I read with interest your editorial on "Free Travel" and the item about transport in German cities in the May Today's Railways Europe. I was reminded of an article in Modern Railways around five years ago, by Professor Stephen Glaister of the RAC Foundation. A diagram from this shows growth curves for road and rail transport in the UK up to 2030, from a 2010 baseline. Leaving aside the dubious nature of such projections (though consultants are paid a lot of money to come up with them) to my mind the most striking feature is the factor-of-ten difference between the two vertical axes. Though not strictly comparable data the essence is that roads in the UK convey about ten times the "passenger" traffic on rail. So, as Professor Glaister pointed out in his article, you could double the rail traffic (for which there isn't capacity on many routes) and the road traffic would fall by only around 10%, a figure roughly in line with that quoted in your editorial. It is not so much that rail traffic changed to road use, but that there has been a tenfold increase in how much people travel and that increase has been through the availability of cheap (!) cars and fuel, and a massive more or less co-ordinated road building programme. And any shift from this would be intensely resisted by motorists and associated organisations. Indeed it is hard to see how we could go back to public transport and maintain anything remotely resembling our present lifestyles, and economy, certainly outside of large city access.
展开▼
