CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
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The toll road has failed to significantly cut congestion on the M6
Journey times on the M6 are only slightly better than before the toll opened
The cost of the toll for users has risen well above inflation each year
The toll operator has lost around £26 million a year since the toll opened
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I certainly don't use the toll road. I travel to Oxford from Edinburgh once or twice a month and there seems little benefit in using it.
There is a little more congestion, especially around the roadworks there but traffic still moves at a reasonable rate. (however, we generally pass that area early to mid-afternoon so that will be a quiter period)
Don't like the idea of introducing tolls an ALL motorways though which I heard as a possibility on BBC Breakfast this morning
bet it would still be cheaper than the train to Ayr and back...
There in is the point. Congestion will never be reduced as long as the car is still cheaper than the train.
Unless there is a cost comparable option to just the petrol costs then people will still take the car over the train and road tolls will be seen as more fleecing of the motorist.
It will also take me longer to travel to Oxford next month by train than it took me to cross the Atlantic for my holidays....which is more of a deterrent for me than cost.
Thing is the car's not cheaper than the train.....well mines not.
Mine is in most cases and for any more than 1 person by a country mile and thats with a 406. This is only including the petrol. I'm sure if you pro rate the running costs the maths is different but most don't since they need the car any way.
For reference i get about 40 mpg on a run so to Glasgow city centre from EH1 google reckons 45 miles so a little over 5L even at 1.15 p/l thats only £6 and i'm not so restricted when i get there.
Scotrail day return: £10.70.
Now if i can share the petrol costs you can see how quickly the train stacks up.
Yep, even if you accept mileage as an accurate overall cost, 90 miles to Glasgow and back is just £38. In reality of course, we should remove things which are already paid for (depreciation, insurance, VED and MOT) and the figure is much closer to fuel only. Say £20 for argument's sake.
2 adults and 2 children by train is, according to the Scotrail website, £69. And you should really add to that the cost of bus tickets (or taxi?) to the station at either end, which is probably another £10 minimum.
There is no comparison.
A car journey of 45 miles at 40mpg would use 5.1 litres, or 10.2 litres return, or about £11.50 of fuel.
But you must also add in the 90 miles of car ownership cost, based on how many miles one drives per year vs. the cost of insurance, VED, MOT and sundry spares. That could quite easily be £500 per year, and anywhere from 3p to 15p per mile. A 90 mile drive to and from Glasgow in my last car would have cost an additional £15 because the operating costs were (quite) high compared with the (quite) low annual mileage.
The same trip by bike/train requires 20 miles of cycling plus 94 miles of train. Using my most expensive bike works out under present mileage as £14, plus the £10.70 train ticket. So er, hmm, it works out about the same as driving but takes twice as long. But hey, I'm all for not driving along the M8.
Taking a return train trip only costs the price of the ticket, so in some cases taking the train is actually cheaper than driving. The 'value for money' aspect for private transport always centres around using it as much as possible against the fixed or predictable costs. The trick is to use the more cost-minimal forms of transport where practicable, and to minimise the longer journeys for which public transport is appropriate and discouraging oneself from owning a car and then feeling duty bound to use it as much as possible 'to justify the cost'.
Edit: of course, Dave's quite right about maximising the number of people carried, where a car costs the same whether it has one person or five inside it, while every person needs to buy a train ticket.
Here in is one of the problems. Car ownership involves a lot of fixed costs depreciation, insurance, VED and MOT, etc. these don't very with amount of usage you make of the car. So if you own a car there is a built in incentive to use it as often as you can. Whereas using the train has a fixed cost for every journey, they don't get cheaper the more often you use it...
Your quite right Arellcat, however for the majority of people they already have a car so if you want to convince them that they'd be better on the train you have to make it cheaper for that trip becuase the rest of the expense, ved, running costs etc, are already written off as a something that you need because you need the car any way.
It begins to look like the best approach for the individual is:
Ride a super cheap clunker bike to the railway station, take the bike onboard, relax, then ride to the destination.
For two people, ride a second-hand or high-mileage tandem, try to take the bike onboard, relax, then ride to the destination.
For two people, neither of whom owns a tandem, or for more than two, it's probably cheaper to share the driving in a small, super efficient diesel car that does 65mpg or more.
'Course the important part of the first two is not to own a car in first place.
Big black hole in the road for throwing good bike money into...
Or if you must have one get a big old Volvo with close to zero depreciation and repair costs.
On second thoughts... don't then the price of them comes down for me.
On topic, we usually go to Dorset in the summer because the memsahib likes it. We try to travel over night but even if I did it during the day I'm not going to pay for a toll road.
What if you need to transport a lot of large heavy objects over a long distance regularly? The bike and train are both useless for this.
Take up truck driving as an alternative hobby?
For most people, they simply can not imagine how they would get about if they didn't have a car. It is not until you get ride of the thing that you realise what a drag they are. When I sold my last car I thought that I would get another one later (when my circumstances changed). However, when that day came, I found that I didn't want another car, I enjoy the freedom of not having a car too much! I have toyed with the idea of joining the City Car Club, but haven't managed to justified the expense yet.
Take up truck driving as an alternative hobby?
that's what I did!
The problem of marginal cost is exactly the thorny issue here.
If you start from first principles it's possible to make a train ride look relatively favourable compared with the costs of driving (as Arellcat does above).
But the thing is that when any given individual is deciding how to travel, arguably they are making a rational decision to reduce the per-mile cost of car ownership by spreading these fixed costs over a larger mileage.
Even fuel is a postponed cost if, like me, you fill up once a month. For us taking the car to the shops is literally free (for the next four weeks...)
The simple (and perhaps only) solution is to increase the marginal cost of driving, through a much higher fuel tax or pay-per-mile system. Even if such a system was revenue-neutral (so the government get the same amount of tax through pay-per-mile as they currently do from fuel & vehicle excise) it would offer a dramatic disincentive to unnecessary car use.
If you actually had to pay £5 right now to drive to the shops, you wouldn't bother unless you had to. Being told that you'll need to pay £5 extra over the next 12 months - who cares!
This document makes for interesting reading: http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/190425/220778/trends2009.pdf
O/T Highlights:
Car usage down year on year but still orders of magnitude higher than all others. (p33)
Cost of real cost of motoring down masively while real cost of rail/coach and bus fares up by a fair margin. (p35)
"Cost of real cost of motoring down masively while real cost of rail/coach and bus fares up by a fair margin."
The same thing has been happening for the last 20 years...
...when any given individual is deciding how to travel, arguably they are making a rational decision to reduce the per-mile cost of car ownership by spreading these fixed costs over a larger mileage.
That's because the cost of ownership is a fixed, single payment. It doesn't matter (resulting maintenance notwithstanding) whether you own a car and use it for one journey a year or a thousand. You could probably reduce the fixed cost somewhat by taking out a restricted mileage policy. But as soon as you've paid up for owning a car, the only real ongoing cost is the fuel, so if an individual can justify the spend for at least one car journey each year, the car suddenly becomes very attractive for all journeys, if the fuel efficiency is sufficiently good. And as soon as you compare the fuel cost with the public transport ticket cost, you're almost always going to favour the car, especially if you then load it up with other people.
So really the only way to make public transport super attractive is to live, financially speaking, car-free, or as close to car-free as possible, with a powered vehicle that is as small and cheap and fuel efficient as possible. A motorscooter or motorbike could be that powered transport in many cases, but can be horribly affected by certain inclement weather.
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