The Public Transport Thread

[jon81uk]

Efteling

• Nearest Hub: Tilburg or 's-Hertogenbosch.
• Whilst geographically "similar" in distance from a hub as Alton is to Stoke, you're ignoring the fact that it is in the Netherlands. The Dutch government heavily subsidises public transport to a degree that is alien to the UK. Their bus network is designed as a public service, not a commercial profit centre.

That last sentence is the key point to this entire thread really.
The Uk thinks buses as things poor people and the elderly need. Whereas many parts of Europe, particularly the Netherlands see public transport as an essential public service.

 

[Burner]

We're also forgetting that it's probably easier and cheaper for the government to subside transport infrastructure for an entirely new park from scratch, than spend hundreds of millions of pounds (probably upwards to billions) to completely redesign a road network in the middle of nowhere that probably hasn't been re-worked in probably 200 years.

 

[John_P]

Alton Towers is such an oddity, just imagine if someone took over a site just like that today saying you'd want to build a theme park and attract 3 million people a year were there'd be no alterations to the road network, and no additions to public transport offerings. You'd never get planning permission for it.

 

[jon81uk]

Double post. Whip me.

All of this is a perfect illustration of why I have been so vehemently critical of the government's approach to the Universal UK project in Bedford, and surprised by many enthusiasts opposition to similar measures at other parks.

Alton Towers, a major domestic employer and tourism magnet, has to rely on the whims of the "free market" for its connectivity. If a bus route doesn't turn a profit immediately, it's cut. If the roads are inadequate, tough luck. The park ought to pay for the infrastructure improvements, they charge enough for parking after all, goes the argument.

Yet, for a multi-billion dollar American conglomerate building a park which doesn't even exist yet, the UK government has committed a support package of approximately £500 million in infrastructure investment specifically to facilitate Universal's arrival. Plus an additional £80 million in "Exceptional Financial Support" handed directly to Bedford Borough Council to help them manage the "economic impacts".

Where's Staffordshire County Council's £80 million to manage the impact of Alton Towers? Where's the £200 million relief road from Uttoxeter to Cheadle that would make a bus service viable? Where's the rail investment to reconnect the Moorlands?

It's a grotesque distortion of the market. We allow our existing, established UK leisure industry to strangle on inadequate infrastructure whilst handing half a billion pounds of taxpayer money to their biggest global competitor to ensure they don't face the same problems.

If the government invested £270 million in a rail link for Alton Towers, we wouldn't be having a debate about whether D&G can afford the diesel for a single bus. It's perplexing that the enthusiast community cheers on state aid for Universal, but absolutely insist that it's entirely (and only) Merlin's responsibility to finance the improvements to the crumbling B roads which connect their park.

Although you can't really compare a brand-new theme park being built right next to a trainline and a few minutes from a second one to a historic theme park in the middle of the Staffordshire moorlands. In your previous post you set out most of the reasons why.
Could you even create a viable rail link to Alton Towers for that money? No existing train line is close to it. Staffordshire County Council have had funding in the past to manage the impact of JCB and Alton Towers, upgrading roads and adding multiple new roundabouts, although I agree more should be done. But I don't think rail is financially viable.

The brand-new Universal park is more comparable to Disneyland Paris, where as you said (as below) the French government paid to extend the rail network and build new infrastructure. It also sat on "new" land in an area where adding new infrastructure was feasible, similar to Universal. Whereas as you say Alton Towers is in the middle of the Staffordshire Moorlands in a location where rail infrastructure would be much harder to implement.

Disneyland Paris

• Nearest Hub: Marne-la-Vallée / Chessy.
• The French government extended the commuter network and built a dedicated high speed rail hub at the park gates.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Although you can't really compare a brand-new theme park being built right next to a trainline and a few minutes from a second one to a historic theme park in the middle of the Staffordshire moorlands. In your previous post you set out most of the reasons why.
Could you even create a viable rail link to Alton Towers for that money? No existing train line is close to it. Staffordshire County Council have had funding in the past to manage the impact of JCB and Alton Towers, upgrading roads and adding multiple new roundabouts, although I agree more should be done. But I don't think rail is financially viable.

The brand-new Universal park is more comparable to Disneyland Paris, where as you said (as below) the French government paid to extend the rail network and build new infrastructure. It also sat on "new" land in an area where adding new infrastructure was feasible, similar to Universal. Whereas as you say Alton Towers is in the middle of the Staffordshire Moorlands in a location where rail infrastructure would be much harder to implement.

The A50 improvements were part of a long term strategic corridor upgrade to improve east west connectivity across the Midlands, benefiting haulage, commuters, and yes, a major manufacturing exporter. It resolved an existing bottleneck on a trunk road.

The upgrades for Universal aren't resolving an existing bottleneck though. They're creating capacity for a demand that doesn't yet exist and will only exist when the specific commercial venture goes ahead.

Although Wixam's initial construction was planned, it was budgeted at circa £60m to serve the local housing development and, crucially funded primarily through the developers through a S106. It was designed as a commuter stop.

It wasn't designed as a high capacity resort gateway capable of processing 12 million tourists a year, with the necessary crowd control infrastructure, baggage handling space and shuttle interchanges. The delta between the cost of a functional local station and the cost of a Universal ready transport hub is the subsidy. That difference is being picked up by the taxpayer to facilitate Comcast's business model.

The feasibility of rail to Alton Towers has, of course, been discussed ad nauseam. Oakamoor railway station sits just over a mile from the park entrance. The track bed still exists (mostly) as part of the Churnet Valley Railway. Reconnecting that to the main line at Stoke / Leek is a massive engineering challenge, yes.

Is it impossible with a budget of £270 million (the rail portion of the Universal grant)? I have no idea. I suspect you could lay quite a lot of track for a quarter of a billion pounds. If rail truly is impossible, £200 million buys you a dedicated, state subsidised fleet of electric shuttle buses running from Stoke and Uttoxeter every 15 minutes for the next century. @owenstreet7 gets his dream.

The fact that "no one else is looking at investing billions" shouldn't be a justification for tearing up the rulebook on fair competition; if anything, it's the exact reason why the rulebook exists. We shouldn't be so desperate for foreign capital that we pay them to take our money.

 

[jon81uk]

The A50 improvements were part of a long term strategic corridor upgrade to improve east west connectivity across the Midlands, benefiting haulage, commuters, and yes, a major manufacturing exporter. It resolved an existing bottleneck on a trunk road.

But the new roundabouts on the B5030 and B5031 were acknowledged by local councillors that “This is a busy route used by traffic accessing JCB’s headquarters and Alton Towers, both major businesses employing hundreds of people, with Alton Towers attracting thousands of people to Staffordshire each year.“ They might have been part of a larger project attached to the A50, but it was acknowledges that the B-roads were benefitting JCB and to a lesser extent Alton Towers.
But yes not to the same scale as Universal, but again this is a brand new park situated much closer to existing infrastructure.

The upgrades for Universal aren't resolving an existing bottleneck though. They're creating capacity for a demand that doesn't yet exist and will only exist when the specific commercial venture goes ahead.

Similar to France paying for everything Disneyland paris required then.

 

[owenstreet7]

You're completely ignoring the fundamental differences in geography, population density and state infrastructure investment between the UK and the continent. Alton Towers suffers acutely from the last mile problem (or rather, the last fifteen miles. problem), which most of your examples simply don't have.

Phantasialand

• Nearest Hub: Brühl train station is 3km away.
• Brühl is effectively a suburb of Cologne and Bonn. It's serviced by both commuter rail and trams. You can get from Cologne Central Station to the park gate in under 30 minutes. It sits in one of the most densely populated metropolitan regions in Europe. It's incomparable to the Staffordshire Moorlands.

Europa-Park

• Nearest Hub: Ringsheim / Europa-Park station is 4km away.
• The park is so economically significant that Deutsche Bahn built a dedicated Intercity Express stop for it on the main line between Freiburg and Basel. It sits on a major transnational artery. Alton Towers sits on a B road that gets blocked if a tractor turns left.

Parc Astérix

• Nearest Hub: Charles de Gaulle Airport is 15km away.
• The park runs a shuttle from one of the busiest international airports on the planet. It captures tourists already in the transport ecosystem.

Efteling

• Nearest Hub: Tilburg or 's-Hertogenbosch.
• Whilst geographically "similar" in distance from a hub as Alton is to Stoke, you're ignoring the fact that it is in the Netherlands. The Dutch government heavily subsidises public transport to a degree that is alien to the UK. Their bus network is designed as a public service, not a commercial profit centre.

Parque Warner Madrid

• Nearest Hub: Madrid / Pinto (approx 15 to 30 km away).
• The park sits just south of the Madrid metropolitan area, a region of over six million people. The roads serving the park are major, multi-lane motorways. The Spanish government originally built a dedicated commuter train line directly to the park gates. Although the line later closed, the park remains fully integrated into the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium's network.

Disneyland Paris

• Nearest Hub: Marne-la-Vallée / Chessy.
• The French government extended the commuter network and built a dedicated high speed rail hub at the park gates.

PortAventura World

• Nearest Hub: Salou / Tarragona (approx 2 to 10 km away).
• The park has its own dedicated train station on the regional rail network connecting directly to central Barcelona. It also sits minutes away from both the motorway and Reus Airport. The park is embedded in one of the most heavily developed tourist coastlines in Europe.

Gardaland

• Nearest Hub: Peschiera del Garda (approx 2.5 km away).
• Peschiera del Garda is a major, high frequency station on a primary railway line. The park is immediately adjacent to the motorway and sits right on Lake Garda. It draws from a massive pool of tourists already moving through a highly developed, transnational transport corridor.

Alton Towers

• Nearest Hub: Stoke-on-Trent / Uttoxeter.
• To get from Stoke station to the park requires navigating 15 - 20 miles of rural, single carriageway roads that are often gridlocked. There is no dedicated infrastructure. There is no major population density along the route to pick up intermediate fares.

If they were cut, the evidence of viability wasn't there. Commercial operators don't cut profitable routes. If the buses were "very popular" (full of paying customers), D&G would still be running them.

The 950 is a high frequency shuttle connecting a major urban rail hub (Staines) to a park 15 minutes away. It can do multiple loops an hour. A Stoke - Alton bus can do one, maybe two loops in a morning peak. The economics are entirely different.

Just to hammer in the economics against a dedicated shuttle bus, let's play a quick round of Bus Tycoon.

Assuming a double decker bus with roughly 75 seats as a baseline.

Thorpe Park:

• Route: Staines Station -> Thorpe Park.
• Distance: 3.5 miles.
• Time: roughly 12-15 minutes.
• Efficiency: In the critical 9:00am - 11:00am arrival window, a single bus can perform 4 or 5 round trips.
• Capacity: 1 bus driver can transport approx. 350 - 400 paying customers into the park during the morning peak.
• Result: High revenue density. Profitable.

Alton Towers:

• Route: Stoke-on-Trent Station - Alton Towers.
• Distance: ~16 miles (via Cheadle / Oakamoor).
• Time: 45-60 minutes (traffic dependent).
• Efficiency: In the critical 9:00am - 11:00am arrival window, a single bus can perform 1 round trip. When it gets back to Stoke for a second run, it's nearly midday and nobody wants to go to a theme park that closes at 4pm.
• Capacity: 1 bus driver transports 75 paying customers (max) into the park during the morning peak.
• Result: Low revenue density.

A commercial bus costs roughly £350 - £500 a day to put on the road (driver wages for a full shift, diesel, insurance, maintenance, depot costs).

If you charge £10 return (which is optimistic), in order to break even, you need 35 - 50 people on that specific bus, every single day.

On a sunny Saturday in Scarefest? Achievable.

On a rainy Tuesday in May when there are only 3 people getting off the train at Stoke? You've taken £30 in revenue against £400 in costs. You've lost £370. Multiply that loss across a 180 day season, and you can see why it's not worth bothering with.

The survival of the slow, meandering 32A proves that the only way to get a bus to Alton Towers is if the taxpayer helps pay for it to stop at the village hall and every other lamp post in Staffordshire, where a pensioner might want to get off to buy a pint of milk on the way. It exists primarily because Staffordshire County Council subsidises it (or deems it a necessary lifeline route) to ensure Mrs Miggins can get to the doctors in Cheadle. The fact that it terminates at Alton Towers is largely incidental to its primary function of connecting rural villages.

Fantastic points

PortAventura I would say is an absolute nightmare. You can get there from Barcelona on it's more limited service but to get a more frequent service, catch a train to Vila Seca and take a 45 minute walk to the resort.

For the cut bus routes to Towers, we do have to remember it's definitely not designed for the park. It's clearly designed as a skeleton service for the local market as you've said.

I definitely think it would be more commercially viable if it was designed for Alton Towers with the local route being more for local use. Something where you'd get on at Stoke, go to Uttoxeter to pick up a few more people, go to the park and then have a service that comes back around closing time.

Something like Parque Warner's would be perfect with two or three buses (more like coaches) on the way and return trip up to half an hour after closing. I see they also do a Water Park service which could be amazing. Parque Warner has an option to get a park ticket which helps the tourist market.

I definitely think a fine tuned service that fits Towers is commercially viable as long as it's what the guests want from the service.

 

[QTXAdsy]

To move away from buses and onto the railway next door, I'm surprised that no one has brought up the idea of asking what if the Churnet Valley line hadn't closed in the first place and had been there at the start when Towers opened as a theme park in 1980.

Wonder how this conversation about poor transport links would have been going if we had a surviving rail link, albeit with a roundabout way giving the station sits at the wrong side of the park entrance?

 

[jon81uk]

To move away from buses and onto the railway next door, I'm surprised that no one has brought up the idea of asking what if the Churnet Valley line hadn't closed in the first place and had been there at the start when Towers opened as a theme park in 1980.

Wonder how this conversation about poor transport links would have been going if we had a surviving rail link, albeit with a roundabout way giving the station sits at the wrong side of the park entrance?

The park entrance may have been built in that location and we may never have got the monorail then.