Safe Speed Forums

I have to say I'm pretty much convinced that motorways are safer than railways in terms of deaths per passenger km.

Seen this: http://www.transwatch.co.uk/transport-fact-sheet-2.htm ?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

A conviction that demonstrates what precisely? That one small part of the road network is safer than the entire rail network Unfortunately, those motorway users have to negotiate all the other types of road to get to the motorway in the first place
Pardon me for being unimpressed by this apparent epiphany.

I think there are potentially important conclusions:

* There's no big or certain safety advantage to rail travel - rather there are "roundabouts and swings" arguments to be had.

* We shouldn't knock the road safety achievement - we're very safe and there's huge room for improvement.

* Moving traffic onto motorways (as opposed to local roads) is in itself a good thing for safety (as well as transport efficiency).

* Improvements in rail safety are hard to win and involve massive investment.

* there might even be a developing case for paving over the damn railways to create goods vehicle and coach expressways.

There are some pretty interesting and compelling arguments on the Transwatch website. It seems to be another case of the "obvious" arguments being pretty crap when things are considered in a bit more detail.

But please don't misunderstand - I haven't studied this stuff in enough detail to draw firm conclusions.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

One of the massive problems of our motorway network is their overuse as local roads. This is particularly obvious in the M6 corridor through the midlands where people will join at one junction and leave a couple of junctions down. This adds enormously to the burden being taken by this overworked stretch of tarmac and the congestion is horrendous. Its probably safer in this respect because nobody can move at any speed above a crawl during peak usage times.



Er......no.

Hmm, not one that seems to be being made at present outside of a few elderly cranks.

As you know, I am not a fan of this idea. See:

http://speedlimit.dreamwater.org/railconv.html

And aren't the railways effectively "goods vehicle and coach expressways" at present anyway?

Maybe this topic deserves its own thread...

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Sigh..........

Here we go again!






And after I posted a couple of posts that were not only completely "on-topic" with respect to the posts I was responding to and the thread as it had developed, but pretty much "on-topic" re "Safe Speed" and "Speed, Safety, Driving and The Law":



I shall, in future, try to keep my posts modelled on that of MrsMiggins' above and hope therby to henceforth meet with her approval for being relevant, on-topic, impersonal and non-insulting.

PS I hope we're not resurrecting an argument from other fora.

Can we now get back to the points at issue?

Or does anyone else want to chip in with a complimentary "contribution", rather than a complementary contribution?

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

I have a pretty good idea what the suicide figures for the rail roads are.

( I also have a pretty good idea what the passenger figures for the roads are).

Please advise what the suicide figures are for the roads and where you found them.

Could you also advise what proportion of road accidents are down to pedestrians.

Police, criminals escaping/being pursued/leaving the scene/joyriding....

Badly maintained structures/trees collapsing, etc.

Drivers falling asleep at the wheel due to having to drive slow/detour due to pro "public" transport policies.

Why?

Why do you blame a road vehicle for the fact that a train can't stop or steer?

Feel free to "redistribute" any road deaths occuring on any journey that was increased due to a rail road getting in the way into the railroad figures.

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

But it's that part of the road network that comes closest to the generally trafficked parts of the rail road network in terms of segregation. And it's far safer than the rail network.

Now, if all motorway drivers were trained on motorways and drove tanks:

What would the motorway passenger fatality figures look like then in comparison to the rail roads?



But all rail road users have to negotiate all the other types of road and motorways to get to the rail road in the first place

Pardon me for being unimpressed by this apparent epiphany.

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

So? Still doesn't stand up to comparison in isolation.



Precisely. One cannot look at such figures in isolation, each is in some way linked to the other. Well done for spotting that.



And you can copy things verbatim too

Here's a few articles to get the thread rolling ( pity they're all by elderly cranks! ):


Come back, Dr Beeching
Jan 17th 2002 From The Economist print edition

Britain has far too many railways. That's part of the explanation for the current mess

Although it is a small country, Britain has the second largest rail network in Europe.

[Compare that with the road and motorway ratios!]

Transport economists question the way decisions in this area are made. “Railway investment,” says Stephen Glaister of Imperial College, “is not properly appraised, in terms of either efficiency or equity.”

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=940401


Every one of us taken for a ride
(Filed: 08/02/2003)

Haydn Abbott, managing director of Angel Trains, Britain's biggest rolling stock lessor: "The costs, particularly on the infrastructure, are out of control."......

......Stephen Glaister, professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College, London, says: "For the vast majority of rail schemes, you cannot get a decent return on capital and I don't just mean a financial return. I mean a cost-benefit return, such as from traffic diverted from the roads or fewer accidents."........

........Says Glaister: "As a punter you or I cannot find any published information on the benefits of investing in the railways. Yet the taxpayer is being asked to spend billions on them."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fmoney%2F2003%2F02%2F08%2Fccrail08.xml


Stop rail subsidies

The majority pay for a rich elite to use this archaic form of travel

Alfred Sherman Friday January 18, 2002 The Guardian

Even when you strip away double counting and exaggeration, present and projected subsidies to rail travel amount to tens of billions over a few years while three quarters of the cost of road travel, especially in private car, is taxation. Does this make sense in terms of economic logic or social justice?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,635333,00.html


Focus, magazine of Institute of Transport and Logistics

Refers to a report for the ESRC by a team led by Prof. Newbery and Dr Affuso of Cambridge.

Main points include:

- Critical of spending three times as much on rail projects as on roads without systematic cost-benefit appraisal.

- Interurban congestion unjustifiable given ease it can be relieved.

- Imposes unnecessary and unjustified cost on economy.

- Far from clear problems better addressed by more rail investment.

- Costs of improving passenger benefits higher in rail than road.

- Road investments appear considerably more profitable than rail.

[From a summary by R Bolt on another forum.]


And to go with:

http://www.transwatch.co.uk/transport-fact-sheet-2.htm

There's over a dozen more fact sheets listed and a summary of findings re road/rail comparisons here:

http://www.transwatch.co.uk/road-rail-comparisons.htm

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

And your point is?

Why are they overused?

Yes, the "evidence" shows that as soon as you build more capacity the capacity is more than used up. In fact one link road in the motorways near Heathrow was actually congested with local traffic before it was actually accessible from the motorways it was meant to link!

But why is that? It is because (until they stopped building new roads) new roads were built to carry the traffic of old roads. But as, naturally, the new roads attracted supressed demand, not only from the "local" road, but from several counties around, they quickly clog up.

We build too little, too late.

Take the M25. Please.

It was originally supposed to be a five ring system. The current road is a hybrid of parts of, I think, rings 3 and 4, linked to form an oval (ellipse/oid/whatever).

And the planning for such a system goes back to attempts to relieve London of congestion and pollution.

From horse drawn traffic.

Put on the back burner originally because of the World War.

The First World War.

And then the Depression.

And then the Second World War.

And now we've got 20% of a system designed to alleviate Victorian traffic problems expected to alleviate 21st Century ones!




Errrrr........See the Transwatch site!


By the way, is there any truth in the rumour I heard that the miniscule share of "goods" traffic hauled on the railways is mainly ballast for Forth bridge painting type track maintenance.

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Did it?

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Whatever

Well, if that's the best you can do:

I'll leave you to have the final word!

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Fair enough - but why not? What's so good about railways? (I'm going to read PeterE's page on the subject shortly.)

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

OK, here's my more fuller answer.
The transport system in the UK is one unseemly mess caused by years of neglect and underfunding. Instead of taking a holistic approach and integrating all the various transport modes, we take an individualistic one.
Few would deny that the railways have had their problems, years of restructuring and re-badging have seen to that. Yet as a method for moving people and freight efficiently they are second to none; just one vehicle can shift as much as numerous cars or lorries making better use of the avialable resources of fuel and space. The railways need a little TLC, but not ripping up - that would be insanity.
The road network is eqaully in need of attention. Cars have given us freedom to go wherever we want, but they sometimes become our prison particulalrly if everyone decides to exercise their freedom at the same time on the same stretch of road. As such they are highly inefficient (as a system); so many vehicles all carrying one person to work each morning. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the private car remains the transport mode of choice for the vast majority.
Unfortunatley, sorting the mess out seems to be beyond us at this moment in time becuase of the constant bickering and whinging that goes on.
In contrast, take a look across the channel at France and their recent projects. They built the Stade de France for the world cup in '98, have the TGV and recently completed the Millau bridge to bypass a notorious bottleneck.
Here we just bicker between pressure groups, 'interested parties' and that good old British product of the late 20th century - the NIMBY.
We couldn't agree where to build the new Wembley, the rail link between the chunnel and London is finally staggering towards completion and as for a project like the Millau bridge...we'd have some analy retentive NIMBY S.O.B. living nearby who'd hold the entire project up whinging that it would affect the value of their goddam house! And just look at the Thelwall viaduct, at the centre of one of our most congested road links yet under repair since, well, living memory
And as for spending money of transport...jeez We have money to burn housing every waif and stray that pitches up on Dover beach on a lilo from France and establishing Diversity Co-Ordinators in every local council yet create a transport infrastructure that meets the needs of our country in the 21st century...nada. Brunell, Stephenson and Telford would be spinning in their graves.
So there you have it, my take on things. It's my opinion and you ain't gonna change it

Thanks. I agree with almost everything you wrote, but that bit I've quoted may seem self evident, but in practice may not be true at all.

When you factor in the fact that trains must run under capacity for much of the time, and then you have to consider the costs and practicalities of transferring goods and people from road to rail and rail to road again at both ends of the train journey. These factors change the picture I think.

If 90% of the market chooses road and 10% chooses rail, doesn't that in itself tell us about the overall efficiency of the modes?

As I said earlier, I'm not calling for change here. More I want to poke at the arguments and see if they are any good.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Because the systems are not integrated, they need to be.

Passenger trains at off-peak times often run under capacity, but freight trains don't. The same trans-shipment factors also apply to air travel, both passenger and freight.


But on most journeys there isn't, and never has been, a choice of mode, so it isn't the case that given a free choice, 90% of people choose road and 10% choose rail. Also, I'm not sure of the figures and haven't got the time at present to dig around in the transport stats, but I believe rail freight's share of total ton-miles is considerably more than 10%.

An either-or, beggar-my-neighbour attitude has bedevilled British transport policy for years and overall has led to a woeful lack of infrastructure investment in all modes. France has built a lot more motorway miles than the UK, and also TGV lines. Rail should be seen as something complementary to road travel rather than as a rival.

_________________
"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Exactly Peter, exactly.