The Government talks of cutting the carbon footprint and encouraging travellers to use public transport rather than private cars. But in some parts of the country key rail service have been withdrawn, leaving travellers with little option but to use private cars or impractically slower bus services. And the government does acknowledge the cost to the economy of extended journey times - in road building program evaluation, for example, a figure of 28 pence to 44 pence per minute is used to calculate the negative effect of a transport delay.
An example.
The corridor from Swindon to Salisbury includes 6 Strategically Significant Cities and Towns slated for major growth in the next 20 years. They are linked by a road intrastructure that is already creaking at the seams with major delays, and by a railway line maintained to a high standard, but with just 2 passenger trains each way a day after the majority of services were withdrawn last December.
Would Ms Kelly care to use this service as an example, and take the opportunity to announce the return of an appropriate service in the near future. I understand from talking personally with directors at First Great Western that they are more than willing to run the service, and I have also letters of support for the service from local transport authority - Wiltshire County Council.
[[I am pre-posting this question, to allow Ms Kelly as much time as possible to look into the example and come back with a good answer. Please feel free to contact me -
graham@wellho.net - for any further background information]]
* Swindon - Chippenham - Melksham - Trowbridge - Westbury - (Frome) - Warminster - Salisbury. All through trains withdrawn, December 2006.
* Traffic growth from 10% to 35% compound pre annum in prior 5 years depending on which measure you look at.
SLC▸ specification based on Jacobs report with an assumed growth of less that 1%.
* 120,000 journeys per annum - last year. Estimate for this year on new minimal, marginal times service - 6,000.
* Journey time - Trowbridge to Swindon - 35 minutes by train or 95 minutes by what is described as the express bus. So cost to economy of delay to each through passenger = 30p x (95 - 35) = 18 pounds per journey.
* 12 key traffic flows on corridor, and those flows will grow. They are journeys people need to make.
* Melksham - town of 24,000 - now has no trains at all from 07:17 to 19:08; local survey shows that a service would be used if provided / clock face / appropriate time of day.
