Friday, February 23, 2007

Smart Transport why bother

I got very annoyed with the government today, considering that the city council in Manchester want to introduce variable price taxation, the so called congestion charge.

Apparently they would prefer that we all got the train or bus everywhere, well here are some reasons why not.

A colleague lives in the Prestwich area of Manchester, near to one of the Metro stops. As an experiment he tried to find out how much it would cost him to get he metro and train on a monthly basis. Estimating a monthly fule and parking bill of £120 we looked up some pricing.

The GMTPE website was useless it couldn't even figure out the the best way was to use a Metro on the journey planner. The prices were only on a daily basis and basically said ring here for monthly. Only because the Metro dosn't come under the same umbrella as the railway the pricing is weird. For one did you know if you want to travel part of the journey outside of Manchester you cant buy a train ticket that works on the metro? As Wilmslow is outside the Greater Manchester area it meant he would have to buy a rail season ticket and an unsubsidised Metro one, costing way more than his current expenditure.

What a farce on the one hand the government is constantly telling us to use public transport. However it leave the pricing system incoherent and disconnected from the ways in which people need to travel.

2 comments:

lulu said...

now i can understand why you guys use your public transport not so often(even infrequently), not like us. but on another hand, the big population here decides that public transport(like metro line i take everyday) is the better way, i even tried this morning: i went to work by taxi wanted to arrive office earlier, ended up being late with 10 times of the price!!!

Cookiesworld said...

That is crazy a taxi would be so much and so late.

I worked out if I took the bus to work rather than drive I would need to catch two buses and the trip would take just under an hour, its only 10 minutes by car.