It's a sad state of affairs that because of past political interference, historical underinvestment, health and safety paranoia, plus the overmanagement of the railway and union pay demands, the railway has basically priced itself out of all but the most lucrative schemes.
This is the reason I have been ranting on about costs for the last few weeks. Governments of any shade will not fund rail at any cost. The Labour government have cancelled a fair few light rail schemes, and we've never really had the re-openings as promised - unless you live in Wales and Scotland.
I don't personally support busways at all. I think they are a complete waste of time and money. It's telling, there are very few of them about around the world, and most have only partial success at best.
Buses are perfectly useful in their own context, this is not an anti-bus post, but planners have to be honest about what they can really provide. Despite 24 times the rights of way compared to National rail, Buses and coaches have roughly the same passenger KMs. They are extremely ineffective at getting people out of cars unless you give the tickets away, or under very special circumstances. They have, in the main, constantly lost passengers since the 50s, while rail has actually grown its passenger Kms and journeys, despite 40% less network.
Unfortunately this does not mean politicians and planners will scrap busway ideas. Only the other day in Bristol the Portishead branch re-opening was effectively scrapped in favour of bendy buses.
As most of the rail companies are run by bus companies, there seems very little political lobbying in favour of rail over bus. So get ready for third world Britain, where we sit in lines of traffic in buses, while much of the rest of the world invests in metros, tramways and super-fast high speed trains.
Its a very sad state of affairs.
