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.
Passengers up 6.8% is a success! There's no way as a service provider you set a KPI of 10%, and can the service for being 3% down, how many other govt services are more than 3% off their KPIs.
The service was always being cut, it was always an election bribe, which as they say in the article particularly benefited the well off (poor people get buses, not trains).
If only the journos had bothered to look at the report, rather than the Transport Scotland press release then they would have found that:
A prudent view of annual costs would be in the range of £25 million to £30 million with a (less likely) downside scenario of up to £40 million.and:
...a prudent range for the value for money is between 1.2 and 1.5 – benefits of between £1.20 and £1.50 for each £1 spent.This is downgraded to:
...between 1.0 and 1.25 or between £1.00 and £1.25 of benefits for every £1 spentby applying a 'distributional weighting' that I have never seen applied to any other Scottish Government transport assessment.
“by applying a 'distributional weighting' that I have never seen applied to any other Scottish Government transport assessment.”
So someone doesn’t like trains?
Or they ‘weight’ things to favour roads?
(Or is that ‘continue the idea that roads are free/ not subject to normal cost benefit analyses?!)
@chdot - the weighting is to reflect that rail users tend to have higher than average incomes. I have never seen socio-economic weighting used in any other transport project assessment. Ministers clearly wanted to paint the results of this trial in a poor a light as possible - using the highest possible cost estimate and the lowest possible estimate of benefits.
They also failed to mention that in nine months some two million car trips were replaced by rail journeys. In the big scheme of things not much, but actually quite an incredible shift.
If they were actually serious about the climate emergency, all train fares within Scotland would be for a nominal amount (to prevent abuse) and capacity would be maintained by lengthening trains / platforms, adding tracks, etc.
As others have said, why are roads massively subsidised and free at the point of use, and railways not?
Given that the Scottish Government has imposed 'emergency spending controls' (Times, 13 Aug), is it plausible that the ending of the off-peak rail offer is connected? I note the Transport Scotland report was published on 20 Aug (but will certainly in any case have taken rather longer than a week to draft, finalise, approve and publish).
@Arellcat - possibly, but the ending of the pilot was telegraphed in a letter from the Cabinet Secretary and associated interim assessment provided to the Scottish Parliament's NZET Committee in June.
Anyone not fluent in civil service speak may consider the report to be neutral - but it was effectively a 'Project Cancelled' klaxon.
Congestion charging (aka Peak Fare) is only exercised on rail I think. Scotland's ambition should be to have a simple fare structure based on distance with no need to worry about time of travel. Passengers 'know' they might not get a seat in the rush hour. Only here do you pay for it - or during the off peak trial create too much demand as @baldcyclist reports.
Since commuting weekly into city I have gone away from train unless using my folder. Still fastest direct way in but then found that uniquely my Scotrail Club 50 railcard isn't valid on the nationalised LNER company on Highland Line. Considering the infrequency of services and the fact I can use on TP trains in Scotland that's a bit of a pain.
It's all these nit picking restrictions that count against rail in my view. Using Ember bus costs nothing and I can book in two clicks and help to clutter up the M90 with often only 12 people on board.
I wonder what the ambition of GB Rail will be? Assume their logo might go on many trains on our shared island but will it do anything fresh on fares by extending ticket life on open returns for example?
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It saw fares standardised across the day, paid for by the Scottish Government, and it did increase passenger numbers by 6.8 per cent, but that fell disappointingly short of the 10 per cent increase needed for the scheme to pay for itself.
Looked at purely on that basis, you can have sympathy with the cash-strapped Scottish Government’s predicament, but the abandonment of the scheme is still a depressing moment which makes it feel as if our hopes of a sustainable, futuristic transport system are slipping away.
The vision for modern, low-carbon, interconnected transport for Scotland is decades old. By now, carbon emissions were meant to be plummeting downwards. We were meant to be cycling with joy in our hearts on well-maintained cycle lanes to our newly reopened local stations, hopping on onto affordable state-of-the-art electric trains, settling into plush seats, connecting to fast and reliable rail wifi, and celebrating how much more spare cash we had to spend on our healthier lifestyles now that we’d dumped our cars.
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So, the unions have agreed to higher pay, but does this actually achieve anything other than averting strike action?
There is still a fundamental shortage of train crew, and those who agree to work (some of) their rest days will just be as tired as before, but will now paid more for their effort. The rail unions have always been pretty militant, and to their credit have fought for their members, but some of their calls have been wholly obstructive in the long run.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/30/harry-styles-twemlow-viaduct-fence
The Twemlow Viaduct, which carries England’s busy west coast mainline, has become a shrine for Styles fans from across the world as it is reputedly the site of his first kiss.Thousands of people have scrawled their name into its Edwardian arches, leaving messages such as: “You are home,” “We’ll be alright” and even “Harry – I’ve had your baby.”
...
Many fans have written their names on the historical structure, while others have taken their hunt for a souvenir one step further. “People are putting murals and messages of support on; however, the paints and solvents are actually damaging the brickwork and people have been taking bricks out,” said Rob Stephens, a senior engineer for Network Rail, which maintains the viaduct.
The rail firm has now fenced off part of the 23-arch structure and erected a specially constructed wall with black boards for fans to inscribe their names, with the aim of preventing further damage.
Within 24 hours, Harries from as far away as the US and Germany had left messages on the new wall.
Sigh. People are flying half way round the world to commit criminal damage for nothing more than a delusional homage to someone who quite likely cares little about them beyond the money to be made from them. Trouble is, we're taking a whole raft of other species with us...
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As commuters return en masse after summer holidays next week, the political omens – and the data – afford some hope that a new Labour government may change rail for the better. Say what you like about Gordon Brown, but at least he made the trains run on time.
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But
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Chancellor scraps the Restoring Your Railway fund
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Some good news though
Other projects axed includes the A303 (Stonehenge tunnel) and A27 Arundel bypass.
To save £85m from axing the railway fund doesn’t seem like much of a saving, especially compared to the road schemes
To save £85m from axing the railway fund doesn’t seem like much of a saving
From what I've read, most if not all of that £85m was for feasibility studies, draft business cases and the like. None of it would have been spent on the actual work involved in reopening railways so - assuming that any of those studies & business cases had actually come out with a positive conclusion - more money (likely a lot more money) would have been needed to implement those recommendations. Potentially, therefore - and with a cynic's hat on - "saving" £85m now also avoids the possibility of ending up being committed to spend more £m later.
That said, those £85m would probably have been spent with external consultancies, the excessive use of which has resulted in the last government getting a mild kicking https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/31/uk-government-private-consultants-spending so avoiding such costs maybe also helps the "optics".
(It's also worth remembering that the Borders Railway business case - which almost certainly involved external consultants - had to be "tweaked" to make the business case, as formulated at the time, work. This turned out to result in a railway that is unable to meet actual passenger demand, and can't cope with entirely foreseeable operational contingencies.)
@ejstubbs - the Borders Railway was subject to further 'value engineering' during later stages of the project. It was originally meant to have significant lengths of dynamic loop- - effectively miles long double track sections of line where trains could pass each other at full line speed. These were much reduced in scope to meet the fixed budget. Scottish rail project not being afforded the same largess to run hugely over budget as road and ferries.
The Portobello junction should also have been doubled. Rail types warned that the line offered no resilience in the case of service disruption, the Scottish Government ignored them and what they warned of has came to pass.
“Rail types warned that the line offered no resilience in the case of service disruption, the Scottish Government ignored them and what they warned of has came to pass.”
But they were experts, not proper consultants…
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Acting on behalf of Transport Scotland, ScotRail will lead the procurement of a replacement for the High Speed Train (HST) fleet that operates on InterCity routes between Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Inverness.
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https://www.railmagazine.com/news/2024/09/03/scotland-to-replace-hst-fleet
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RAIL SERVICE DECARBONISATION
Commitment
“reduce emissions from Scotland’s railways to zero by 2035”
– Programme for Government 2019-20
Progress
Whilst 76% of passenger journeys are electrified, progress on this commitment has been slow and it has been labelled off track by the Government’s own report.
In light of restricted budgets and high upfront investment to decarbonise the rail network, the Government’s 2020 ‘Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan’ (DAP) is currently being refreshed which suggests this target may be extended beyond 2035.
Comment
It is concerning to see limited progress on rail decarbonisation over the past year. Whilst electrification of the East Kilbride line is proceeding it was notable that the Leven line was reopened without the necessary electrification infrastructure being in place.
Alongside lack of progress on rail electrification is the failure to go to market for new trains which will be required to achieve modal shift targets. There is a looming crisis developing here as the current diesel fleet is ageing and becoming increasingly unreliable. This results in service cancellations and short-formed trains leading to overcrowding on key routes – not an image of Scotland that we would wish to see portrayed to the wider world and surely not one of which the Government can be proud.
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https://transform.scot/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/In-Reverse-Transform-Scotland-2024-09-03.pdf
Is this new news? Or something that's been dug up to make the Greens look ridiculous? - because, frankly, it does.
We cannot build our way out of a climate emergency.
And the Greens, of all, should know that hyper-mobility and ever-expanding consumption is just business-as-usual.
Is this new news?
The article is from 2021.
The National columnist Lesley Riddoch commented: “MSPs have just backed Tory motions backing universal free school meals and removing peak rail fares on Scotrail – defeating the SNP who argued they haven't the cash for either.
“Motions are not binding but it's a sign of budget trouble ahead cos Greens voted with Unionist parties.”
The Scottish Greens ran something of a victory lap after the Holyrood votes, with party co-leader Patrick Harvie saying: "It was telling that the rest of the opposition have no ideas of their own, so spent the afternoon arguing for policies that we secured by the Scottish Greens as part of the Bute House Agreement."
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