Sidelines

national road user charging

With the election not far off, where do the 3 main parties stand on national road user charging? We contacted all three; so far two have replied.

The Department for Transport (for Labour) in a brief reply said, "the Government has no plans for national road user charging".

With a hung parliament a distinct possibility, the view of the Liberal Democrats is more relevant than usual, and their more expansive response included, "UK-wide, the long-term policy of the Liberal Democrats is to move to a revenue-neutral road user pricing scheme on motorways and trunk roads, while scrapping Vehicle Excise Duty completely and reducing fuel duty". Perhaps such an approach offers the best chance of getting more drivers to sign up for voluntary "black-box" schemes which would at least pilot the potential technology and move the discussion on.

The Conservatives have yet to reply.
04.03.10 @ 05:59 PM CST [link]

airport links

The Bow Group, a right-wing "Think" tank, is calling for any north-south high-speed rail line to have direct links to major airports, and mentions Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester.

What is wrong with Birmingham airport's current high-speed rail link? With Virgin Pendolinos and Voyagers stopping there frequently en-route to Birmingham and Euston, things couldn't be too much quicker.

All in all, travel to Birmingham airport by rail is a very un-British experience; good rail links on quality trains, then straight onto the fully automated monorail which takes you the 600 metres to the terminal. Somehow one would expect the monorail, which opened in 2003, to break down a lot. In fact, frequent users of the airport will testify, it's incredibly reliable.

The monorail runs on the track created for the maglev system which when it opened in 1984 was the world's first commercial maglev.
20.01.10 @ 04:03 PM CST [link]

big ideas, small ideas

The high-speed rail train rumbles on with a report delivered by High Speed 2 (not being published yet) to Lord Adonis yesterday; he will be making proposals on the back of it by the end of March 2010. While any decision taken will probably be retaken (and retaken, and...) after a General Election, Lord Adonis is proving a more can-do Transport Minister than any of his Labour predecessors.

Lord Adonis has also taken an interest in overhauling old carriages and moving them to parts of the country where they are needed as a stop-gap. There are certainly some inexplicably short trains on our networks. What is Arriva doing running 2 carriage trains on a morning service from Manchester to Pembroke? As this train approaches Cardiff through places like Cwmbran and Pontypool with probably quite low car-ownership, capacity is uncomfortably exposed. Can margins really be that tight?
01.01.10 @ 01:59 PM CST [link]

alicante-denia tram/train

A good chunk of coast north of Alicante is covered by a very new narrow-guage tram/train system using the rails of an old diesel train. A ride to the end, Denia, takes almost 3 hours, although the route is circuitous in places. The interesting bit is that you have to change in Benidorm, from an electric tram to an identical looking diesel "tram". A project to electrify the line from Benidorm to Denia is underway. 2 questions arise from this: will the diesel "trams" be converted to run from the electricity pylons once they are in place, and, while there are plenty of cities running light trains on tram track, is there anywhere else in the world where a diesel train vehicle looks identical to a standard modern tram?
04.12.09 @ 03:54 PM CST [link]

turning left

It's a few months since the London mayor announced that Transport for London would look at letting cyclists turn left through red lights. TfL would need to submit a proposal to the Department for Transport, which it hasn't done yet. Many of the current mayor's original ideas have been whimsical and, where already implemented such as Ride to Work Friday, not particularly successful. This one is good though. There are already precedents for allowing traffic through red lights. In Germany, of all places, motor traffic is allowed to turn left through red during the pedestrian crossing phase if the way left is clear of pedestrians.

There is, despite the headlines about "legalised red-light running", potential support for this proposal from commercial drivers for one. Anecdotally, some taxi drivers have spoken in favour of cyclists going through red lights as it gets them out of the way when the lights do turn green, particularly useful one imagines where drivers accelerate away from lights side by side in lanes.

Let's hope as much effort goes into this idea as is going into the naive Routemaster plan.
24.11.09 @ 05:37 PM CST [link]

jonny come latelys

Suddenly everybody's got an opinion on new high speed rail capacity. It's a dangerous time; people like Christian Wolmar with depth of understanding are being drowned out by jonny come latelys trotting out their support for the idea with glib and highly questionable assumptions. Unfortunately, these won't be people who are hanging around to see others point out the complexities.

It's been said before, and it's worth saying again: there are still huge gains to be had, including in speed and capacity, in ironing out bottlenecks, signalling problems etc in the existing system. These might not be glamourous election promises, but might it not be a good idea for commentators to get an understanding of the network as a whole before jumping in with their rabble-rousing support.
28.09.09 @ 05:43 PM CST [link]

simple ideas

Here's a simple but great idea that made it into the specialist transport press but deserves wider recognition. Stations on London's new Crossrail east-west tunnels will be built on humps. This will allow less energy to be used in braking coming into stations and acceleration leaving stations. An additional benefit is that less heat will be produced in the tunnels, helping to keep the stations cool
24.09.09 @ 12:32 PM CST [link]