Selling the total trip door to door

[A V Lowe]

For those who want to try it out there is an automated folding bike hire facility at Guildford, and with a folding bike one can radically cut journey times door to door.  In the imminent pipeline there should be one of these appearing near Ealing Broadway early in April, with potential for other sites shortly afterwards.  The business model is that with about half of the bikes out on long term hire the units should generate a small income for the site host.

A manual pilot scheme has been running from Waterloo from May 2009 and all bikes (100) are out on long term hire.

A second detail is to have car sharing (one car shared by several different drivers as opposed to ride sharing, one trip shared by several people in one vehicle) facilities at stations with a car club.  Roll in by train and take a PAYG car to make that visit to a client just too far away to cycle or walk.

One Belgian bus & light rail operator offers a total travel package, a 1-stop point of sale for all your travel needs, and with the bus operator having a 50% share in both car and bike 'hire' operations, they get a share of any revenue surplus generated.  the icing on the cake is that they offer a scrap your car deal which makes far more sense than the UK £1000 bung to simply move a few years back on the same old cycle. Scrapo your car and you get up to 3 years free bus travel and membership of car and bike clubs, and thus should be able to meet all your travel needs without the burden of owning a car - effectively boosting the disposable income of a typical UK household by around 20% but without any impact on the tax code (& deductions).

Car club members are also good for the railway and a reciprocal deal is that regular rail travelers are potential car club members. the annual Car Club member survey indicates that a car club member makes more than 6 times as many train trips per year as the UK NTS average.  basically everyone wins.     

[eightf48544]

Excellent ideas would never happen in the UK as it's contrary to the rules of Capiltalism where everyone competes. You can't have this kind of cooperation smacks too much of Socialism. Sharing revenue and profits come off it!