National Transport Strategy

Biospace
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Biospace »

Bmblbzzz wrote: 25 Mar 2023, 11:15am
Biospace wrote: 24 Mar 2023, 8:16pm
Bmblbzzz wrote: 24 Mar 2023, 7:27pm Strikingly similar, aren't they? Not by coincidence.
Many Welsh might struggle with that analysis. It's the same for plenty of Scots, also.
It's more of an observation than an analysis, and Scotland isn't even on those maps. So why might many Welsh struggle with it?

Here are two much clearer maps of Wales -

Motorways and dual carriageways
Wales Mways and dual carriageways.png

Railway network
Wales railway network (present).png
Nearholmer
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Nearholmer »

Yes, I get that in Wales and Scotland rail gets further than decent roads, which is why I said above that it might be worth doing some “long legs” into such areas by rail. In fact I seem to recall that it has been tried into northern Scotland.

The logistical challenge though is that a great deal of inbound goods to these areas will be downstream of break-bulk, things like s Tesco lorry with the sorted needs of a few supermarkets, or an animal feed truck with sorted deliveries for multiple farms. My instinct is that those things could be catered for by container or “trailer on flatcar” to towns like Aberystwyth, then transfer to road, but clearly only if the break-bulk depots further back up-stream are rail connected. You’d really have to crunch the numbers to see what the “carbon payback period” might be for some f these things, indeed to check that there actually would be a payback.

I honestly think that decarbonising freight is a harder thing to do than decarbonising passenger travel, because of all the re-sorting en-route. It was a serious issue in the “railway age”, with vast amounts of infrastructure devoted to re-sorting things, both wagons in marshalling yards and individual items in nodal sorting warehouses. All that would need to be re-created, which again is why I wonder if the focus should be on the road haulage motive power, and continuing to exploit the sorting systems already in place.

At least passengers sort themselves out, changing trains and changing mode under their own volition if you give them decent facilities so to do.
Bmblbzzz
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Bmblbzzz »

My initial observation, referring to England and Wales – though it would apply to most countries – was simply that road and rail patterns are similar "not by coincidence". The non-coincidence is that they serve the same places.

However, if you want to say that rail serves more parts of Wales than major roads, fair enough. But that's comparing all railways to only major roads.

As for decarbonising freight transport, well I think it will be some time till we see electric HGVs over about 17 tonnes (except perhaps on very short, strictly controlled routes) and so far all the "zero carbon" fuels investigated are anything but (even if combustion of the fuel is neutral, growing it or synthesising it is not). So yes, it's difficult. There is scope (even in Wales!) to more more on to rail, where it's easier to electrify – and to avoid other problems associated with large vehicles.

Passenger transport is probably easier to decarbonise but even harder to alleviate the other negative aspects.
Biospace
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Biospace »

Over the next 60 or 70 years we can be fairly certain there will be increasing volume of freight traffic as well as the most enormous changes of which we're not so sure, many AI-related. The effects of the latter are not so easy to predict but more and more freight traffic on the roads is easily imagined. It's the sort of pollution I'd prefer to try to relieve, especially given the motorways alone feed right through and close to housing for hundreds of miles.

I believe it's something of an urban myth that freight traffic vanished off the rails because they somehow weren't suitable, more a combination of unreliable service due to strike action (the 1955 strike occurred just as roads and lorries were becoming increasingly capable of hauling longer distance and heavier loads, then Murdoch placed all his newspaper deliveries on the road in the 80s because of the print unions), post-war mechanical unreliability, the reduction in heavy engineering and fall off in coal for power relatively recently - although biomass has replaced this in part. And general instability for the railways under various political regimes.

I heard of a new quarry requiring one 28t truck leaving every ten minutes throughout the working week. The quarry was only one mile from a railway line. There are other similar stories which are very likely a result of the "nobody else has" effect. These extra trucks pummel our roads, shake our buildings and create more unnecessary pollution and danger.

HGVs as pointed out are already at their limits of efficiency whereas the private car is the definition of inefficiency. Adding electric wires to motorways and dual carriageways to which the heavy vehicles were constrained would see a reduction in HGV emissions but with an explosion of road miles on all the other roads, which isn't acceptable. On the other hand, the private car could easily see a reduction in its average energy use by a factor of 5, through energy-saving design together with the replacement of the ICE with EM and lighter battery.

The logistic challenges of railfreight are well known as are the minimum distances needed to make it most efficient, however it's fascinating to see what's already possible with AI and 'the hive mind' for sorting and packaging. The goal should not just be maximum profit, but minimal excess emissions and pollution also. As I mentioned many posts upthread, the original design of a railway was to carry heavy goods efficiently. If passengers generate a little more profit, then railways should expand to serve the public in a far, far better way than they do at present.
Nearholmer
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Nearholmer »

I believe it's something of an urban myth that freight traffic vanished off the rails because they somehow weren't suitable,
We could easily wander off into a lot of history, so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me bringing in a bit more of that.

Railway goods distribution to every wayside village station was “suitable”, that is best in terms of time and cost, while the horse was the alternative. As soon as motor lorries came on the scene things began to change, and by the late 1930s the railways were beginning to concentrate most goods at nodal depots c20-30 miles apart in more rural areas, and use road distribution downstream. The Southern Railway got furthest with it, but he whole scheme was kiboshed by the war and didn’t really get into its stride again until the late 1950s, by which time it was too late. Coal was treated differently, and was still railed to wayside stations for longer, but even that moved to “concentration depots” eventually, then pretty much ceased altogether, which finished the local goods train completely.

The issue is that most rail freight has always been “intermodal” in the sense that road transport has been part of the trip at one end or both, so the question is “how far apart should the transfer nodes be?”. In horse days the answer was “a few miles”, as lorries got better and better the distances moved out to the point where today they are many tens, a hundred or more, apart.

Valuing pollution properly will logically push the nodes back, closer together, but if longer-haul road legs of the trip can be electrified as shorter-haul already can (battery), then he move closer together may not need to be as much as might be expected.

Automated picking and sorting is already normal in very many logistics applications, so I would take for granted that it will be applied wherever it is cheaper than human beings doing the job. AI is a level higher, and again is already beginning to be visible in things like routing-optimisation software, sophisticated demand prediction etc.

In the end though, the optimum selection of transport modes in order to minimise CO2 emission is a mere matter of clever bods asking their software to crunch numbers for them.

The really, really, really challenging bit is whether anybody is going to elect a succession of governments that will actually get serious about any of this. At the moment, what I observe is mostly “kicking the can down the road”, greenwashing, and wishing the problem away.
Biospace
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Biospace »

And freight by rail was actually falling throughout the 1930s until the war effort began, such was the convenience of the lorry and perhaps because there was significantly more money to be made with passenger traffic at the time.

Most of us will remember light goods used to be couriered by British Rail passenger services, which seemed to make a lot of sense not least because bicycles were accepted freely on almost every train running. However, there are many signs of business beginning to wake up to the potential of fast rail for freight, not just for heavy, long distance carriage.

https://orion.railopsgroup.co.uk/#how
https://reveelgroup.com/resources/new-r ... ice-in-uk/
https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyin ... -next.html
https://www.intercityrailfreight.com/

I recognise the 'kicking the can" description all too well - Britain has excelled at that for 30 years in energy, and look at the mess we're now in. Other nations don't muddle their way along and although we do have some extra challenges with transport because of existing density of infrastructure, that shouldn't be an excuse not to plan properly for the next half century.
Jdsk
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Jdsk »

"Transpennine Express to be brought into operator of last resort":
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tran ... ast-resort

28 May 2023.

And a review of "services in the north".

Jonathan
Stevek76
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Stevek76 »

For this government 'review' probably means 'cuts'. They are a disaster for transport at the moment; Harper's a car brained maniac.

And yes, there is a need for some sort of overarching transport strategy, or even a simple political vision would help as we don't even have that currently. Lacking that, DfT forecasts are based on 'business as usual' assumptions and spending follows that.
Biospace wrote: 27 Mar 2023, 4:11pm And freight by rail was actually falling throughout the 1930s until the war effort began, such was the convenience of the lorry and perhaps because there was significantly more money to be made with passenger traffic at the time.
How much of that convenience was effective subsidy via externalised costs though? Railways were at that time privatised and use of them was charged to recoup construction and maintenance costs. Roads were provided by the government and then used by lorries for close to free, on top of that there were the greater air & noise pollution along with casualties from collisions. Developed into a classic tragedy of the commons example much like car use has.
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Biospace
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Biospace »

Stevek76 wrote: 11 May 2023, 10:31am
Biospace wrote: 27 Mar 2023, 4:11pm And freight by rail was actually falling throughout the 1930s until the war effort began, such was the convenience of the lorry and perhaps because there was significantly more money to be made with passenger traffic at the time.
How much of that convenience was effective subsidy via externalised costs though? Railways were at that time privatised and use of them was charged to recoup construction and maintenance costs. Roads were provided by the government and then used by lorries for close to free, on top of that there were the greater air & noise pollution along with casualties from collisions. Developed into a classic tragedy of the commons example much like car use has.
Roads in the 1930s were a result of government, private and local parish authority investment, so like the railways most people had paid for them, directly or indirectly. The railways caused the collapse the Turnpike trust system, the CTC were one of the first bodies to lobby government for the improvement of roads at the end of the 19th century.

It was the massive government investment in the motorway programme together with vehicles capable of hauling heavier loads over longer distance at speed (together with other factors I mention in previous posts) which tipped so much freight on to the roads, which today causes so much pollution and damage.

Note I've been arguing for freight to be transferred back on to the railways, since they're designed for hauling heavy loads and do so more economically and with less environmental harm. This picture is from the mid 1930s showing construction of a road, from https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.u ... d=1&pid=10

1930s roadbuilding.jpeg
Stevek76
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Stevek76 »

Yes people had paid for them but those costs aren't felt by the user, i.e. they're externalised, which is a key distinction.

This isn't automatically a bad thing, but it is a factor that affects the choices people and companies make. The company wanting goods moved had to contribute to the maintenance/construction costs when moving them by privatised rail, they do not have to contribute to the cost of the roads when using those (beyond a fairly nominal VED charge on the HGV) as that is paid for by the general public. Hence from the perspective of company road looks cheaper, even if from a wider societal perspective it might not be.
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Jdsk
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Jdsk »

Image

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/articl ... 699_7.html

Is this going to hold in practice?

Jonathan
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by mjr »

Biospace wrote: 24 Mar 2023, 4:31pm[...]
if we used our motorways and dual carriageways mostly for freight carriage, have you considered the significant extra distribution miles once on the final leg?

Screenshot 2023-03-24 at 16.09.00.png
The "motorways and dual carriageways" image seems like a work of fiction. It includes the eastern A47, southern A46 and I think the A49 which are mostly single carriageway, often through many towns and villages. It shows parts of the A303 which are still single carriageway. And those are just the ones which leap out. It may have been created by someone trying to mislead people into thinking that the South East hasn't got lots more higher-spec "National Highways" than the rest of England.
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Bmblbzzz
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Isn't it just the Strategic Roads Network with a bit added on for Wales?
https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-road ... we-manage/
Biospace
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by Biospace »

mjr wrote: 23 May 2023, 3:26pm The "motorways and dual carriageways" image seems like a work of fiction. It includes the eastern A47, southern A46 and I think the A49 which are mostly single carriageway, often through many towns and villages. It shows parts of the A303 which are still single carriageway. And those are just the ones which leap out. It may have been created by someone trying to mislead people into thinking that the South East hasn't got lots more higher-spec "National Highways" than the rest of England.
It's a lousy map in every way, but the best I could find online in that format, at the time. Looking again, it's not worthy of its title. If you know of one which better shows twin carriageway roads please send a link or picture.

There seems to be a lack of maps differentiating between single and twin carriageway roads.
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mjr
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Re: National Transport Strategy

Post by mjr »

Biospace wrote: 23 May 2023, 4:56pm
mjr wrote: 23 May 2023, 3:26pm The "motorways and dual carriageways" image seems like a work of fiction. It includes the eastern A47, southern A46 and I think the A49 which are mostly single carriageway, often through many towns and villages. It shows parts of the A303 which are still single carriageway. And those are just the ones which leap out. It may have been created by someone trying to mislead people into thinking that the South East hasn't got lots more higher-spec "National Highways" than the rest of England.
It's a lousy map in every way, but the best I could find online in that format, at the time. Looking again, it's not worthy of its title. If you know of one which better shows twin carriageway roads please send a link or picture.

There seems to be a lack of maps differentiating between single and twin carriageway roads.
In theory, it should be possible to extract a map of divided carriageways from OpenStreetMap using Overpass Turbo or similar, but doing that in a reasonable time is beyond me.

The main map I can find which makes it easy to tell the difference is the OS Miniscale, which can be viewed online at https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/ind ... =9&layer=8 — it also shows railways as think black lines, so you can see that while many have motorways/duals parallel, the GWR lines are some way from the roads (where the M4 sits between the two GWR main lines) and there's not really any in Wales and Scotland.
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