mjr wrote:Congestion? Should that be "due to people like us making similar decisions to use motor vehicles instead of a 55 minute bike+train journey to try to save a few minutes, £7.20 train fare and a bit of exercise"?
Well it would be if we could,but for reasons I'm not prepared to go into publicly we can't.
But I take your point,it's 2.5miles to the station,and a mile from Oxford Rd station at the other end which is very doable by bike,however the congestion within Manchester city centre would be enough to put off most people from even considering cycling.
Maybe, but why should it be? You can't really expect less use of the roads, surely?
Well you could if there were enough trains to cope with the influx of people leaving their cars at home or with strategically placed hubs outside of the city and or dedicated cycle roads and buses into the centre.
See my previous posts on this thread.
I agree that it's not how we should be moving people about. Rather than feeling sorry for other people who decide to go motoring, many of whom will also later discover they made an incorrect decision about what would be faster and more convenient, I feel we need to accept that this individual-level decision-making is broken and work to fix it - part of which will probably be making it more obviously attractive to more people to cycle as a way of getting past motorists blocking the A34.
I agree,see my point above.
Instead, the Manchester councils seem to be trying to deflect cycling off onto near-parallel routes which are also busy - Oxford Road and Plymouth Grove, for example. The time will probably come where they've got to bite the pollution/congestion bullet and take a lane out of the five-lanes-plus-centre-hatching A34 to help reduce pollution (four lanes = lower exhaust density) and encourage cycling.
Whatever the council is doing to stop pollution and congestion IMO ain't half enough.