Consultation until 28th November https://banestransport.co.uk/


There are a number of consultation events ...

Although I do not live in Bath is of major significance to me, my family and neighbours. We are in effect a connected city, where many facilities and services are present in one urban element and people move between the urban element to access them.  See https://grahamellis.uk/blog1764.html

Thanks for this.

I understand the objectives, but I do think they seem to forgotten that Bath is a relatively small city, and a lot of people working there live in surrounding towns. 

There doesn't even appear to be any thought on travel to big employers if don't live in the city centre. As an example how many people work at the university but live in Bradford on Avon, Trowbridge, Frome etc.  It's travel by car or take ages going indirectly by public transport.

Yes there are park and rides in south west, west and north. But why 3 on one side and nothing from M4 or Corsham/Chippenham or SouthEast etc.   It all feels half hearted with a few easy wins rather than a city wide approach.

We go to Bath a lot, we drive in with my electric car (about 40p return in overnight electricity, and £1.80 to park in Broad St car park for an hour).  We do occasionally use train (with our senior railcards, old enough for them, but too young for a Wiltshire bus pass), but only when we expect to be there for hours because it is more expensive to use public transport than the parking normally.

So yes I have a vested interest in trips to Bath too, but whilst the train and bus are diesel, and not electric like an increasing number of cars in our area, there is no quality incentive factor to use public transport

They were there from 1909 to 1939 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Tramways - and do not necessarily need to come back - at least along complete routes.   Angers in France, for example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angers_tramway - uses modern ground level current collection in the city centre - I saw it in action in June - and the various experiments with batteries in trains for anything from short gaps to a significant number of miles between live overheads are interesting and have moved in places from research through development to live use.

The strategy needs to be brave in its use of emergency technology so that it's not outdated even before it becomes live.  But there is a danger in that in that we could end up with something like the Cambridge Guided Busway which is so leading edge that it turned out to be bleeding edge.

IIRC^▸ ('if I recall/remember/read correctly'), WECA^» (West of England Combined Authority - about) part-funded a recent NR^» (Network Rail - home page) study into the updated costs of wiring Filton Bank into Temple Meads, including whether a couple of bridges could be left in-situ given advances in the rules around clearances and whether the refurbished Temple Meads roof could support electrification spans, Paddington-style.

On that basis, you could ask what BANES and WECA could do to get rail electrification through Bath prioritised and progressed, and what steps have been taken?