Posted by scrlk 11 hours ago
I would like to be able to see when each road/section was built. I assume with GoogleEarth and other databases it should be possible to run some kind changelog comparison and do this at scale for at least the last 20 years or so.
Reality is far more depressing. You'd also need to add ghostly white for cancelled and bus icons for replacement buses. Why do I live here god. Why can't we have a functional train network like literally any other civilised country.
It's a bit massaged in some cases e.g. Transpennine, who have only recently been forced to stop abusing P-coding to pre-cancel trains that would have been significantly delayed. So I think those figures may take a dip.
But re: civilised countries: Germany's rail service is effectively significantly less punctual than ours; regional services are OK, about as good as ours, but if you need a longer haul service for any part of your journey you will have a very much worse experience. France is a bit more punctual on long-haul, I think; they average better within-the-minute punctuality on TGV, but regionally it is not better than the UK, it is worse. Italy (in some senses the most civilised country on earth) has poor train reliability.
Delays on UK networks are in many case due to very fundamental, long term issues that are hard to resolve. Rural lines that are single-track for geographic reasons, for example — where it's a choice of either single track or no train. And there are some absolutely pathological problems like the Borough Market Junction, which has been a cause of severe structural delays for about 140 years, in part because the only way to solve it is to destroy historic parts of London.
I personally do not think delays are the biggest problem in UK rail; ticket prices are. The slow return of train services to various forms of public ownership may help there, but we need the ROSCOs too. We need to stop what privatisation did. Perhaps we will.
If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use. In an ideal world, we'd have both more capacity on the busy routes and cheaper tickets, but that will need a lot more work than just nationalising the train companies.
(Or just fewer people would solve all these problems, but that doesn't look likely to happen...)
Yes, it is a fact of modern life that one reason there's no political will to reduce ticket prices is that it's an effective pricing mechanism for limiting demand or pushing travellers to other modes of transport to avoid further overcrowding – as perverse as that sounds for a rail network.