Interesting

maltrab

Administrator
Staff member
Last week my wife and I needed to pop into Lincoln, I checked google traffic and the roads were gridlocked, turned out it was the University open day for potential new students, so rather than try and drive in,we took the train from a station about 3 miles out.
The station car park has limited space but is free, there is no ticket office or machine at the station, so we expected to pay on the train, but on the short journey no inspector came along. On arrival in Lincoln the ticket barriers were wide open so we just breezed through.
My wife made the short dash into the high street, while I went to the ticket office, where I could of bought 2 singles for the return journey, but I was honest and bought 2 day returns with a railcard. Now if I had driven in I would of parked in Lincoln station car park, minimum charge £2, plus the fuel cost and hassle that day driving in, if I had bought single tickets they would of cost 50p more than the day return, so total cost of going by train was £2.25 and coming home, from departure to walking in our front door was 20 minutes, I think the drive home that day would of been at least 1 hour.
 
Our infrastructure of roads countrywide can now not handle the levels of traffic which has exploded in recent years . With public transport costs rising and the reliability in question you can see why road traffic has increased substantially , unfortunately the road network has not grown at the same pace . The measures taken to ensure the future of the car industry , by making it so easy to procure a car , effectively making them available as leased vehicles that you never really own , without having to pay a huge deposit ,has contributed to the growth of vehicles on our roads, but because of the lack of investment in all public services the problem has reached saturation point.
 
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I think living in the backwaters of Lincolnshire, in general we are pretty lucky traffic wise, and normally we can time our trips into Lincoln to suit us, unless it is a hospital appointment, most other spots around here it is not a problem.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Hertfordshire for a few days, the infrastructure in the entire county has not moved on years, the population has exploded in the county by approx half a million in 10 years, yet the major routes have not really improved, the worst section is the A1 between Welwyn and Stevenage particularly northbound as it is a slow uphill climb and only 2 lanes, so in the evenings to travel the 5 miles to the next junction can take 20 minutes without any accidents etc. Yet in the mid 80's they planned to upgrade the route to at least 3 lanes, personally I would either remove the motorway status and use the hard shoulder northbound as a lorry only lane, or like several motorway that they term as smart motorways (Really mean getting ready for tolls) use the hard shoulder at peak times. Of course all other routes to avoid this bottleneck are also very slow going and push traffic through many narrow residential streets.
 
Totally agree about public transport, I was without the car today so walked a few miles to the shops, I was walking home again when an old war injury played up so got the bus from the bottom of a very steep hill, cost me £1.70 to go 4 bus stops !
 
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