to form price fixing cartels. In the US they got bunged with soft loans and grants after 9/11. Airports are often paid for and run by governments and governements provide the Air traffic control infrastructure.

All of this goes to make air travel artificially cheap, expecially when compared to Rail. Removing the fuel duty exemption would go a long way to redressing the balance.

As far as rail vs Bus goes, Rail is more efficient per passenger kilometre once you get above a certain distance and way more attractive to the travelling public. What would make it more so would be a network of High Sped lines in the UK. Internal Air trqvel in France does not take place on nearly the same scale as it does in the UK because of the TGV network and every new line decimates the demand for air travel between the places served. Travel between london and Paris has sky rocketed in the last 10 years but the number of flights and the number of people taking them has plumeted to less than 30% of the market.

It is widely reported that 4hrs on the train is the limit at which the plane starts to become more attractive. Very soon most major cities in france will be within 4 hrs of each other (requires lGV Est, LGV atlatique Bordeaux extension and the Nimes-Perpignan LGV). Add to this that you can check in for Air France flight from Lyon St Expeury and Paris Charles de Gaulle at major French stations (and some Belgian ones), hey presto the need for short haul flights is vastly reduced.

And this is with France's much less concentrated population centres. We could have the same effect with 2 or 3 LGV. One up the East Coast to serve the Peterborough, Yorkshire, North East, Edinburgh corridor, one for London, West Midlands, Manchester/Liverpool (possibly extended to Glasgow, but that could be served vis the East coast, with a reopening of the Woodhead line to link the midlands with the Yorkshire HSL). The London-Bristol-Cardiff line could be added to although it is already quite straight and fast and could easily be upgraded to 140mph running. Add in connections to the airports and we can decimate internal air travel in the UK and short haul to near Europe.

PAYMENT DETAILS
*********0.04 GBP Adult
********36.70 GBP Taxes,Fees & Charges
********13.92 GBP Aviation / WCHR Levy
*********0.00 GBP Car Rental
********13.00 GBP Insurance
********63.66 GBP Total Paid

xpost haha that's like the firewire cable i bought from amazon. £0.01 cable, £4.50 delivery.

I would like to know more about how train ticket prices are calculated, weighted etc.

There has never really been a rational fares system in the UK. I sound like a stuck record but the fares systems in Italy is really good. You pay by kilometre and there are 6 fares, 3 first class, and three second. The three tiers of fare are based on the speed of the train top price for the Eurostars, next for the Intercities, and everything else on the bottom tier. There are all kinds of discount cards but essentially there is one fare structure whether you book a week in advance or 5 minutes before the train leaves. They have been experimenting with demand mangement type fares on certain trains but they are not proving very popular, it seems.

Ed, the problem with price-per-mile fares is that then the fares end up different for different routes. The good thing about the British system, ORCATS included, is that on an Open you do end up with the same ticket price whatever route you take.

(of course, this doesn't apply to the demand-managed tickets that make up most of the sales on long-distance routes)

Incidentally, "any reasonable route" was abandoned a few years ago. Valid routes now consist of:

a) a direct train
b) any combination of trains which take the physically shortest route
c) a "mapped route", as shown by the maps in the Fares Manual.

When these rules were first introduced, there were a few oddities and inconsistancies if you followed the route maps to the letter - for example, a London Terminals to Finsbury Park ticket was technically valid via Cambridge.

anyway, i agree, air travel is public transport, ubt even you will agree that it is not seen as such by members of the public nor much by public transport bodies. PTEs have no control over airports or anything to do with air travel as far as know, despite being "Passenger Transport Executives", which wouldnt seem to preclude air travel from their remits.

* for example, in South Yorkshire the PTE is responsible for Doncaster-Scunthorpe trains, but not Doncaster-Scunthorpe-Cleethorpes ones.