Thursday 6 November 2014

Inter-city train links will not fix our main transport problems

The infamous Beeching report, a piece of work so short-sighted and under-researched one might think it had been dreamed up by a City broker in 2006, led to the closure of more than 2,000 railway stations. The crucial flaw was to acknowledge the increase in road traffic and the low cost of road use without realising that the kind of increase seen would begin to cause problems within 20 years.

Defenders of Dr Beeching say that if his report hadn't suggested the closure of these lines, the larger routes would also have been at risk as the costs spiralled totally out of control. What they fail to see is that whilst the UK was ripping up railways and closing stations, other nations were beginning invest heavily in developing their networks. Those countries now have far better rail networks than we do.

As part of the 'backing the workers' rhetoric, talk about transport is a popular theme among the main political parties but they are focusing on the wrong things. My friends could all be described as middle-class and have the sorts of careers you might expect middle-class people to have: insurance, pensions, education, civil service, healthcare, retail management etc. None of them regularly travel between cities. Some occasionally travel for conferences etc but this is pretty straightforward to do when they need to. It is already possible to get direct trains between northern cities; all that the politicians' proposals would do is speed it up slightly.

The real problem in the country is getting to work from villages and towns, not getting from one branch office to another, or from your office to a conference centre 50-200 miles away. There are huge areas of the country where the only choice, other than a convoluted, lengthy and expense public transport route, is to drive.

When I left University and started commuting to my first job in Manchester from my parents' house in Lancashire, I experienced this first hand. I had to walk for 8 minutes, take a bus for 15 minutes, walk from the bus station to the train station - another 5 minutes, get the train to Manchester which took at least 30 minutes (depending on whether it was the slow local route or the quicker route with less stops) and then walk for another 10-15 minutes to work. Include the waiting times and that is at least 90 minutes - all for a 30-mile commute. Sometimes the trains in the evening were so full I couldn't get on and had to wait for the next one. I lasted two weeks before moving to a shared house in the Manchester City area. I was young enough to be ok with living like a student but that isn't suitable for everyone and for many, moving to the City area is far too expensive.

Trains still pass through the village my parents live in - sadly, they no longer stop there. It used to be possible to get direct trains to Blackpool, Preston, Wigan and Liverpool and the current trains passing through go all the way to London. But the station was closed in 1963 and local people and local businesses have suffered greatly. It's only 30 miles from Manchester but that journey by car, during rush hour, could easily take 90 minutes and quite possibly more. And that's before you factor in the fuel costs and parking costs in Manchester.

People from all over the country will have similar stories. Villages and towns all over the UK need alternatives to using our massively-congested roads and the environment would be greatly improved too by re-opening old railway lines and stations. Not only would people have better opportunities for work, quality of life would improve and house prices would balance out more evenly once forgotten areas are reconnected. But for some reason, politicians only seem interested in making direct journeys that are less vital and are already possible just a little bit quicker.

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