THE results of the first ever National Rail Travel Survey were published by the Department for Transport at the end of last month. The exercise was originally commissioned by the Strategic Rail Authority and developed in conjunction with the 2001 London Area Travel Survey. Between them, the surveys have collected some 436,000 questionnaire results, 296,000 [...]

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This month’s bullish trading statements by the big five UK transport groups have come as something of a surprise. This is especially true of those who expected that public transport patronage would react as it always has in the past to downturns in the economy – heading southwards. It is beginning to look, as Stagecoach’s Brian [...]

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An unqualified welcome is, I think, due to the stories in today’s press about Network Rail’s plans to assume industry leadership on the question of high speed rail developments. It is increasingly clear that our existing network is becoming more and more congested as demand continues to grow. There are signs, too, of modal shift [...]

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I have been giving considerable thought recently to the growing pressures on local authority funding of marginal and rural bus services, and how we might develop a  way of empowering local communities to help retain their own bus services. This would require a combination of local authorities, commercial operators and the voluntary sector intermediate agency [...]

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Much has been made of late in Transit magazine and elsewhere of about the level of public transport fares. There are groups, such as the Campaign for Better Transport (the artist formerly known as Transport 2000), the rail unions and certain trade press columnists who seem to equate cheap fares with success, and continually call upon [...]

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Like 50 or so of my colleagues, I have been in Birmingham for the last couple of days, as TAS was helping to sponsor the inaugural meeting of the Young Bus Managers Network (YBMN). This gathering was facilitated by Transit magazine, the trade journal, and was chaired by Transit’s managing editor Robert Jack. As I [...]

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Like many people, I suspect, I was initially very pleased about the announcement in April about the Department for Transport’s green light for a tram-train experiment in South Yorkshire. Then I read it again, and started to think. The story in Modern Railways last month ran something like this: The Department for Transport has announced [...]

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The Government’s current political woes have been much exacerbated in recent days by the explosion of anger about petrol prices and the level of fuel taxation. Given the trends of the last few months, and the knowledge of what happened over fuel tax protests in 2000, this can hardly have come as a surprise to [...]

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This third extract from the February 1991 article looked at the role which press and public relations activity should play in the bus industry. Press and public relations are an important and ongoing part of the process. It is important that local people should feel that their local bus company is part of the community, [...]

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This second extract from the February 1991 article considered the elements of a promotional campaign for bus services. From a marketing point of view, the bus product has several positive attributes, given good network design, well-maintained vehicles and properly trained drivers (things we ought surely to be able to take for granted). The product is: [...]

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