York makes travel plans to beat gridlock (From York Press)
Get in touch: send your photos, videos, news & views by texting YORK to 80360 or send an email»
City makes plans to beat gridlock as i-Travel York programme launched
8:36am Wednesday 19th September 2012 in News
By Mark Stead, Political Reporter
At the i-Travel York launch are, from left, Coun Dave Merrett, Graham Titchener, i-Travel York programme manager and Susie Cawood, head of York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, with the project’s bee mascot, which will be named in a competition
NEW cycle links and bus technology will be among a raft of measures introduced in York over the next two years through a £4.65 million scheme aimed at tackling the city’s traffic problems.
City of York Council yesterday unveiled its i-Travel York programme, launched after a huge slice of Government transport funding was secured, which is designed to give York a bright economic future, improve public transport and stop routes around the city becoming choked by cars.
Most of the work is set to take place over the next two years and will include a network of new cycle and pedestrian routes being introduced, particularly to the north of the city, as well as fitting buses with real-time information displays, installing machines which allow passengers to buy tickets before they board and bringing in measures which will give buses priority over other vehicles to cut down on delays.
i-Travel will see cycling and walking links alongside the River Foss, in Stirling Road, New Lane and Jockey Lane, between Haxby Road and Clifton Moor , between New Earswick and Huntington and in the Heworth Without area, with more facilities for cyclists around Clifton Business Park, Monks Cross and Clarence Street. The council is planning a schools engagement programme and the extension of the Bike It project, outlining the benefits of cycling to youngsters, while it also hopes to encourage more women to use bikes.
Businesses will be offered guidance on travel planning for their employees, with educational campaigns in areas such as road safety awareness and reducing pollution also on the cards.
The authority has said residents will also be given help with “personal travel plans”, with one of the aims being to reduce the high number of short car journeys which are taken in the northern part of York.
A new website – itravelyork.info – has been created to allow residents to pick up live traffic information, tips and health advice, and it will also include a video outlining the benefits of using modes of transport other than cars.
Coun Dave Merrett , cabinet member for transport, planning and sustainability, said “We’re proud that York already has a high number of people who take the bus, walk or cycle around the city, and we want to build on that.”
The project has been made possible after the Government provided £4.65 million from its Local Sustainable Transport Fund for the initiatives.
Comments(41)
DooftheDog
says...
8:48am Wed 19 Sep 12
roskoboskovic
says...
9:04am Wed 19 Sep 12
dodgydavereturns
says...
9:07am Wed 19 Sep 12
Well done YCC....Will this mean we will be getting once monthly bin collections next year?
pedalling paul
says...
9:16am Wed 19 Sep 12
But seriously folks, the itravel website does include advice for those who wish to travel by car. There are useful tips on journey planning, car sharing, fuel choices, electric cars and encouragement to consider other travel options for some journeys.
inthesticks
says...
9:41am Wed 19 Sep 12
pedalling paul wrote:You have to admit it is a really patronising website!
Great being a bee...just fly past the congestion!
But seriously folks, the itravel website does include advice for those who wish to travel by car. There are useful tips on journey planning, car sharing, fuel choices, electric cars and encouragement to consider other travel options for some journeys.
Quote -"Make sure you know where you are going before you set off" WHAT?
I don`t think there is anything on there that I didn`t know already. The bee I can`t even comment on, it`s making me feel quite angry that these people have such a low opinion of us. What is this, an episode of an under 5`s program?
Garrowby Turnoff
says...
9:46am Wed 19 Sep 12
inthesticks
says...
9:49am Wed 19 Sep 12
Septimius Severus
says...
10:05am Wed 19 Sep 12
£4.6M on a bee costume and a website providing information already being provided on CYC & First websites but in a more patronising way. Traffic congestion plans at Monks Cross! Don't get me started.
More bus and cycle lanes don't improve congestion they make it worse.
This is more Merritt bull. Spinning anti car measures as easing congestion. It's a box ticking exercise that will not improve the situation. Just enable CYC to stick its snout in the trough of quango cash.
Pathetic for The Press just to copy and paste this release without criticism. Still no change there. It's either lazy or complicit with the propaganda machine at The Guildhall.
hugohackenbush
says...
10:21am Wed 19 Sep 12
Any takers.
capt spaulding
says...
10:27am Wed 19 Sep 12
retribution
says...
11:06am Wed 19 Sep 12
Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste.
They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course.
Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes.
I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full).
If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites!
Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
retribution
says...
11:08am Wed 19 Sep 12
B***** Off!
york_chap
says...
11:10am Wed 19 Sep 12
It also says I should swap my diesel car for a petrol version - I quite like the sound of significantly less mpg and more visits to the filling station.
I also learnt all sorts of nice info about electric cars, the types available and their benefits etc etc. Sadly, the site creator forgot to mention where all the charging points are in York, so I can't get an electric car as I'd have to set off without knowing where I was going - a definite no-no according to the website.
Note to Cllr. Merrett et al - if you're ever stuck for ways to blow excessive amounts of our taxes on eco-measures (unlikely, but still), installing a lot of electric car charging points around the 'community' would definitely use up a shed load of cash in one go.
pedalling paul
says...
11:10am Wed 19 Sep 12
retribution wrote:There are two ways to tackle so-calleed congestion. One is to knock down half the City to widen roads and build new ones then sit back for a few years until they are bunged up with more car journeys. Then the process starts all over again.
Quote from V Meldrew,'' I can't believe it''!
Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste.
They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course.
Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes.
I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full).
If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites!
Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
The other solution is to make the most efficient use of what we've currently got.
york_chap
says...
11:55am Wed 19 Sep 12
I live out of town and to go into the centre for work, or to the hospital/station there are four buses in the 12 minute period between 07.56 and 08.08 (average one every 3 minutes) followed by a 50 minute period with NO buses whatsoever.
Also tried entering my daily commute:
To get there on time, round trip by public transport = 2hrs 23 mins.
Round trip by car = 46 minutes (confirmed by my own experiences)
If they want to get people out of cars, they should sort out the bus service and make it affordable. I'd have to use at least 2 bus companies and end up paying nearly £5 per day, compared to about £2 in petrol. That's £15 per week = £720 per year extra. That's enough to cover my tax and insurance.
Not to mention the extra 388 hours I'd spend commuting by public transport each year. (That's 16 days).
Fat Harry
says...
11:59am Wed 19 Sep 12
Buses missed out altogether and buses being delayed so badly by congestion that they end up arriving en masse (recently no fewer than FOUR turned up at once after a forty minute wait for my supposed 10-minute service) mean the service so extraordinarily unreliable that it's unusual for me and my colleagues to actually arrive on time in the morning, unless we allow a full hour to travel three miles to our out-of-town office.
The extra cycle and walkways might help alleviate this problem by making it feasible to walk, which it currently is not.
I remain sceptical that even the council's best efforts will kick First's abysmal profit-driven management into gear to get things sorted.
BigDog-LittleDog
says...
12:19pm Wed 19 Sep 12
pedalling paul wrote:What about the third way? The way which the majority of people on here actually understand and support?
retribution wrote:There are two ways to tackle so-calleed congestion. One is to knock down half the City to widen roads and build new ones then sit back for a few years until they are bunged up with more car journeys. Then the process starts all over again.
Quote from V Meldrew,'' I can't believe it''!
Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste.
They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course.
Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes.
I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full).
If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites!
Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
The other solution is to make the most efficient use of what we've currently got.
I'm obviously referring to "making most efficient use of what we've currently got".
What we have got is a traffic light system which stops traffic to allow no other vehicles or pedestrians through before allowing vehicles to move on. Efficient? Nah.
We have 1 rush hour train from Selby to York. Great! However buses from outlying villages mean that arrival time is 5 minutes after the train leaves. So either wait 55 minutes for the next train, or use another means. Buses back home again don't exist.
We've got junctions which are dangerous, and roads that are too small. We all know that. Changing these things is an aspiration which won't ever happen. But let's by blunt. How much would it cost to revisit the Hopgrove roundabout to stop traffic stopping when there is no one coming? Why do roundabouts need traffic lights anyway - they are self managing by design!
So yes, Paul, you are right. Let's make most efficient use of what we have. But no one ever does that and no one ever tells us why they don't.
Even AndyD
says...
12:20pm Wed 19 Sep 12
pedalling paul wrote:If you follow that argument to its logical conclusion then no roads would have been built at all.
retribution wrote:There are two ways to tackle so-calleed congestion. One is to knock down half the City to widen roads and build new ones then sit back for a few years until they are bunged up with more car journeys. Then the process starts all over again.
Quote from V Meldrew,'' I can't believe it''!
Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste.
They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course.
Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes.
I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full).
If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites!
Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
The other solution is to make the most efficient use of what we've currently got.
Also, some roads take traffic away from congested areas - bypasses. Are you saying it would be a good thing if we still queued through Tadcaster to get to Leeds, or Malton to get to Scarborough? Similarly, a two lane outer-ring road here would stop people going into the city centre and out again to avoid its queues!
BigDog-LittleDog
says...
12:22pm Wed 19 Sep 12
pedalling paul wrote:What about the third way? The way which the majority of people on here actually understand and support?
retribution wrote:There are two ways to tackle so-calleed congestion. One is to knock down half the City to widen roads and build new ones then sit back for a few years until they are bunged up with more car journeys. Then the process starts all over again.
Quote from V Meldrew,'' I can't believe it''!
Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste.
They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course.
Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes.
I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full).
If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites!
Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
The other solution is to make the most efficient use of what we've currently got.
I'm obviously referring to "making most efficient use of what we've currently got".
What we have got is a traffic light system which stops traffic to allow no other vehicles or pedestrians through before allowing vehicles to move on. Efficient? Nah.
We have 1 rush hour train from Selby to York. Great! However buses from outlying villages mean that arrival time is 5 minutes after the train leaves. So either wait 55 minutes for the next train, or use another means. Buses back home again don't exist.
We've got junctions which are dangerous, and roads that are too small. We all know that. Changing these things is an aspiration which won't ever happen. But let's by blunt. How much would it cost to revisit the Hopgrove roundabout to stop traffic stopping when there is no one coming? Why do roundabouts need traffic lights anyway - they are self managing by design!
So yes, Paul, you are right. Let's make most efficient use of what we have. But no one ever does that and no one ever tells us why they don't.
Even AndyD
says...
12:22pm Wed 19 Sep 12
Buzz Light-year
says...
12:52pm Wed 19 Sep 12
capt spaulding wrote::D
I thought BUZZ would have risen to the challenge on this thread him being a hive of opinions with the occasional sting.
Cheers honey!
Von_Dutch
says...
12:56pm Wed 19 Sep 12
retribution wrote:Although i agree that any grant comes from general government taxation, a certain amount of money was available in the bank accounts of the DfT to bid for and be spent on this kind of thing, no matter what.
Quote from V Meldrew,'' I can't believe it''! Nothing will ever surprise me anymore with City of York Council /Quango waste. They just spend, spend and spend...other peoples' money of course. Any 'grant' comes, whether UK or EU -based, from someone paying taxes. I'll bet they don't waste their own money in this way ( and of course make sure all expenses are claimed in full). If these folk ran thier own business the'd be bankrupt! Parasites! Anyway, York will be freed up from traffic congestion? ...Oink... Oink , there goes another one flying past.
So all those having the usual whinge, I say to them that if we'd not won this money, it'd have just been spent on other towns/cities. Call me selfish maybe, but i'd rather have the money spent on York than elsewhere, even if it doesn't amount to much.
(And please don't come with the usual "there are more deserving causes to spend this money on" like bins/elderly/disable
d etc. Targetted government grants don't work like that. If you disagree, it's your MP you need to complain to, not your council).
Ichabod76
says...
2:12pm Wed 19 Sep 12
Even AndyD wrote:I think this is a more likely solution than public transport
All that said, I still think the future is an efficient, cheap public transportation system. One day that is what we will get - but I suspect not anytime soon!
The timeline for autonomous cars hitting the road en masse keeps getting closer. GM's Cadillac division expects to produce partially autonomous cars at a large scale by 2015, and the automaker also predicts it will have fully autonomous cars available by the end of the decade. Audi and BMW have also shown self-driving car concepts, with the former working with Stanford to pilot a modified TT up Pikes Peak. Meanwhile, Google is ripping along at its own rapid pace with a fleet of fully autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids that have logged over 300,000 miles. And the company has pushed through legislation that legalizes self-driving cars in Nevada. California is close behind, and Google has also been busy lobbying joyriding lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
But while we know that robo-cars are coming, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently released predictions that autonomous cars will account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040. The organization went even further, forecasting how infrastructure, society and attitudes could change when self-driving cars become the norm around the middle of the century.
IEEE envisions an absence of traffic signs and lights since highly evolved, self-driving cars won't need them, and it believes that full deployment could even eliminate the need for driver's licenses.
Google gets license to operate driverless cars in Nevada
While this all sounds sci-fi, we're already starting to see separate threads of this autonomous-car future being weaved in current real-world tests.
It's been assumed that the largest hurdle for autonomous cars is building the infrastructure. Not so, says Dr. Alberto Broggi, IEEE senior member and professor of computer engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. Broggi, the director of a 2010 project that successfully piloted two driverless cars on an 8,000-mile road trip from Parma to Shanghai, points out that two current types of self-driving cars will need less infrastructure, not more.
"The Google cars are based on very precise maps and they have sensing primarily based on a LIDAR technology," he told Wired. "The cars that we tested on the route from Parma to Shanghai had no maps, and had sensing primarily based on cameras. In both cases, the cars have no help from the infrastructure."
When reached for comment, a Google spokesman declined to make a statement on this story and IEEE's predictions on autonomous cars.
But Broggi also delineates between what he sees as different levels of self-driving technology as the features mature, and adds that infrastructure in the form of centralized communication once large numbers of autonomous cars are on the road will be crucial -- and have the greatest impact. This could lead to traffic lights, speed limits and even driver licensing disappearing. "Autonomous cars alone will bring limited benefits," he says. "They would be able to locate obstacles, avoid them and follow the road. But efficient autonomous operations would also require that vehicles coordinate with each other."
A nascent form of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) is currently being tested in a NHTSA field trial in Ann Arbor, allowing cars to share situational data to avoid crashing into each other. Meanwhile, Volvo is testing the concept of using "road trains" in Europe to allow for more efficient driving. "A train of vehicles moving very close to each other would reach a higher throughput -- the number of cars per road unit -- and have lower fuel consumption due to aerodynamic drift," says Broggi.
Vehicle-to-infrastru
cture (V2I) communication would also allow vehicles to share their position, destination and intended route with a central station, Broggi continues, that could coordinate and dispatch information about traffic and route vehicles accordingly. "Suppose all cars are connected and a central station knows precisely their position and destination," Broggi says. "The central station can send speed adjustment commands to the vehicles that enter an intersection in such a way that they do not collide and they occupy the intersection area one at a time, optimizing their movements. In this case, traffic lights will not be required since coordination is reached at a higher level." We're already seeing a basic form of this in testing going on in Europe that combines V2V and V2I communication, collectively known as V2X.
IEEE also foresees autonomous vehicles accelerating car sharing and helping make it more widespread, especially for people within a wider range of ages and physical abilities. And driverless cars may even eliminate the need for driver's licenses. "People do not need a license to sit on a train or a bus," said Azim Eskandarian, director of the IEEE's Center for Intelligent Systems Research, in a statement. "In a full-autonomy case in which no driver intervention will be allowed, the car will be operating. So there will not be any special requirements for drivers or occupants to use the vehicle as a form of transportation."
IEEE also predicts that the biggest barrier to pervasive adoption of driverless cars may have nothing to do with technology, but will be general public acceptance. While the average driver may grasp the basic benefits of autonomous cars -- increased fuel efficiency and safety, along with a reduction in traffic -- it may not be enough to get them to let go of the steering wheel. Jeffrey Miller, IEEE member and associate professor of computer systems engineering at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, believes that baby steps in the form of driver assist systems may help. "As more vehicular controls begin being automated, such as parallel parking and automatic braking, people will become more accepting of autonomous technologies," Miller told Wired. "So by 2040, driverless vehicles will be widely accepted and possibly be the dominant vehicles on the road."
Kevin Turvey
says...
2:59pm Wed 19 Sep 12
Now I have seen a photo of it that rather confirms my initial thoughts.
It looks like the outcome of a tryst between Berty Basset and some form of mutated cabbage patch kid, obviously the cabbage patch where it lived was in the waste tip within a nuclear facility or is it just me?
This whole thing is a huge expensive White Elephant from York council as usual.
Pandering to the Cyclesexuals again!
Tom6187
says...
3:30pm Wed 19 Sep 12
yorkie71
says...
3:34pm Wed 19 Sep 12
After some searching it still seems there is no bus from Hull Road (Melrosegate) to Morrisons, only buses which drive past and dont stop (P&R)
Alf Garnett
says...
6:08pm Wed 19 Sep 12
D_Wolf
says...
9:09pm Wed 19 Sep 12
capt spaulding
says...
10:27pm Wed 19 Sep 12
Buzz Light-year wrote:Spot on mate. New you could extract the nectar given the opportunity.
capt spaulding wrote::D
I thought BUZZ would have risen to the challenge on this thread him being a hive of opinions with the occasional sting.
Cheers honey!
yorkshirelad
says...
10:32pm Wed 19 Sep 12
But we need more people to see that if the people that can/want/might use alternatives to the car are enabled to do so by schemes like this...then it's also best for the necessary car journies.
Whether you like walking/cycling/publ
ic transport/cars/taxis (and lets face it, a lot of us Yorkies use all these modes from time to time!)... it's best for us all if we invest in alternatives to the car. Yes...if you go everywhere by car...it's still better for you because every bike or foot journey is potentially one less car journey.
Keep at it guys... it's the only way to keep us all moving!
hokey cokey
says...
11:23pm Wed 19 Sep 12
york_chap wrote:So where do you park your car for free in the centre of York/at the station/at the hospital?
Just followed a link from the new site to one which allows you to plan your journey and compares driving to buses/walking. Although a useful site, it only confirmed what an absolute joke the bus service is in some parts of York.
I live out of town and to go into the centre for work, or to the hospital/station there are four buses in the 12 minute period between 07.56 and 08.08 (average one every 3 minutes) followed by a 50 minute period with NO buses whatsoever.
Also tried entering my daily commute:
To get there on time, round trip by public transport = 2hrs 23 mins.
Round trip by car = 46 minutes (confirmed by my own experiences)
If they want to get people out of cars, they should sort out the bus service and make it affordable. I'd have to use at least 2 bus companies and end up paying nearly £5 per day, compared to about £2 in petrol. That's £15 per week = £720 per year extra. That's enough to cover my tax and insurance.
Not to mention the extra 388 hours I'd spend commuting by public transport each year. (That's 16 days).
BigDog-LittleDog
says...
4:29pm Thu 20 Sep 12
hokey cokey wrote:City Centre - Holgate Road (and walk). Heslington Road (and walk) Bishopgate (and walk). Station - Holgate Road (and walk) Hamilton Drive (and walk). Hospital - Burton Stone Lane (and walk).
york_chap wrote:So where do you park your car for free in the centre of York/at the station/at the hospital?
Just followed a link from the new site to one which allows you to plan your journey and compares driving to buses/walking. Although a useful site, it only confirmed what an absolute joke the bus service is in some parts of York.
I live out of town and to go into the centre for work, or to the hospital/station there are four buses in the 12 minute period between 07.56 and 08.08 (average one every 3 minutes) followed by a 50 minute period with NO buses whatsoever.
Also tried entering my daily commute:
To get there on time, round trip by public transport = 2hrs 23 mins.
Round trip by car = 46 minutes (confirmed by my own experiences)
If they want to get people out of cars, they should sort out the bus service and make it affordable. I'd have to use at least 2 bus companies and end up paying nearly £5 per day, compared to about £2 in petrol. That's £15 per week = £720 per year extra. That's enough to cover my tax and insurance.
Not to mention the extra 388 hours I'd spend commuting by public transport each year. (That's 16 days).
BigDog-LittleDog
says...
4:30pm Thu 20 Sep 12
Alf Garnett wrote:20th century ended 13 years ago - nice that we're keeping up to date.
Delighted as I am that York is catching up at long last with other cities in terms of real-time information I shall feel more confident that we are moving into the 20th century when I see FirstYork get shot of their twelve year old double deckers. There is one in particular which clanks and wheezes on the No 1 route. One almost feels compassion for it but not much. Some cities have hybrid buses but we still have junk. I'm convinced that York is the dumping ground for Firsts' rejects from Leeds and Edinburgh.
Theapplesarecoming
says...
7:37pm Thu 20 Sep 12
Sorry but speeding OUR money patronising ud like this is a frigging abomination
Magicman!
says...
12:44am Fri 21 Sep 12
i-Travel will see cycling and walking links alongside the River Foss, in Stirling Road, New Lane and Jockey Lane, between Haxby Road and Clifton Moor , between New Earswick and Huntington and in the Heworth Without area, with more facilities for cyclists around Clifton Business Park, Monks Cross and Clarence Street.
Some of these, such as the River Foss cycle route, the clifton moor to haxby road route, and improvements around Huntington.... However these are mainly good ones because they are off road - hopefully the clifton moor to haxby road route will be direct and either go from the Bumper Castle or from Woodland Chase (which currently has a cycle lane that hits a fence!) and go under the rail line straight to New Earswick somewhere near the Lime Tree Avenue area.... using the nestle-new earswick route would require a significant amount of backtracking, which is extra mileage and thus extra energy expenditure. Other points to note is would hope such off-road routes would NOT have pincer bars (which require the cyclists to have to weave around tightly-placed bars in a zig-zag in order to get through) or step bars (where one bar comes out of the ground and goes off at a right angle thus forming a step that your cycle pedal has to be right at the top in order to get over) - especially the latter as these are dangerous because they can (and have) caused cyclists to come off their bikes because the pedal hits the bar because the bar space is too narrow and the bar is too high (the nestle-new earswick route has the step bars too narrow, and the meadlands-osbaldwick route has them too high and too narrow)
... I would also like to hope the other cycle routes which would likely be on the road would be at least 1.5m wide (not like the current ones on York Road Haxby which are barely .5m wide and so are not only dangerous but bordering on illegal) and also marked as compulsory routes with associated enforcement so anybody parking on them gets an £80 fine, as happens in London. As it stands, the previous coucil spent a lot of money improving Crichton Avenue by widening it to include cycle lanes - but the cycle lanes cannot be used as there is always a 'Numark' branded Ford Transit and a green Fiat Punto permanently parked on the cycle lanes, in front of houses with empty driveways.... this is just one example.
Hopefully the improvements at Monks Cross will include educating the management of the shopping park that cyclists actually still visit the shops there when there is snow on the ground and so the cycle lanes need to be cleared of snow and not have the snow from the car park dumped on them (it'd also be nice to serve some form of legal enforcement so the management is legally obliged to repair the bus lane that has been out of use for well over 2 years because they can't be ar$ed to spend the money currently)... in addition maybe some fences can be put up so we don't have pedestrians straying from their 3-meter-wide pavement onto the clearly marked cycle lane....
And away from the shopping park, perhaps filling in the 'missing link' of cycle route from Waterworld (Katrin Avenue) to the junction of Katrin Avenue and Jockey Lane (ie, travelling beside Aldi) might be a nice idea.
For bus travel, currently the council cannot do anything to change what the private companies do on commercially operated services - so if First decided to get rid of a route with no replacement, all the council can do is whinge about it - same for fare increases. Different companies run things differently; Stagecoach, for example, has a much shorter lifespan for their buses than First does (Stagecoach buses are normally gone before they're 10 years old now, with older fleets getting replaced with either brand new vehicles or cascaded vehicles under 10 years old... First runs the buses into the ground until they die); Transdev and Stagecoach have a history of developing new routes or investing in under-used routes with potential to unlock supressed demand to get a profitable service, whereas First cuts back frequencies and/or places served on under-used routes in combination with increasing fares.
To improve bus travel in York then one of the following has to happen:
- First sells up York depot to recoup dwindling profits (not helped by the Competition Commission's decision to try and block First selling it's Devon operation to Stagecoach), with another operator like Govia (Preston Bus), Centebus, or Go-Ahead group (Go North East) buying the depot and services;
- York merges properly with West Yorkshire and becomes a zone for WYPTE Metro thereby allowing greater control over supply of buses and regulation;
- possibly combined with the Metro point, York develops a Quality Contract scheme or a legally binding Quality Bus Partnership (the current one is voluntary and has no legal enforcement) whereby the local authority controls what is run, when, where, and for what price.
... and this is in addition to controlling and getting rid of stupid timetabling whereby buses do not connect with trains or a road corridor has multiple buses with a small block of time with then nothing for over 50 minutes after that (this includes Huntington Road heading citybound on an evening).
Reducing congestion requires sequencing traffic lights to create a Green Wave for the flows with the most demand, and changing the layout of junctions so pedestrian crossing phases become "walk with traffic" so pedestrians can cross one section whilst another section has traffic moving - instead of the current setup at junctions like at Hayleys Terrace or at Blossom Street where the whole junction stand still for one person to cross, and just as they're at the other side, another person steps out and takes their sweet time to cross knowing the sensors will not let traffic move until they've reached the other side.... In addition, the inner ring road being a circle is creating problems where both flows are merging. Shifting all the flow to Nunnery Lane - Skeldergate Bridge - Castle Mills - Barbican - Foss Islands Road, in addition with restricted access form Rougier Street, Tower Street, Lendal Bridge, and the rail station area, along with revised signal priorities so that the main flow has an almost uninterrupted green light at the castle mills 'roundabout' (for example) would get traffic moving and reduce the congestion that makes bus routes so unreliable.
peter123456
says...
9:11am Tue 25 Sep 12
GuyWithCommonSense
says...
2:29pm Tue 25 Sep 12
Tim Cronin
says...
3:04pm Tue 25 Sep 12
Steve,
says...
3:39pm Tue 25 Sep 12
hlsbusiness
says...
4:59pm Tue 25 Sep 12
The bus service in York lets me down more than it arrives on time and is just too expensive.
I also cannot actually get to most of the places I want to go on the bus!
If York actually bothered to look at the antiquated traffic light system that stops you as soon as you get through a light they'd be amazed how much more smoothly traffic would flow.
But then I am only a resident, and therefore not of importance to the council who only seem to be interested in tourists these days.
NoNewsIsGoodNews says...
8:46am Wed 19 Sep 12
before I was just thinking that it was just silly, but who could possibly think it's silly now?