Great Western Coffee Shop

Yesterday's Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/31/bus-service-cuts-impose-virtual-curfew-on-many-people-in-rural-areas

Discuss  ;)

Apart from London the UK probably has the worst Public Transport System in Europe.

Playing devil's advocate: if so many residents are being 'trapped in their village', why have so many village shops, post offices and pubs had to close down?

It has been asked of stakeholders at a county level here whether there's a reduced need to travel if fast broadband is available. Online ordering and deliveries by carrier replacing journeys into the nearest town removed, thus reducing the need for loss making buses and allowing subsidy cuts while lessening hardships they cause.

- as well as being amongst the most expensive!

It's a very emotive subject, but it would be good to see some stats ie how many people were using services now axed? Should the taxpayer have to fund the lifestyles of people who live in rural areas without transport of their own?

There are after many places where you can live on the edge of a town with a good bus route and yet also be within walking distance of open countryside eg where I currently reside on the outskirts of Truro.

I have over the years lived in a number of both North and South Devon villages - with bus services ranging from the non-existent to relatively frequent - and people overwhelmingly owned cars regardless,  even if they were just old bangers. Hence, as the poster above points out, local services struggle.

I'm delighted - I think - that we've got a lot more figures on this available now than we used to have.  And how long have you got for a very detailed technical answer?

At on extreme, two of our local service runs axed the other week carried on one passenger each - and those passengers said to me "pity, but I can understand it" ... what really miffed them was not being told and just finding the bus had gone.  At the other extreme, a minibus that run that carried 10 people plus every day was axed  ... with the curiosity that the first service got press support from the local councillor, and he stood up and agreed with the latter cut in a pubic meeting against users and supporters.  It's a funny system - even funnier than trains.

I can't agree that "everyone in the countryside has a car".  I've met the chap who was given a lift to his nearest public transport stop and was waiting there for 4 hours; no car, no prospect of a car because no driving license due to an illness.  Bred and born in the country, not his choice.  For sure, the majority have cars and that leaves the buses quiet - the solutions to switch from buses to fewer buses to taxis ... or to make the buses work for those people with cars - by being known about, connecting with each other, reliable, affordable.

Even looking at road costs ... there's that fascinating question of why people living on roads with houses every 400 yards should have 400 yards of road provided by the state, when people living on roads with houses every 20 yards only get 20 yards of road provided.

There are ways of making things rather better ... and of course the beauty of having a huge mess at the moment is that changes can so practically be for the better - the "most improved" prize is an easy one to win if you've a mess to improve on in the first place.

..............are there many pubic meetings in Melksham?  ;D :o

There are some - the population keeps going up and there are places like http://www.angels-club.co.uk . Clearly, I was talking about a public meeting in the context.

I don't suppose you've head that one in connection with any road dualling proposals? ::)

In remote areas not well served by buses, or where existing services are under threat, I feel that more could be done to make bus services viable.
Perhaps have the bus company deliver mail, parcels and light freight such as small deliveries to local shops.
Or in small villages, have the bus driver read utility meters. The reading of large numbers of meters would cause undue delay, but to read say one meter a week should be reasonable and the utility company should be willing to pay for this service in remote areas.

The other approach would be to increase the population of many small villages a bit by building more housing. Few people would support large scale redevelopment, but most villages would NOT be spoiled by the building of say 5 new family homes. That's another 20 or more potential passengers for the bus service, and more trade for the village shop, public house, and post office.
Such additional housing should in my view be of a similar style and price to existing homes in the same village, so as not to unduly alter the character of the village.

Reminds me of the "post bus" ... but yes.
http://www.royalmail.com/personal/uk-delivery/postbus

This whole "dual use" thing is quite important.  In line with using a bus from "C" to "T" to run from the Railway Station via the town centre to serve local traffic on the way out of "C", traffic from "C" to "M" - a town along the way, local traffic within "M", traffic from "M" to "T" and finally pick up local traffic in "T" before terminating via the town centre at the railway station there.


Yes, there is a lot to be said for growing housing groups to be more economically viable.  I can find you a town around here that takes that approach and one that feels its gone too far.  And one (currently small) one that enquired about getting a station and decided against taking the "lets build enough houses to make it possible" approach when they learned that number.


Others may suggest "affordable housing" to provide starter homes / places for the rural poor - where there are some very real issues.  That would also give you a metric of residents who would be less car dependent.

Of course, one elephant in the room is the high volume of private cars with empty seats making journeys between almost every habitation group ... and the statistical true-ism that if every car stopped and gave a lift to everyone who didn't have a car if they wanted a lift, there would be no need at all for buses in most places.

At a guess the answer to that one is that not many residents are actually being 'trapped in their village', because most of said residents (unfortunately) have a car. In other words: .

I'd go for "make the buses work for those people with cars". It's win-win: less traffic on the roads, less greenhouse gas emmissions and possibly even less subsidy required (one hopes that at least, no permenant increases in subsidy would be required). The ^10,000,000 question is what will get people out of their cars and onto buses? Everything you said (advertising, connections, reliabilty and affordabily) is important, but even if you addressed all of those would it work? Personally, I think you'd also need to drive up the quality (frequency, comfort, journey time etc.) of bus services considerably in many areas, but I could be wrong.

That might not be a bad idea. It would almost certainly be more sensible than building new 'eco homes' in villages/hamlets that are currently without any bus services at all ::)

Does reducing the cost of homes influence the character of the village, and if so how? My gut feeling is that there shouldn't be a problem provided the new builds are of an appropriate style and carefully designed (unlike the new Fishguard & Goodwick station, which has none of the character of the original), but again I could be wrong.

Also, the mention of 'starter homes' brings to mind another group of people who may be reliant on public transport: under 17s. Ok, so young people will often be given lifts by their parents, but that is not always possible/practical. It was, after all, a pair of school pupils who launched the petition which eventually resulted in the effective re-opening of the Fishguard railway to local passengers. If young people get a good experience of bus services in their area, are they less likely to become car dependent in future (ok, so apparently Sam from the Fishguard petition now drives, but claimed he would still use the trains (buses weren't mentioned))?

Frequency and length of service day are, I believe, key.  A service from the station that finishes at 17:30 isn't much good to commuters arriving there from their work town at 17:44.   And a service that leaves people sitting around for hours on end for a short journey hasn't tipped over the balance from "used for a specific purpose" to "general use".

You have tradeoffs with journey times.   Cut 5 minutes and:
- the journey is less comfortable / more bouncy
- there is a reduction in reliability of timings
- you leave out some of the less direct route sections that where there to bring more passengers

To some extent, there's  journey time v frequency tradeoff.     An hourly bus taking 55 minutes gives an average journey time end to end of 85 minutes if you run "turn up and go".  If the bus takes 65 minutes but that justifies a half-hourly service, turn up and go reduces to 80 minutes.  Alas, people feel slowed down and in my example you have introduced a problem in how you make it efficiently clock-faced.


Young people are indeed a prime public transport user group / potential group, and can pull / campaign strongly and be heard.  But so few have the confidence and commitment to get effectively involved within available openings for them.

It's difficult for people without rail / bus / local government experience to get involve in a way that they're listened to - that includes all young people, and also that majority of the rest of us who haven't done any form of meaningfully associated work; there's an assumption that we've got tunnel vision on one particular hair brained idea, and that even if the idea turns out to be good, we'll not have the background / sticking power to see it through.  An especial problem for young people, who's travel issue that generates their initial concerns and action faces competition from boy/girl interest, and from going off to college, and such competition is expected by the system and discounts their inputs.

Very true, which is why I added the caveat 'possibly' to my 'even less subsidy required' comment; it may well be necessary to run late evening / early morning services which require subsidy.

The first two would certainly run counter to the objective of attracting more passengers, so I certainly don't want to see unrealistic / hard to maintain schedules. The third is what I was getting at in my previous post (and I've started at least one topic on the subject elsewhere on this forum); going via C to get from A to B seems likely to result in loss of through traffic between A and B. To me, road bypasses are, to use an expression, the 'work of the devil' because they create a suituation where the bus operator / council has to make the choice whether to travel via the intermediate town or not, losing either through traffic or traffic to/from the intermediate town.

I've seen this done in Iceland and Norway (where they have plenty of remote villages).  Norway is also rather good at integrating tourist buses with service buses and also with their ferries and trains, so you might have 100 people on a coach/rail/boat trip who are tourists off a cruise trip or doing a "fjord tour", but the tourists keep the ferry links to remote villages viable and the  coach will stop a couple of times in the middle of nowhere to pick up a local coming home from college.  In Iceland, the tourist bus coming out of Reykjavik each morning stops at local fuel stations to drop off boxes of part backed bread for the shop and Amazon parcels.


Maybe, although I think that will all be being done remotely soon with smart meters


Absolutely agree.  Too many villages have become outposts of well off retirees.  Some new "ordinary" homes would give a better social and age mix.  I get the sense that building more houses though would provoke the usual NIMBY reaction. 

The main problem with UK buses since deregulation is lack of stability of service.  Would you move to a village on the basis of a decent bus service to your work place?  Would you trust that that bus service would still be running in the future?  You might if it was a railway service (and Freshford for example thrives in part due to the presence of a station).  If you were a logistics company would you use buses to transport your parcels knowing that the service could be stopped with only a few days notice?  If you were a package tour operator would you book your customers onto a service bus to, lets say get them to Stonehenge, would you trust your customers with one of the UK's bus companies?  or would you lay on your own coach?

My Mum and step-Dad, despite not being well off retirees, are dead set against proposals for new housing, including a social element, in the village they live in. Something I find mildly amusing as they are living in a 1980s build house on a small estate which a previous generation of village NIMBYs campaigned against.

That's why buses are superior to trains, in some eyes (not mine, I hasten to add): Flexibility! :)

Is there an answer to the question of sustainable rural transport? A combination of factors has stripped most small towns and villages of their original purpose and turned them into little more than outer suburbs, with too low a population density to enable the economic provision of services. Opening a new railway station in a town or village may serve as a nucleus for development, but essentially it does this by making it a better-connected suburb of the city that is now more accessible.

Transfer responsibility for tendering bus services from councils to TOCs, making the bus services a franchise commitment of the rail franchise? No idea if that would work out, just throwing the idea out there.

No idea how it would work either but I do think it is an idea worth exploring. 

For those in the BBC's southern region (as it were...) I believe there's going to be an item on bus subsidy cuts on BBC South Today at 6.30pm today.

They might also show the fella from the lunchtime bulletin who used his photocard driving licence number (or I'm guessing, part of it) with a 7 day season from Basingstoke to Twyford. GWR are looking for ^170 from him or I think it's court this Friday IIRC.

OT; he's not the only one who does this.

Presumably instead of the official Rail photocard?

If that's against the rules then I don't condone it although its hardly the crime of the century because the railway will still have got the correct fare off him.  A slap on the wrist and a small fine would seems the appropriate punishment.

Having said all that, the rules are a bit silly though aren't they.  Is there any reason why the rules shouldn't be changed to allow a photo driving licence to be used as a photocard for a season ticket?  Surely they are deemed secure enough.  It would save the railway and the passenger a bit of money if unnecessary issuing of photocards was avoided.

It's my fault for dragging this thread off topic with the tenuous connection of South Today :). The photocard issue has being brought up over on this suitable thread anyway:
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=16354.msg186053#msg186053

I suspect t would add a whole raft of ID checking options onto railway ticket inspection people - if a driving license then what about a passport?  And what about an international driving license ...

It also strikes me as a curiously perverse message to allow the "competition"s photo ID when rail competes so often with the private car for journeys.

I think it is very reasonable to expect to be able to use your passport or driving licence as proof of identity; the proprietory ID card should only be necessary for those who don't have one of the others. I don't see this as a 'whole raft', and I don't see the need to accept any other form of ID which may not such obvious bona fides.

I gather that in some states of the USA it is normal for people who can't or don't drive to have a 'non-driving' driver's licence - essentially an ID card by another name.

 

It's really very simple - does the photo on the Passport/Driving license match the holder? Yes? Then accept it.

This is one of the fundamental problems of the railways - customers are expected to fit around their often archaic rules & processes "this is the way it works around here", rather than these being adapted to suit customers in the 21st century.

As a valid photographic driving license is perfectly adequate ID to board a domestic flight in the UK, I can't see why it shouldn't be enough for a clippie at a railway station.

We're getting off-topic, but isn't it even more perverse that I was enable to buy a 3yr 16-25 railcard when I was otherwise eligible because the 3yr car was (I think) only available online and online purchase of a railcard requires 'competition' ID (passport or driving license)? I don't drive and haven't gone overseas for years, so my passport had expired (apart from Eurostar, overseas travel involves use of 'competeing' modes too).

[rant]

For fear of going further off-topic, the noun is LICENCE.

 >:( :(

[/rant]

Insidious American spelling like color, signaling and program! I blame Bill Gates  :). Don't get me started on 'train station'.

"Train Station" is the usual form in the North West of England.  If you had said "Railway Station" at my comp, you would have been thought a bit "posh"

Also wouldn't the most common American term be Railroad Station? 

We have been round this one before: 'Train station' is fairly recent and does originate from the other side of the pond, but is superseding both the old US term 'railroad station' and the old UK term 'railway station'. Personally I'm happy with this, as it is a logical change to the language - not something you could say about Noah Webster's spelling reforms, that give us 'license' as a noun whilst keeping the correct spelling of 'advice' as a noun.

Railroad Depot ('Dee-poh')

Ah; here's what we all said about this last time:

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=13952.0

almost exactly what we have said this time.  That there has certainly been a fairly recent change.  That suspicion falls on America, but they may be innocent (and experiencing an analogous shift from Railroad Station to Train Station).  That there are arguments in favour of either term and that people have their own preference.

The Russians meanwhile use vokzal (Вокзал) for (main) Railway Station/Train Station.  This seems to come from the English place name Vauxhall, either because Vauxhall Station in London (later Nine Elms) was the first station a group of Russian dignitaries and/or the Tsar had ever seen or (more likely, I suspect) because an early Russian station was located and named after a local pleasure gardens which was in turn named after London's Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

A less important Russian Station is called a станция (stantsiya) which translates as "Station" or "Stage" and is used for work station, space station, etc in addition to Railway Station.

A bus station is where a bus stops.  A train station is where a train stops.  On my desk, I have a work station.  ;) :D ;D

Wonder if I could call my cocktail cabinet a drinks station......

Only if drinks stop there!

Does not the term "station" derive from the word "stationary" and indicate a place where some form stoppage is the headline reason for its existence?

Latin I believe; comes from statiō which means standing still.

The network cable connecting it to other machines on your company's computer network stops there  ;D

However, not everywhere a bus stops is called a 'bus station'. They also stop at 'bus stops' and sometimes by request almost anywhere along their route (I tend to think nearly every bus route should do the latter).

I tend not to risk it even at "Bus Stops" and stick my arm out!

In the past, I have enjoyed putting my arm out in a clear signal to the driver of a passenger train approaching Dilton Marsh Halt that I would like him to stop.  How quaint!  ;) :D ;D

That is sensible, since many (or most?) bus stops are request stops.

In London all bus stops are now request stops. This change happened in the last few years and another forum that I read has reported that it causes a lot of confusion among passengers standing at the white bus stops (previously compulsory stops)

Yes this was a change made without any publicity, on the basis that most people used to request the stop anyway (by ringing the bell or sticking out a hand) even when it was a compulsory stop so there was no point making the distinction. Those that are still aware of the old distinction can be more confused since any new bus stop sign erected is of the former compulsory type.

Hmm. Giants are frightening, aren't they?

We have a problem in taplow with three stops in close succesion Westbound on the A4 by the new the new Tescos.

The first with a shelter and timetable but no bus bay. First drivers (75) have been told not to stop at but go onto the new Tescos stop with bus bay. I'm not sure whther they still stop at the next one the station but  it still has a shelter and timetable but the sign is obscured in bushes. There is now only one eastbound stop at Tescos in between the old station and the next both of which have been removed.

RE the orignal point of trapping people in villages, it seems to me it is similar problem as on the railways particualry with the call for more new  stations on main lines. How do you run fast Inter Cities with few stops, Regional Expresses with more stops,  in amonst the all station stoppers. Do we have to bite the bullet and build all new stations (unless most trains are going to stop) with platform loops. This was the way one of the last main lines to be built the GC GWR joint line through from Paddington/Marylebone to Anyho Jn was finshed. There were at least 10 such loops from Paddington to Anyho I bet Chiltern wish many of them were still extant.

It sems to me to be a similar problem applies to buses. Some from town to town via bypasses are REs and the one turning off and serving the villages are all station stoppers. Off peak is probaly not a problem you run one each route alternately, however, in the peak you might have to run both at roughly the same times to enable people to commute. The advantage the bus has you don't have to build loops for the stopper to be overtaken as the RE sails by on the bypass.

You could even by clever timetabling provide a connection from a stopper to the RE in opposite direction at the first stop on the mainroad if they were opposite each other. The only problem I can see is that people will have to cross possibly a busy main road.

Like static. Or even state and of course both stationary and stationery (the latter cos it shows one's station in life ^ I think  ::)).

We seem very reluctant to bite bullets. Not only on railways (or buses).

According to my dictionary (which is pretty big, if that aids credibility) it was used for university bookshops, also supplying writing materials and other scholars' supplies. It was a Latin word for shopkeeper (with a fixed shop, as opposed to pedlar without one) and of course universities did use Latin in everyday life.

I have also heard that it was used for a shop set up at a staging post, or operated by the innkeeper (as it often was). They usually handled mail, which travelled by stagecoach, but I suspect the term was transferred to them from the university usage.