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In your view, what is wrong with British public transport and what would you do to solve the problems?

Matt N

Matt N

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Hi guys. Over in the Chessington thread, a debate ensued about the ULEZ in Greater London, and this led to a wider debate about public transport and its feasibility for getting to Chessington. One thing I have noticed is that in general, people’s opinion of British public transport is pretty low, and UK public transport supposedly being awful almost seems to be a running joke. This country’s bus and train networks have a pretty bad reputation among many people. But I’d be keen to know; in your view, what is so wrong with it, and what would you do to solve the problems?

I’ll admit that I’m a little stumped as to what’s supposedly so awful about British public transport. I admittedly don’t know any different to how public transport is in the UK, but the public transport network we have functions perfectly well, from what I can see. Admittedly, the strikes don’t paint an especially rosy picture from a worker’s standpoint, but those are caused more by pay and the countrywide economic situation than anything to do with how the system functions from a user standpoint. Sure, a bus only runs through my village once every 3 hours, but I always put that down to living in a rural area rather than any specific issue with British public transport; surely sporadic public transport coverage is to be expected in a rural area? Isn’t that the case for any public transport network?

So I’d be keen to know; why is it that everyone seemingly hates Britain’s public transport network so much?
 
Matt N said:
Hi guys. Over in the Chessington thread, a debate ensued about the ULEZ in Greater London, and this led to a wider debate about public transport and its feasibility for getting to Chessington. One thing I have noticed is that in general, people’s opinion of British public transport is pretty low, and UK public transport supposedly being awful almost seems to be a running joke. This country’s bus and train networks have a pretty bad reputation among many people. But I’d be keen to know; in your view, what is so wrong with it, and what would you do to solve the problems?

I’ll admit that I’m a little stumped as to what’s supposedly so awful about British public transport. I admittedly don’t know any different to how public transport is in the UK, but the public transport network we have functions perfectly well, from what I can see. Admittedly, the strikes don’t paint an especially rosy picture from a worker’s standpoint, but those are caused more by pay and the countrywide economic situation than anything to do with how the system functions from a user standpoint. Sure, a bus only runs through my village once every 3 hours, but I always put that down to living in a rural area rather than any specific issue with British public transport; surely sporadic public transport coverage is to be expected in a rural area? Isn’t that the case for any public transport network?

So I’d be keen to know; why is it that everyone seemingly hates Britain’s public transport network so much?
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The buses in my area are absolutely terrible, especially on my local route. I've given up waiting ages for three to turn up at once and now walk into town most of the time instead.
 
Trains should be comfier, and every train should have a bar car with a fully functional bar on board.

More realisticly longer distance services should be be able to deliver food and drink to your seat like LNER does.
 
I try to use public transport where I can, but certainly over the last year or so have found going in the car much better at times.

Trains can be expensive. An off peak return to London for me would be £98. I can get that down the around £50 with split ticketing and taking a slower train, which doesn't add a massive amount of time. Downside here is the timetable changes next month, so when I arrive at Crewe from Chester there will be a 58 minute wait for this train as opposed to 28 now (And it is usually at platform already).

Locally my rail service is pretty decent with trains every 15/30 minutes to Liverpool taking 40 minutes, though I do think the last train at 23:30 is a bit early for a Friday or Saturday, be nice if there was a later one or two. Trains are over 40 years old, and the new trains to replace them have been sat rusting away in sidings around Europe for up to the last 3 years.

Buses on the other hand, ye, where to start. Want to go to Liverpool, will take 90 minutes on a good day. Chester? Need to go for a magical mystery circular tour of Cheshire Oaks first that takes a while, and coming up to the infamous Xmas Shopping period, be stuck there for a good hour or more. Bus routes have been cut back greatly over the years so what remains are a few services covering the most profitable bits from all the axed services, so you end up with a bus that goes around the houses multiple times before getting to its destination.

In the not to distant past even had night buses on a Friday & Saturday night, great for coming back from Liverpool at 3AM, but they were gradually cut back, and Covid pretty much killed off what, if anything was left. Now the last bus back from Liverpool is 22:30. The Sunday service is no longer something to write home about but at least there is one, many places the idea of a bus on a Sunday is mere fantasy. Also have become very expensive. I was shocked to find a 1 mile journey on one of our local buses would cost £3.50. Good job I've got legs...

One big thing that I find a pain is the lack of co-operation between bus and rail companies in coordinating timetables and have some integrated transport; so can hop on a bus to the train station arriving in plenty of time to catch the train, and similar on return. What tends to happen, if a bus ever goes near a train station is it's timetabled to arrive just after the train has gone or it is timetabled to leave just as the train is due to arrive. Also bus and train stations seem to be at opposite ends of town rather than having a proper interchange station.

Outside of central London Public Transport is hit and miss. Some areas its OK, others it is woeful. The larger cities tend to fair better than the towns. Even London though has its downfalls. Using Chessington as an example: Trains every 30 minutes which is acceptable, but late evening goes down to hourly, and this seems to happen quite a few services in London that go out to the sticks as it were. In the main core heading out, with all other services combined frequency is good, but once the trains start branching out to their respective destinations, start to become thin on the ground.

Having experienced public transport elsewhere in Europe, then what we have isn't all that bad, but could be a lot better. Certainly better integration between rail/bus/tram even cycle, and much better fares and a rail card that is for everyone which can get 1/3 of fares
 
When I went into Birmingham city centre on the train in July. I got there no problems but they cancelled my last train cause of lack of staff so had to wait over a hour for a rail replacement bus.
Over the Christmas period I will be using the bus as I got my work do on the 23rd, going the football on the 26th, theatre on the 29th and out with friends on the 30th.
 
At 40 years old, despite the lack of investment in new roads over many years, I learnt decades ago that you need a driving licence to do anything. My driving licence still remains the most important qualification I'll likely ever gain to aid my prosperity.

We all want to use public transport. I've used the trains a number of times to get to work in the rare scenarios I've been working between the hours of 8am and 8pm on weekdays (mainly due to my car being in for repairs or in for an MOT) and it was mainly a lovely experience. Someone else does the driving and you can crack open a beer on the way home. Wonderful stuff.

But the real world isn't like that. Shock and horror to you kids who may have been lead down the garden path by your elders, but a huge minority of jobs don't require you to work 9-5 Mon-Fri like some Dolly Parton song and - new flash - many jobs require early mornings, late nights and weekends when public transport doesn't run. They also frequently require you to be in places where there are no railway stations and bus stops are few and far between.

Unless you live in London of course where you're lavished with taxpayers money for world class transportation services. If that isn't good enough, rest assured that the government of the day is so wrapped up inside the city bubble that they'll pick the pockets of the rest of us to lavish yet more expensive infrastructure projects upon London like Cross rail.

Meanwhile, Scotland's rail network serves very little tangible purpose, to cross the Pennines takes hours, public transport in Wales is something like Trevor's bus in an episode of Fireman Sam, Devon and Cornwall is served by ancient diesel locomotives the rest of the country doesn't want and Bristol remains the largest city in the country to have neither a rapid transit system or any form of ring motorway.

Our public transport systems in this country are either built on the ideas of Victorians or Londoners and the policies around them from successive governments continue that down that route. And no, HS2 won't solve any of those problems. All it will do is allow a handful of 9-5 Dave's and Sarah's from the Accounts dept from the west Midlands, and possibly the north west, to get to London (the only place in the UK the government actually care about) slightly faster.
 
cracks knuckles
Where to start! Well let's start at @Matt.GC comment about driving licenses needed to do anything: well I hope this isn't true, because if I were to get a driving license one of two things would happen: 1) I will crash a car and kill myself and others 2) the DVLA hunt me down and put me in prison. I am visually impaired and I don't think people would take too kindly to me on the roads, especially lampposts, they're always in the way.

Next, let's talk about trains, they're a mess. There are so many little things that NEED to be done but let's go through a few:
  • As rail contracts end do not renew them and instead bring them under public ownership, (this especially applies to CrossCounty who are dreadful, take all of there routes away ASAP)
  • Bring new trains in where possible. Preferably trains that can be converted from diesel to electric when lines are electrified.
  • Electrify lines, as many as possible
  • Standardise ticket prices, they shouldn't vary so much. I understand having peak and off peak but there should be no need for split ticketing or anything like that. Bring in a fair system that makes it affordable but makes the system turn at least enough to cover itself. Make sure there's a total fare cap.
  • Bring in the ability to use an 'oyster' system across the whole country when tickets have been standardised. There is no reason this cannot work. For the question of Railcards you simply have contactless cards that act as railcards, you can then log into your railcard account online and assign which card you'd like your discounted fair to be charged to whenever you can your rail card.
  • Bring in lines that should exist, there are a few examples of this. some I'm aware of is @Thameslink Rail 's example where he cannot get from Luton to Stevenage without going into London, that's stupid. Another I know of is that there is no way to get from Leicester to Coventry direct by train, this would connect the whole of the midlands better, sort it out.
  • As @MattyH says a reasonable in seat ordering system on at least major train services, this would result in more cashflow for the new state owned train operators (and eventually operator when all licenses with external companies have ended and they can all be combined).
  • Make train stations a less miserable place to be, we've all got to wait in them. Some are lovely little old victorian stations (they're fine), but stations like Birmingham new street are horrid.
Right, what about busses?
Well this is a little more tricky, there are serious problems, but not many easy solutions. It seems a lot of councils are in charge of there own bus systems. I think this overcomplicates things and coucnils generally aren't good at these sorts of things. Bring them under some form of national operator. This new national operator should, like trains, bring in standardisation of all prices, free travel for disabled and elderly people at all times of day (some councils only allow this at certain times of day and some allow them to be used on trams, and in London on the tube).

As for the current 'bus pass' system, I would make it so disabled and elderly people can travel on buses, trams, metro and other local train services free while also giving them discount on longer rail journeys,
 
I feel for you not being able to drive and being left at the mercy of crappy public transport. There's railway lines all over the country, many of them reopened in the 80's and 90's after short sighted policies in the 60's of closing them. Many more have never reopened and never did which has left us with a network in high demand, starved of funding, not fit for purpose and costing a small fortune to travel on.

As for buses, I wouldn't be too keen for national government to take over them if I was you. They'd probably spend more of your money putting leather seats and air conditioning on London buses as opposed to improving services in your area. They're in full control of the levers of the railways and look how that's gone so far. Cross rail and an efficient tube system for London, the east coast mainline electrified since the 60's and nationalised every time it fails. Frequently late or cancelled 1970's built diesels chugging along barley updated Victorian lines run by First Group for most of the rest of us.
 
HS2 has been manipulated by the government so badly that it's been pruned.

The original full spec line was going to run to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham and have connections onto the East and West coast mainline and a connection onto HS1.

With these full specs you would have been doing it's main job of increasing capacity. If express trains are on HS2, there would be more room for local and freight trains to run, therefore increasing capacity.

If the connections between HS2 and HS1 is built you could have had a possibility for international services from more destinations.

The main issue with public transport is the conservative government.
 
I work roughly 4 miles away but if I wanted to get the bus I would have to get 3 of them which I did once on the day of my work do and a journey which takes 10-15 mins took me nearly a hour.
Someone at work who past retirement age comes In his car Mon to Fri but gets the bus on Saturday as it’s free. He lives in West Brom so has to get a bus into town and out again and takes him just over a hour but longer to get home with the traffic.
 
Matt.GC said:
Unless you live in London of course where you're lavished with taxpayers money for world class transportation services.
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Nope pre-pandemic TfL was entirely funded from fares and advertising plus a little council tax, they were one of the only urban transport providers in the world not to get funding from central government taxes. Even the roads TfL manage have to be paid for from fares.
Most countries in the world see public transport as necessary and fund it from taxation as well as fares.
Then there is the current issue of it being a conservative government.
 
I know some say nationalise the rail network but TBH, this does has several issues. As history has proven us, both the Tories and Labour have been pretty bad for the rail network for example when Labour won election in 1964, they promised to reverse much of the Beeching closures...instead they closed far more than what was recommended which says a lot. So while the Tories do deserve flak, I won't hold my breath should Labour return to power as honestly any positive change would only be a drop in the ocean.

Problem was the management structure of British Rail who didn't seem to realise that heavy rationalisation such as automatic level crossing, basic signalling, closure of many pointless stations and cutting of staff and not to mention diesel locomotives that actually worked would have all helped. Government does seem to favour roads and sadly this is the same north of the border in which while the SNP Government may look like more positive in reopening railways, they actually spend far more on roads such as the North Queensferry crossing and A9 Duelling project. For example they are just as bad in pruning railway projects in which the reopened Borders Railway is a prime example in which their conservative passenger figures were so woefully underwealming that the railway is unable to handle heavy the passenger numbers, albeit this was before the pandemic, but it seems that they'll have to spend more just to double track in places in which had they doubled tracked it all the way they wouldn't have been in this situation.

I have many railway related stories of where things weren't wrong but I need my own separate topic to say which closures were wrong, mostly in Scotland at least though I can answer those in England and Wales.
 
One of the biggest problems with public transport is peoples expectations and willingness to be mildly inconvenienced. We have become accustomed to a fairly extreme level of comfort and convenience in our everyday lives, and driving everywhere satisfies that. If you are going to use public transport you just have to accept it will take longer, sometimes considerably so, and a lot of people are just not accepting of that. You cannot expect some sort of door to door service to rural villages with any regularity.

I write this sat on a train. I have to leave home about 20 minutes earlier and arrive home around 40 minutes later than if I drove to work. Driving is viable and my time is precious, but with petrol and parking costs this is the right thing for me to do. Also gives me a chance to sit and read and relax a bit after work.

That's not to say there couldn't be huge improvements in the quality and cost of buses and trains, there certainly could. Services to anything remotely rural finish too early when there is clear demand as seen by huge queues for the taxi rank when our branch line closes in the evening.

But i wonder how many people who currently drive a particular route would use trains or buses instead if improvements were made? What is a person's tipping point?

There is local uproar that the train service has not returned to its pre-pandemic service with fewer trains per hour and fewer direct trains to London, but the trains are running half empty. How muchfunding should be tipped into something people are unwilling to use regardless?
 
jon81uk said:
Nope pre-pandemic TfL was entirely funded from fares and advertising plus a little council tax, they were one of the only urban transport providers in the world not to get funding from central government taxes. Even the roads TfL manage have to be paid for from fares.
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Cross Rail and the Victoria line were built with both huge sums of national government money and government loans to TFL. So was the M25 which is mostly maintained and upgraded by the DFT as all national motorways are.
 
pluk said:
One of the biggest problems with public transport is peoples expectations and willingness to be mildly inconvenienced. We have become accustomed to a fairly extreme level of comfort and convenience in our everyday lives, and driving everywhere satisfies that. If you are going to use public transport you just have to accept it will take longer, sometimes considerably so, and a lot of people are just not accepting of that. You cannot expect some sort of door to door service to rural villages with any regularity.

I write this sat on a train. I have to leave home about 20 minutes earlier and arrive home around 40 minutes later than if I drove to work. Driving is viable and my time is precious, but with petrol and parking costs this is the right thing for me to do. Also gives me a chance to sit and read and relax a bit after work.

That's not to say there couldn't be huge improvements in the quality and cost of buses and trains, there certainly could. Services to anything remotely rural finish too early when there is clear demand as seen by huge queues for the taxi rank when our branch line closes in the evening.

But i wonder how many people who currently drive a particular route would use trains or buses instead if improvements were made? What is a person's tipping point?

There is local uproar that the train service has not returned to its pre-pandemic service with fewer trains per hour and fewer direct trains to London, but the trains are running half empty. How muchfunding should be tipped into something people are unwilling to use regardless?
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If my local trains were running half empty that would be considered a massive success!
I'm right on the local commuter line to Manchester from the Ribble Valley.
The rush hour trains are packed out from Blackburn in the morning, likewise the teatime rush, but the other (80%) of the trains run 95% empty.
The motorway to Manchester is now congested right through the day, especially to that Holy of Holies, the Trafford Centre (which has excellent public transport links).
Nice warm own car, own music, safe from strangers, direct door to door with no waiting, quicker, for a similar (or cheaper with a full car) cost.

My answer, make that choice uneconomic...increase the purchase taxes on all new and used cars, and make annual "road tax" (I know it isn't) proportionate to the cost of using public transport, increase all fuel duties on top.
.
As a good communist, I would say increase income taxes to ninety percent for all income (paid and unpaid) over a couple of hundred grand a year, to pay for massively subsidised local and national public transport system...like we used to have seventy years ago, before Beeching, and the destruction of local bus services.

As a kid, I could go to Manchester for 4p on the bus...2 busses actually (buzzez round here), because that was the maximum fare for a child, I think the adult limit was 10p.

All the time, all of the day, every day.
Kids locally now do not have that option.
Kids now do not have that cheap option.
 
I'd get public transport to work except...

No train station nearby.

Bus takes at least an hour. Car takes half that of not less time.

Buses in Leeds also are a fantastic lottery at times. First are the main operators and they are terrible. Buses may or may not stop even with you stood at the stop signalling, if they even turn up. And the timetables compared to the app timetables aren't the same.

Leeds becoming anti-car in the centre at the moment is a good idea in theory, but there's no viable or decent transit system to make up for it. So people still drive in but are now all forced onto the same road, causing more traffic and emissions. Good job council.

Unfortunately the other issue with trains are expansions are either poorly thought out, run hilariously over budget, or suffer from Nimbyism. Then on top of that it costs more for me to get a train to London than drive? Surely long distance public transport needs to be the cheaper alternative when the majority can't claim tickets back through work?

Also lol Northern trains.
 
Matt.GC said:
Cross Rail and the Victoria line were built with both huge sums of national government money and government loans to TFL. So was the M25 which is mostly maintained and upgraded by the DFT as all national motorways are.
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Yep all national motorways are funded from taxation as is most large scale transport infrastructure such as Crossrail which has been planned for about 40 years. The issue isn’t that things are getting built in London, it’s that the government keep cancelling the public transport infrastructure elsewhere. All the northern parts of HS2 have been scaled back as well as northern powerhouse rail. All of these projects should be going ahead.
 
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