Great Western Coffee Shop

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48512697

Maybe some of the 14 billion pounds could be spent on the electrification between Cardiff to Swansea

£1.4BN, not £14BN.

In reality there probably isn't a mechanism by which this 'money' could be diverted elsewhere, but it will be interesting to see if the Welsh Government now finds that it can bring forward electrification projects...

By way of instant digression ... when I was at school we sat a use of English paper where one of the questions presented some (alleged) samples of badly worded sentences by teenagers, and asked us to say what was meant. The results were generally bad, and pressure from teachers led us all getting a resit with no such question. The issue was that we were asked to second guess the examiners' view of how kids use language, which we might understand better than them. In addition, the examples were really fake ones, invented by the examiners, which adds another level of guess-what-I'm-thinking.

Anyway, that was prompted by this from that BBC piece: "It is the third time Welsh ministers have shelved plans for the M4 relief road. It had been supported by Mr Drakeford's predecessor Carwyn Jones and breaks a Welsh Labour manifesto pledge from 2016."

What, exactly, breaks a Labour manifesto pledge? The second sentence tells us that "it" - which can only be the M4 relief road - (1) was supported by Carwyn Jones, and (2) breaks a Welsh Labour manifesto pledge. That doesn't read naturally; you'd expect either building the road or scrapping plans to build it to be in a pledge.

For the road itself to break a promise can only mean, rather awkwardly, building it, so the pledge was to scrap it. But the whole piece provides a "jump here" sign for the opposite conclusion: that Labour promised to build it. What did you read it to mean first time through?

Still good news IMHO, I am opposed to almost any large scale road building.
Road transport is not going to vanish overnight, but I feel that adding more road capacity is a backwards step due to concerns about both climate change and oil supplies.

If more freight and passengers could be persuaded use rail instead of road, then the existing roads should be adequate for that traffic that remains.

In some cases buses could replace cars, and some freight could use coastal shipping, but rail is the most likely alternative.

I thought that I had seen somewhere that the money "saved" on not building the A350 Westbury bypass went towards the re-doubling of the Swindon/Kemble rail line.

I note "probably" in Red Squirrel's post.  Things happened to line up on Swindon-Kemble and an opportunity that resulted was grabbed.  The same people involved still have eyes open for other chances, though the geographic area of activity does not extend to South Wales. 

Is he built into one of the road's pillars?
Doubtless he would have had a different view on things if his name were Trainwyn instead of Carwyn.

As supposedly the most congested road in the UK apart from the M25, something is desperately needed, whatever your view on road v rail. Imagine having the GWML come down to two tracks between Slough and Paddington, as that is what the Brynglas Tunnels does for the M4.  The queues in the peak are already sometimes now back to beyond the old toll plaza and as far as the bridge, which is rather ironic.  Imagine the emissions caused by all that queuing.

Still, the WG has made it's mind up, and I'm sure so will businesses looking at their investment plans for the next 20 years.

Talking of the bridge, and digressing slightly, I couldn't help smiling when I saw a Severnside(?) Rail Partnership poster last week on my travels, which had a large picture of the Second Severn Crossing on it, but no pictures to do with rail.   

Assuming, of course, that the WG ever had a spare £1.4BN to spend on it.

Discussions on the Portishead line which this thread diverted onto are at

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=231.msg266532#msg266532

Perhaps the WG are thinking of buying Celtic Manor and turn it into the world's largest overnight travelodge for all the people caught up in the congestion. Even now I have seen westbound traffic backed up from the brynglas tunnels to the POW bridge.

It's really the wrong alignment for a relief road anyway. A Lavernock-Weston bridge/barrage would create many more new journey opportunities, removing the need to go past Newport entirely. And a rail element could be included, speeding up Cardiff-Taunton no end and (with a Cogload North curve) providing a sensible alternative to the Severn Tunnel.

...7830?

Though I must have missed the £0.8bn spent on a new railway 15 miles to the north!

(The parallel being the A465 Heads of the Valleys road, of course - the biggest road upgrade project in Britain over the last few years?)

Sometime before the end of the 20th Century, a consultancy was commissioned to produce what you might call "plan B"; an alternative to the M4RR based on more sustainable transport choices. Much of what was in the final report would have produced gladness in the hearts of many on this forum, although there was no pussyfooting about the scale of the challenge, which might have put SW Wales in the "best in Europe" class.

Of course, the M4RR never quite went away, and the plan B was never implemented. Perhaps with NR it might have been impossible anyway.

Twenty years on, with more car-dependency built into the system, it's going to take more than a few new stations to sort out the mess. On the other hand, there might be big prizes from thinking at the edge of what is possible as an alternative to expecting a daily lemming-like commute.

Question is: "Oos gunna be the advocate for something different?"

This was in Transport , environment and economic terms , the right decision, let’s press for full upgrade of Ebbe Vale, and Abitalery , with wires.
Further east it’s time to scrap , the financially suspect expressway, £4bn and counting , and invest in Cowley , Witney , Hanborough, and actually. Getting to Cambridge .
It’s about time the road Lobby has a set back , with their Poor VFM , schemes .
Expressway 1.2 CBR
NM4 - even less .