Great Western Coffee Shop

[Geographic Area - journeys made to / from / within the GWR served area; we should probably exclude international journeys]

What proportion of public transport journeys are:

a) Day return trips
b) Return trips of up to a week
c) Return trips for longer periods
d) Single journeys not echoed by a return
e) Other?

Does this differ based on

a) The mode of transport used
b) The length of the journey

Guesses / thoughts / pointers to links all welcome - to help me with a couple of suggestions I'm making.

I'd say about 70-80% of my public transport trips are day returns.

The rest, up to a week, but just one night mostly.

What counts as a return? Same origin and destination points? For example I'll often take one bus out and another back, using different stops at either end.

I think my travel patterns are too varied to ascribe length to the options listed. For example, I recently travelled Bristol to Carlisle and back in one day, then a few days later, Bristol to Taunton with an overnight stop.

IME, almost all rail journeys involve a return by rail, whether the same day or much later. Most rail journeys are too long to walk or routinely take a taxi for the return.
I must have made hundreds of return trips to the West country, and all but one of those was rail both ways. The one exception was a taxi at a cost of about ^350.
Buses however are different, and IME a lot of passengers might take a bus in one direction only, perhaps walking or taking a taxi for the return. Just today I made a local bus trip to the shops but took a taxi back due to weight of shopping.

I suspect that this is fairly typical. There must of course be those who make short rail journeys and walk the other way, but not I suspect that many.

agreeing with others, nearly all my train trips are returns (although not always made with a return ticket).

My most common bus journey is the 2 mile trip home from work made almost every day.  I almost always make the outward morning journey on foot.  Partly for the exercise, and partly because in term time at least there is very little time saving in getting the bus and I resent paying for a bus when it saves me little time, whereas the evening traffic is not quite so bad. 

Also, there are 2 stops near my house in different directions on different routes (basically I live in a minor road between two major roads both of which have buses).  The journey into town involves choosing one of those stops and once chosen I have  effectively halving the frequency of services available to me*.  Coming home, all the buses call at the same city centre stop and so I can use any route to get home.  This means that the overall service is inherently better (and therefore more attractive) in one direction than in the other despite each route having an equal number of buses going both directions.

* probably more of a 30/60 split although it depends on the time of day   

These days, all of my occasional journeys by public transport are on trains - daily returns.

In my previous employment, there were also a few return train journeys to London or Manchester (one overnight stay) or return flights to Edinburgh (one overnight stay).

The ... flavour ... I'm getting is that most trips could be considered 'returns' - out and back by public transport. And so if just one leg (assuming connections are used) cannot be done by public transport, the whole double trip fails.

Put another way - give people who drove home at 10 p.m. a service, and those who start to use the 10 p.m. service will also be on one earlier in the day going t'other way.

I've got 17 tickets in my rail wallet 1 is a 7 day season, liskeard to Redruth this week, the rest are day trips where I've deviated from my season validity all travelling off peak.
I've found myself doing more days out since not having a working car, as I have a greater disposable income to allow a trip to Plymouth, or Torquay or anywhere else in the Devon Cornwall railcard zone.

A couple of exceptions for you:

1. short journeys which are within walking distance but for a serious hill, for example when I was at university, I would catch the bus up the hill but often came back down on foot
2. once one of my brothers had to be in Nottingham, where my father (with a car) already was for some reason. So we put my brother on a train and he came back by car with my father

I'd guess the latter sort of thing is very rare though, your assessment that 'if just one leg (assuming connections are used) cannot be done by public transport, the whole double trip fails.' is one that I agree with, although I would re-word it as 'if the journey can only be done in one direction by public transport, neither direction will be done using public transport'.

Where connections are involved, if one leg fails it might only be that leg that is lost; for example rather than go from A to C, changing at B, pepole might drive to B and use rail from B to C and back again, as long as B to C works in both directions. I think that happens quite a bit with Pembrokeshire services, when part of my family goes to rugby in Cardiff they tend to drive to Port Talbot Parkway and use the train into Cardiff, rather than use a station closer to home. The local MP (or was it the AM, I forget now) once refered to Port Talbot Parkway as a key station for our area as well.

As for journey metrics, my father recently pointed out that cameras are being installed near junctions on major roads. He thinks they are number-plate recognition systems tracking car movements; that data could be very useful for identifying where there is a big flow of point-to-point journeys which could be captured by a new public transport service.

I had a discussion with a BANES councillor many years ago about park and Ride.  She asked why people still drove into work and paid for city centre parking when they could use the excellent P&R buses to get into work. I pointed out that if they decide to stay in town after work for a meal, drink or theatre trip etc (all good things for the city's economy) the P&R buses would have stopped by the time they needed them.  I queried as to why the ordinary service buses couldn't be used to serve the P&R car park that they drive right past in the evening when the P&R buses have stopped running and suggested that a few extra passengers on that route could be helpful in supporting more buses in the evening so that the precipitous drop in frequency after 7pm could be mitigated (separate contract, too difficult was the reply)

Exactly!    We were at the Big Business show in Salisbury yesterday, talking TransWilts trains, but some conversations widened out to public transport as a whole.  And the business of getting home after stopping in town at the end of the day for meal / gym / meeting  a friend was putting people off the bus for the whole day's round trip.

I think I may have made the mistake of thinking it's obvious that people need the whole return journey to be catered for on their regular daily runs .... obviously, it's not obvious to everyone.


Isn't the "too difficult" draw getting far too full these days?  :-\

Just to be awkward.....almost all my day to day journeys are singles, I car share with family going into oxford, but get the train home 3-4 times a week as the car is going back earlier than I finish.

Most of the returns I buy are the occasional return into London.