5 replies to this topic

[b3nr]

Bristol’s urban area has about a million residents and next to no transport infrastructure, at all.

Bristol is now the most congested city in the United Kingdom after… London (Bristol CC Core Strategy Consultation Report, 2006). That includes Glasgow and Edinburgh. The traffic here is unrelenting, it grinds along narrow roads, with parked cars, traffic lights, sharp bends and steep hills all adding their own ingredients to a deadly mix.

http://maps.google.c....149369,0.43396

Don’t get excited about the blue ones, the motorways. They are for strategic routes; Wales to Landon, the north to the south west of England. For the residents of Bristol they are next to useless, hard to access and take circuitous routes. And the orange roads are single carriageway, lined with houses and shops.

The road network if positively medieval. Two key bottlenecks, one recently created mean there is no decent inner road to speak of at all. The two miles between the cities filthy under capacity railway station and the M32, a motorway that starts at a roundabout off of the M4 and ends at a set of traffic lights (one of the aforementioned bottle necks).

http://maps.google.c...&...p;z=12&om=1

The average bus speed is now 11mph (Evening Post 20/12/06), and of course this is lowered to about 4 in the central area.

Our busses are ran by a private company, First, who have complete control of routes, prices, and type of bus. For a day ticket covering Bristol, the cost is a ludicrous £4.40 per day. The busses are old, dirty and polluting: http://www.southbus....thants/1089.jpg

Other private companies fiddle about on marginal routes, many don’t have set prices, or even available timetable, they use 30 year old minibuses.

There is no proper network, if you need to change busses, forget it.

The Rail ‘network’ is hilarious … http://user.bahnhof....davidgr/severn/

One single laughable branch line travels right through the northern part of the city, via no-where important, taking the most indirect route possible, frequencies on this line are less than one an hour…

The other lines are shared with mainline trains, the two stations in the south of city get about 10 trains a day.

Out in the suburbs bus frequencies are diabolical, with prices a serious issue.

The second largest employment area is in the very north of the city, it takes around an hour on a bus form the centre, its only 8 miles away.

So can anyone beat Bristol?

Edited by b3nr, 21 December 2006 - 06:34 AM.

[Snowguy716]

This seems to be a problem in the UK.  The rail transportation there has been torn to shreds by private interests and Britrail was a disaster when I was there.  They are using out-of-date diesels that travel slowly on old tracks.

I don't understand this about the UK.  They seem to pay higher taxes than anyone else in Europe, and yet their infrastructure isn't nearly as good as other EUropean countries.  Does anyone know why?

[Spartan]

This is interesting. I'm interested in the privatizaiton of transit that has occured in the UK. Here in the USA, some people argue that transit should be a private entity and not a public one... but your example in Brtistol seems to indicate that privatization has not helped transit at all.

[b3nr]

The UK is essentially the only developed country that has privatised its mass transit and it has been an absolute disaster. Bus riderships are still much lower than they were before privatisation and rail riderships have gone up only by ‘default’, its pretty widely expected they would have done this anyway.

Its really really frustrating and makes life just that little bit harder. Other countries which have considered privatisation, such as Holland, just looked at the Uk and said ‘Hell no’. New Zealand privatised its railways and passenger services disappeared overnight.

At least here privatised public transport has a fighting chance with more compact cities and central employment areas, but in the states… surely not! I have only experienced public transport first hand once in America, and it was an interesting experience, lower land densities meant I had to walk a long way to the stop (they don’t like sidewalks in Texas either it seems), but it turned up on time, it was cheap, and information was good, with decent maps. Frequencies were low, and theres not really much in downtown, you cant really food shop there for example.

here, we don’t even have transit maps anymore, frequencies are higher but timetables largely ignored. It really is pretty bad.

To make matters worse, the main bus company now runs all the trains, what’s the point in privatising something and then letting it become a monopoly?

[Snowguy716]

I think mass transit would naturally allow for a monopoly since the only way to really increase profit margins would be to expand your service area rather than try to pump up ridership in one area.

There is enough space and demand to operate nation-wide long-journey mass transit in the U.S. with private interests simply because there are so many people that want to get from city to city, but airlines and car travel make up the vast majority of that travel with trains and buses filling only a small niche.  As it is, the trains are subsidized by the government at a pretty high rate.  All the railroad companies in the U.S carried 1 billion passengers in the 1910s each year, and consider this:  2006 was a record year for Amtrak since it was founded in 1971 carrying 26 million passengers.

Britrail is pretty much doomed, I would think, by Virgin Trains simply because Virgin has newer trains and is looking to 'shave the cream' off, much like Southwest Airlines in the U.S.

But I wouldn't worry too much.  There are plenty of wonderful things about the U.K that make up for the horrid mass transit... including the humor.. so at least you can have a good laugh while you're waiting for the train.

[b3nr]

Yeah, well we like to hide our emotions under a think layer or sarcasm. I have been told that if you suspect a British person is 'taking the piss', the best thing you can do act really upset, they won't know how to react having spent their whole lives hiding their feeling through humour...