Train GraphicClick on the map to explore geographics
 
I need help
FAQ
Emergency
About .
Travel & transport from BBC stories as at 18:35 28 Mar 2024
- How do I renew my UK passport and what is the 10-year rule?
- Passengers pleaded with knifeman during attack
- Family anger at sentence on fatal crash driver, 19
- Easter travel warning as millions set to hit roads
Read about the forum [here].
Register [here] - it's free.
What do I gain from registering? [here]
 02/06/24 - Summer Timetable starts
17/08/24 - Bus to Imber
27/09/25 - 200 years of passenger trains

On this day
28th Mar (1917)
Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore closed (link)

Train RunningCancelled
16:54 Cardiff Central to London Paddington
17:48 Reading to Gatwick Airport
17:54 Cardiff Central to London Paddington
17:57 London Paddington to Worcester Foregate Street
18:03 London Paddington to Penzance
18:08 London Paddington to Frome
Additional 18:25 Shalford to Reading
18:26 Newbury to Bedwyn
18:36 London Paddington to Plymouth
18:37 Westbury to Swindon
18:51 Filton Abbey Wood to Bristol Temple Meads
18:55 Bedwyn to Newbury
19:23 Reading to Gatwick Airport
19:24 Newbury to Bedwyn
19:33 London Paddington to Worcester Shrub Hill
19:55 Bedwyn to Newbury
20:13 Swindon to Westbury
20:16 Frome to Westbury
20:49 Newbury to Bedwyn
20:56 Worcester Foregate Street to London Paddington
21:16 Bedwyn to Newbury
Short Run
15:03 London Paddington to Penzance
15:23 Portsmouth Harbour to Cardiff Central
15:30 Cardiff Central to Portsmouth Harbour
16:19 Carmarthen to London Paddington
16:23 Portsmouth Harbour to Cardiff Central
16:35 London Paddington to Plymouth
16:50 Plymouth to London Paddington
17:03 London Paddington to Penzance
17:20 Reading to Gatwick Airport
17:30 London Paddington to Taunton
17:36 London Paddington to Plymouth
17:50 Gloucester to Salisbury
17:59 Gatwick Airport to Reading
18:18 Newbury to London Paddington
18:19 Reading to Gatwick Airport
18:54 Reading to Gatwick Airport
18:59 Gatwick Airport to Reading
19:06 London Paddington to Bedwyn
19:29 Gatwick Airport to Reading
20:42 Bedwyn to London Paddington
Delayed
13:59 Cardiff Central to Penzance
14:15 Penzance to London Paddington
16:03 London Paddington to Penzance
Additional 17:17 Exeter St Davids to Penzance
Additional 17:26 Castle Cary to Penzance
17:29 Gatwick Airport to Reading
An additional train service has been planned to operate as shown 18:25 Shalford to Reading
18:29 Gatwick Airport to Reading
19:04 London Paddington to Plymouth
19:59 Gatwick Airport to Reading
etc
PollsOpen and recent polls
Closed 2024-03-25 Easter Escape - to where?
Abbreviation pageAcronymns and abbreviations
Stn ComparatorStation Comparator
Rail newsNews Now - live rail news feed
Site Style 1 2 3 4
Next departures • Bristol Temple MeadsBath SpaChippenhamSwindonDidcot ParkwayReadingLondon PaddingtonMelksham
Exeter St DavidsTauntonWestburyTrowbridgeBristol ParkwayCardiff CentralOxfordCheltenham SpaBirmingham New Street
March 28, 2024, 18:52:57 *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Forgotten your username or password? - get a reminder
Most recently liked subjects
[133] West Wiltshire Bus Changes April 2024
[132] would you like your own LIVE train station departure board?
[53] Return of the BRUTE?
[44] If not HS2 to Manchester, how will traffic be carried?
[41] Infrastructure problems in Thames Valley causing disruption el...
[32] Reversing Beeching - bring heritage and freight lines into the...
 
News: A forum for passengers ... with input from rail professionals welcomed too
 
   Home   Help Search Calendar Login Register  
Linked Events
  • JLTP Consultation closes: March 20, 2019
Pages: 1 2 [3]
  Print  
Author Topic: WECA Alphabet Soup  (Read 14654 times)
grahame
Administrator
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 40690



View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #30 on: February 02, 2020, 08:07:02 »

Dr Steve Melia of UWE has written a thought-provoking piece on JLTP4 for the Bristol Cable. He reiterates his view that it's not enough to provide better public transport; we need to reduce road capacity too

From that article - worth selectively quoting here.

Quote
This week, WECA» (West of England Combined Authority - about) published an updated Local Transport Plan, for Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) and North Somerset councils to approve. It includes £8.6bn worth of projects due for completion by 2036.

Quote
The proposals map (on page 128) shows new roads carving through the countryside around: Nailsea, Backwell, Thornbury, Yate, Keynsham, Stockwood, Whitchurch, Winterbourne, Frampton Cotterell, Churchill, Sandford, Banwell and Barrow Gurney. The map is quite small; you have to look very hard and read through a long appendix to work out what they are actually proposing. The lines on the map are “indicative” they say; they might change; the whole plan remains under review, which offers some hope.

Quote
I am currently writing a book about transport protests over the past 30 years, from the anti-roads protests of the 1990s to Extinction Rebellion today. One thing I have learned is that most people only wake up to a threat when it’s too late. By the time an authority publishes a firm plan, it will almost always be too late to stop it. The WECA authorities seem to be facing a dilemma, so there may still be time to avert these threats – if people act now.

But what about other ways of getting around than cars - trains, cycling - and buses on all those new roads?

Quote
“To achieve carbon neutral transport by 2030 requires a substantial modal shift away from cars to public transport, cycling and walking,” the plan states. To be fair, there are lots of plans to expand public transport (and cycling, but judging by the quality of recent cycle routes, I wouldn’t take that too seriously)  They want to re-open rail lines to Portishead and Henbury, build new stations, extend Metrobus to surrounding towns and in the longer-term build a metro system for Bristol.

All of that will be great, if and when it ever happens, but better public transport, on its own, does very little to reduce traffic or carbon emissions. Cars and vans account for six times the distance covered by public transport, so if bus and rail use could be doubled, and every new trip replaced a car journey, that could theoretically cut car mileage by one sixth. But unfortunately, only a small minority of additional trips made by public transport replace a journey by car. And on congested roads, every car removed frees up a space for another car to take its place. In my last book, Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, I estimated that doubling bus use in England might reduce car traffic by around 1%.

“Initial modelling suggests that Bristol would have to reduce traffic by around 40% to hit their decarbonisation targets.
It is possible to reduce traffic by expanding public transport and reducing road capacity at the same time. London, Cambridge and lots of European cities have done that. But where an authority expands public transport and builds more roads, the net result is more travel and higher carbon emissions. New roads also cause other problems, such as noise, local pollution and severance of wildlife habitats.

Sadly, his figures on doubling bus use causing a reduction of road traffic by just 1% align with other data.  I've worked with a figure of doubling train use along a corridor accounting for less than a 2% reduction in road traffic - and with towns expanding as they have been [in Wiltshire in my example], a single step down of 2% is small beer compared to an annual increase of even 1% each year for new housing catered for in the same way we've catered for housing in recent years.   For sure,  2% of those new 1% may use the better / doubled bus.   In a decade:
* "Same old" - 10% more traffic
* "Same old" plus doubling of bus use, including newcomers - 7.8% more traffic
* Target - 40% less traffic (or cleaned up to be carbon free)

Commenting on one other element:

Quote
One thing I have learned is that most people only wake up to a threat when it’s too late. By the time an authority publishes a firm plan, it will almost always be too late to stop it.

I personally got into the whole business of campaigning for appropriate public transport for my town in 2005.  And one of the first things I was told is "You are too late. You have just missed the consultation. It closed a month ago and you should have responded then".  When the report came out "There were only seven inputs concerning services [on the TransWilts] and they were not unanimous in asking for more services".

Turned out the proposed reduction from 5 to 2 trains each way per day was two bullet points on page 70 of a 240 page document covering Paddington to Worcester, tp Weymouth, to Penzance and to Pembroke and all places between. And the suggestion that inputs were not unanimous was because someone who lives in a different part of the territory had suggesting pulling off all of our trains and using the rolling stock freed up to give his town a better service.

Cutting a very long story short, it was too late to stop that step back from happening.  But in that it helped strengthen our resolve and understanding, and begin a long, slow and at times frustrating process of building up more sustainable and healthier transport.   The five went down to 2.  We have struggled back to 8 and 9, but recently been reduced again to 8 (because of the timetable recast to get more and faster London trains!) and we still have a long way to go - 8 is minimalist, with a gap (for example) from 07:52 to 10:01 on the popular 10 minute journey into Chippenham, and the 25 minute ride to Swindon.  Passenger numbers are up from 3,000 to 75,000 journeys per annum but that's far from the limit and we need next to be up to around 13 services per day - plugging specific gaps and it can be done on line capacity.

Back to(wards) topic.  We learned last week that First bus are pulling out of their contract with Wiltshire Council  to run evening and Sunday buses from Bath to Melksham and Devizes as from 5th April.  That contract crosses the border from BaNES into Wiltshire.  The competing, victorious daytime operator on a similar route currently provides a service with a last bus at 17:40 - First run 5 later services, some of which are supported, and another is an depot run which takes passengers and has been routed to be useful.  At least one more gets a vehicle into place ready for the start of the evening's supports runs so is subsidy dependent.

Public Transport support passes from BaNES to WECA on 1st April as I understand it, though rather curiously the support for this cross-border service comes purely from Wiltshire (journeys, I estimate, are 50% cross border, 35% purely in BaNES and 15% purely in Wiltshire).  Too late, I suggest, and too much going on to attempt to redress the balance for 5th April;  to note at this stage, and also note that the next spoke of the wheel out from Bath - to Frome in Somerset, does have its evenings subsidised by BaNES rather than Somerset.

We are - just about - in time to have a replacement public transport service into Bath evenings and Sundays - if anyone bids at an affordable price to run it, and if Wiltshire Council goes ahead and places a contact to take up the bid.  There is no guarantee; we are mindful of 2014, when a parallel situation (and the same bus companies were involved) meant that the last bus from Chippenham to Melksham at 22:16 and several others were lost - the last bus is now around 17:35.

But Steve Melia is so utterly right - the community needs to get in early and make their "asks" - by the time plans become general knowledge they're very much someone's baby and it's very late - perhaps too late - to have a level playing field to fight them.  And, yes, I have some sympathy for the knoweledgable people who plan our towns and cities and getting around them who have to handle substantially more public input if the plan are shouted out clearly and early.  However, that gives those experts a chance to explain and test their suggestions far more fully, and to come up with a more robust and better supported way forward.
Logged

Coffee Shop Admin, Acting Chair of Melksham Rail User Group, Option 24/7 Melksham Rep
Bmblbzzz
Transport Scholar
Hero Member
******
Posts: 4256


View Profile
« Reply #31 on: February 02, 2020, 15:57:48 »

Quote
It’s a bizarre document; seemingly written by two groups of people with totally different views. One group says: all four authorities have declared climate emergencies; we must take urgent action to decarbonise by 2030. The other says: we must build and widen lots of roads to boost economic growth.
Gotta keep all your constituents happy! (In fact it's something of an achievement that the first group gets noticed, that's a relatively new thing.)

Quote
Initial modelling for Bristol City Council suggests that Bristol would have to reduce traffic by around 40% to hit their targets. WECA» (West of England Combined Authority - about)’s Transport Plan says they will consider congestion charging, but to make a big impact, the charges would have to be quite expensive. Good luck to any politician who wants to try that. 
Gotta keep your voters voting.
Logged

Waiting at Pilning for the midnight sleeper to Prague.
Red Squirrel
Administrator
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 5190


There are some who call me... Tim


View Profile
« Reply #32 on: February 02, 2020, 16:27:42 »

Gotta keep your voters voting.

Aye, there's the rub.
Logged

Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
Do you have something you would like to add to this thread, or would you like to raise a new question at the Coffee Shop? Please [register] (it is free) if you have not done so before, or login (at the top of this page) if you already have an account - we would love to read what you have to say!

You can find out more about how this forum works [here] - that will link you to a copy of the forum agreement that you can read before you join, and tell you very much more about how we operate. We are an independent forum, provided and run by customers of Great Western Railway, for customers of Great Western Railway and we welcome railway professionals as members too, in either a personal or official capacity. Views expressed in posts are not necessarily the views of the operators of the forum.

As well as posting messages onto existing threads, and starting new subjects, members can communicate with each other through personal messages if they wish. And once members have made a certain number of posts, they will automatically be admitted to the "frequent posters club", where subjects not-for-public-domain are discussed; anything from the occasional rant to meetups we may be having ...

 
Pages: 1 2 [3]
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.2 | SMF © 2006-2007, Simple Machines LLC Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!
This forum is provided by customers of Great Western Railway (formerly First Great Western), and the views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. Visit www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website. Please contact the administrators of this site if you feel that the content provided by one of our posters contravenes our posting rules (email link to report). Forum hosted by Well House Consultants

Jump to top of pageJump to Forum Home Page