Public transport in the UK is trapped in a vicious cycle. The system is poor, so people buy cars, which means fewer people use the system, which means less investment, which means the system gets even worse, so more people buy cars. Despite all its ills, driving is, for enough people, a more pleasant experience than tackling strikes, standing on a train for two hours, or being unable to travel at certain times at all.
I have to go on a cross country journey this Sunday which would suit the use of the train, except there are none at all on my section of the main line early in the morning, so I shall drive all the way into London. The data may make it look as if no-one needs or wants to use the train early on a Sunday, except we might, if we had the option.
The system is suffering from too many people rather than too few; it has a problem of chronic under- and mal-investment, of which the cancellation of HS2 is just one example.
The problem is that for whatever reason rail users ""don't count"" politically.
> Despite all its ills, driving is, for enough people, a more pleasant experience than tackling strikes, standing on a train for two hours, or being unable to travel at certain times at all.
In order to make driving less attractive than mass transit outside of urban cores like Manhattan or London, driving would have to be made more costly via increased tolls, removal of parking spaces, and less road capacity in conjunction with mass transit being made more frequent (every 5 to 10 minutes) with more routes.
Point to point travel in an individual vehicle is just very hard to compete with, especially on amount of freedom.
> or being unable to travel at certain times at all.
This is all fine and dandy until enough people decide to travel by car, and eventually there are traffic jams making you virtually unable to travel (by car) at certain times as well.
The times are different though. Plus the time when there tends to be the most traffic is when train fairs can be so ludicrous that it was not unreasonable for a group of 4 to consider chartering a helicopter from Bath to London instead.
You aren't lying. I recently visited London and did a day-trip by train to Oxford. I booked my ticket way ahead for 12 Pounds each way. If I had waited and bought a ticket at the station on the day of travel, it would have been closer to 80 Pounds each way IIRC. There was a bus option as well but I wasn't aware of it until I was already in Oxford. Bus was 13 Pounds each way.
More people have cars too though. Working on gut here rather than having checked any figures, but I'd wager that the proportion of rail journeys compared to car/bus journeys, for any given distance long/med/short, has fallen.
I thought this was an interesting question, so I looked it up. I don't have figures going back to the 1990s, but I've looked at the DfT's dataset on modal share NTS0409 [1] which has data 2002-2018.
Looking at number of trips/head, surface rail was 13 in 2002, rose to a pre-pandemic peak of 22 in 2018 and fell back to 15 in 2022. Bus (London + non-London local + long-distance) was 74, 48, and 37 respectively; motoring (car driver + car passenger + motorbike + taxi) was 694, 614, 512. Overall was 1074, 986, 862. So rail had a modal share of 1.2%, 2.2%, and 1.7% in 2002, 2018 and 2022.
The distance measure looks similar for rail: 482, 683, 493, from 7193, 6530, 5373. Modal share 6.7%, 10.5%, 9.2%. (I haven't done separate sums for buses and motoring.
So at least since 2002, it looks like rail has had a small but growing modal share of a steadily declining travel market, until disrupted by Covid to a place below peak but still considerably ahead of where it started.
Caveats: I haven't included the tube, and these data don't disambiguate light rail systems from 'other' (including flights). Rail remains dominated (like bus travel) by London & South East commuting, at least in number of trip terms.
I have to go on a cross country journey this Sunday which would suit the use of the train, except there are none at all on my section of the main line early in the morning, so I shall drive all the way into London. The data may make it look as if no-one needs or wants to use the train early on a Sunday, except we might, if we had the option.