Are there any cities in the UK (other than London) with actual public transport, or just a bunch of private companies offering for-proft, substandard services?
Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
Glasgow has a subway. Edinburgh, Manchester, and other cities have trams.
Glasgow should get it’s own DLC for Mini Metro ;)
I've never played Mini Metro but Glasgow probably wouldn't be too interesting, the subway is just one circle with no offshoots or other lines. A couple of months back I was on the wrong platform so I went the wrong way around the loop, the end result being I had to wait one whole extra stop to get to my destination.
I'm not sure about the economic models of how such cities work, but Manchester and Nottingham have very competent rail/ tram services and public transport. I'm also pretty sure Nottingham also offers free travel to students.
Maybe it's just Cambridge then. It's pretty miserable here, though at least we can bike (semi) safely.
Brighton had a very good bus system. At least 10 years ago it covered all my needs. Plus bicycle lanes and trains to get to the nearest towns and I had 0 need or wish for a car.
I moved to US and miss those times
Having been across most of the UK, I can safely say that londons public transport is easily the best (kind of out of necessity as it's nigh impossible to get anywhere on time with a car, considering the amount of traffic).
That being said however, it's not like other cities fall far behind. The UK has really good bus & train networks outside of london, and given that other cities have FAR less traffic, the buses are actually usable.
I'm not going to rank it, but I am going to discuss two reasons why I think London beats other UK cities.
First is obviously that the city is the political and economic capital of the UK.
Second is the creation of the Greater London Authority and giving it transport as a responsibility. Having elected officials directly responsible for mass transit has made policies like tolling the CBD and projects like the Overground possible.
RMTransit just did a video about how it's basically impossible to have good public transit without London-style city control.
The comments on his video list certain cities where the council own a bus company and everything works okay.
Note that the north of England almost got an Oyster card style of combined payment system thanks to tfN.