"How coronavirus could usher in a new ‘golden age’ of rail travel"

[whole diary]

[Red Squirrel]

...there's been a huge realisation over the last few months that people don't have to be in the office anything like as much as previously and are indeed in many cases more productive, happier and healthier WFH^▸ (Working From Home) with the additional benefits it brings to work/life balance. This has been the experience of almost everyone I know and is perhaps one of the few positive outcomes of the pandemic.

I was rather amused the other day by WECA^» (West of England Combined Authority - about) Mayor Tim Bowles' reaction when someone suggested that our leaders should set an example by using public transport once it is safe to do so. Mayor Bowles' facial expression made it very clear what he though of that for a game of soldiers! But he did go on to say, to the nodded approval of others in his top team, that he had found teleconferencing very useful and expected to carry on using it in the future. 

[CyclingSid]

I don't think Covid (or more generally one of the Sars type coronaviruses) is going to vanish anytime soon. Any more than flu vanished after 1918. Keeps coming back, in the case of flu in slightly different forms.

Have a read of the article in I news https://inews.co.uk/news/health/world-face-another-pandemic-tom-koch-predicted-coronavirus-460702. Tom Koch is a well known medical geographer, and doesn't tend to needless doom-mongering.

[Bmblbzzz]

Covid-19 is clearly not going to vanish unless we a) produce a successful vaccine, and then b) commit to a worldwide coordinated eradication programme. Part a) is merely technically difficult, part b) requires sustained global cooperation. We did it for smallpox (intensified eradication programme started 1967, world declared free of smallpox in 1980), we started doing it with polio and achieved a lot – only endemic now in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria – but seem to be going backwards due to local wars and global disagreements. I can't see us getting anywhere near that with any new programme due to the shapes of global politics and culture, sadly.

But what really counts for rail (and bus and air etc) travel is not so much the existence of the disease as the epidemic outbreaks and our reactions.

[southwest]

Covid-19 is clearly not going to vanish unless we a) produce a successful vaccine, and then b) commit to a worldwide coordinated eradication programme. Part a) is merely technically difficult, part b) requires sustained global cooperation. We did it for smallpox (intensified eradication programme started 1967, world declared free of smallpox in 1980), we started doing it with polio and achieved a lot – only endemic now in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria – but seem to be going backwards due to local wars and global disagreements. I can't see us getting anywhere near that with any new programme due to the shapes of global politics and culture, sadly.

But what really counts for rail (and bus and air etc) travel is not so much the existence of the disease as the epidemic outbreaks and our reactions.

You never know, SARS(Sister virus to COVID19) died out in 2005, anything is possible.