Does UK Public transport live up to expectations?
Introduction
Public transportation has always been a key issue to the government by
trying to promote public transport more than using a car. Today public
transport is pushed more to help reduce factors of pollution and
congestion which seem to be growing all over the UK.
Transportation needs vary greatly depending on peoples commuting needs
and therefore trying to focus on transport as a whole over the UK is
very difficult to research.
I have used over 20 documents to help me research this statement.
Literature Review
Out of the documents that I was able to find the documents seemed to
have very positive or negative opinions about public transport with
only a few mixed opinions. The following facts were from mixed view
documents.
There were many documents which were about crime on public transport
and around areas of public transport. The main issues were about train
stations and buses where situations of theft were experienced on
regular basis. Crime is a factor which is now being dealt with
increasingly with investments going into cameras at train stations and
increased security. Buses are also being equipped with cameras on
board so that drivers can see the upper floor. These articles can be
found in the appendix and are articles AP 1, 3, 4 and 5.
Many articles were also mixed as they acknowledged improvements being
made but were also negative as plans are always based on 5 to10 year
developments and cost millions if not billions of pounds. This seems
to make people loose faith in public transport as it is slow and
costly. An example of this is the £10bn investment into the London
underground found in appendix.
Many articles brought forward positive opinions of public transport
these opinions and facts are as follows.
There are new websites being created to help people plan their
journeys by public transport. These sort of sites help people by
telling someone which, buses and trains they may need and which ones.
A site which I used is www.transportdirect.co.uk. A site like this
gives people confidence as they know what forms of transport they may
need and how long a journey may take. In appendix this site can be
found as AP6.
New investments are being made to link major cities. An example is
Leeds and Sheffield being linked by one train route. This is designed
to help reduce congestion on the M1 this can be seen in appendix AP7.
Appendix article AP8 shows achievements made over 2003 and 2004 and
tells us of more park and rides schemes being used and set up more.
My first key highlight of the ‘trusty and reliable’ service would have to be that the metro timetable is extremely un-reliable and outdated due to the metros un-weary maintenance service and their ‘caring’ service schedules i.e. in the middle of Christmas when sales are taken place. Their timetables placed at the ‘lavish’ metro stations are outdated and outlandish as the timetables don’t even represent the actual daily schedule of the metros and that the timetables don ‘t correspond with anything related
The procedure for approving a bill and making it a law involves many steps. The following description is a short summary from “How Our Laws are Made”, an in depth description of the legislative process that can found on the website of the Library of Congress. After a bill is drafted, a member...
The Irish began immigrating to North America in the 1820s, when the lack of jobs and poverty forced them to seek better opportunities elsewhere after the end of the major European wars. When the Europeans could finally stop depending on the Irish for food during war, the investment in Irish agricultural products reduced and the boom was over. After an economic boom, there comes a bust and unemployment was the result. Two-thirds of the people of Ireland depended on potato harvests as a main source of income and, more importantly, food. Then between the years of 1845 and 1847, a terrible disease struck the potato crops. The plague left acre after acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. The failure of the potato yields caused the prices of food to rise rapidly. With no income coming from potato harvests, families dependent on potato crops could not afford to pay rent to their dominantly British and Protestant landlords and were evicted only to be crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Peasants who were desperate for food found themselves eating the rotten potatoes only to develop and spread horrible diseases. ¡§Entire villages were quickly homeless, starving, and diagnosed with either cholera or typhus.¡¨(Interpreting¡K,online) The lack of food and increased incidents of death forced incredible numbers of people to leave Ireland for some place which offered more suitable living conditions. Some landlords paid for the emigration of their tenants because it made more economic sense to rid farms of residents who were not paying their rent. Nevertheless, emigration did not prove to be an antidote for the Famine. The ships were overcrowded and by the time they reached their destination, approximately one third of its passengers had been lost to disease, hunger and other complications. However, many passengers did survive the journey and, as a result, approximately ¡§1.5 million Irish people immigrated to North America during the 1840¡¦s and 1850¡¦s.¡¨(Bladley, online) As a consequence of famine, disease (starvation and disease took as many as one million lives) and emigration, ¡§Ireland¡¦s population dropped from 8 million to 5 million over a matter of years.¡¨(Bladley, online) Although Britain came to the aid of the starving, many Irish blamed Britain for their delayed response and for centuries of political hardship as basi...
Automobiles play a major role in today's society. Almost every American owns at least one motorized transportation vehicle. Some say they make our lives better by reaching places faster than before. Others say they are a harmful to the environment. Have they made our society better or worse? They may be fast, but do we as humans want our environment to suffer because of time. Face it, cars pollute. And they release destructive chemicals into the air. Air pollution can threaten the health of many subjects in the environment including human beings.
In Ireland in the years 1845-1852 a great famine caused a mass die off of potato crops throughout the country. Beginning in 1845 the weather in Ireland were abnormally chilly and damp for a summer season in Ireland, providing the perfect type of whether to allow diseases to spread rapidly. Phytophthora infestans, the cause of the great famine, can spread in the blowing wind. Shortage of food caused many Irish people to immigrate to other countries yet, some citizens of Ireland stayed most of which became struck will illnesses or died of starvation. Many farmers consolidated their land and shared the harvested crops creating another shortage of food for consolidated farming families. Potatoes originated from South America. . In the 1800s Ireland’s population grew immensely so, lands owners did not own more than a couple of acres for only themselves.
Social boundaries and many misunderstandings kept Lia from getting the right amounts of recommended prescription. This caused her doctors to become uncertain on whether or not that she was getting the right combinations and amount of her medication. Lia’s parents were having a hard time understanding and were unable to comprehend or correspond with the healing directions to cure Lia, the doctors saw this as the Lee's being resistant. One of Lia’s health provider’s at the time wrote, “Father had become more and more reluctant to give medication at all because he feels that the medicines are causing the seizures and also the fever (Fadiman, 50).”
Therefore, it is virtually impossible to deliver effective and comprehensive healthcare without clear communication between the patient and practitioners. It is a necessity to understand that there are countless cultures across the globe, and no matter how underrepresented, morally, all are entitled to the right to practice their own beliefs unimpeded as long as they do not threaten or inhibit other’s rights to practice.
There is a serious problem with our nation's roads and highways. I find myself repeatedly avoiding trips to the city for this very reason, as I'm sure many others do as well. This nerve-wracking congestion is even beginning to find its way into the suburbs and surrounding areas of large cities. It is a serious problem that affects everyone who owns an automobile, as well as, businesses that are dependent on reliable and convenient transportation. To top it all off, this problem is getting worse every year. The population of this nation is growing, which translates to an increase in cars on the road. More people are moving to cities and the suburbs that surround them, creating gridlocks everywhere.
The Great Potato Famine was a huge disaster that would change Ireland forever. The people in Ireland were extremely dependent on potatoes and when the blight came the economy went down. When the fungus attacked the potato crops slowly crop by crop throughout Ireland, people began to lose their main source of food. With the people in Ireland’s huge dependency on the potato, people began to starve or get sick from the potatoes. No one had any food to eat. The potatoes were black inside with molds through out it that came from the fungus from something in nature. The weather that brought the blight also was one of the causes because they could not control how the weather was bringing the fungus. Ireland was under the British government and did not help Ireland when they needed Britain. The aftermath of the Great Famine was not only a huge drop in population, but emigration, and much more.
From the dawn of time, man has followed his urge to travel; sometimes neglecting the enjoyment of the journey in pursuit of the destination. Although two of the favorable means of passenger transportation - the plane and the train - accomplish the task of arriving at a destination, there are distinct differences in their capacity for comfort, time, scenic value, and safety.
The bus is short and only has seating for eighteen passengers. It is white on top, black on the bottom with a12 inch wide green stripe along the side of the bus and the letters K A T S, boldly displayed on the green stripe. There are 3 steep stairs to climb, to get on the bus. The day I rode it was raining and cold. The windshield wipers ticked back and forth, clearing the wind- shield of rain. There were three passengers, all of them where white; two men, one woman. The older gentleman was casually dressed. I think he was in his 60’s (I’m guessing, because he was gray headed). He sat in the third seat on the drivers’ side of the bus. Right across the aisle from him was a man, in his mid- 30’s, dressed in an olive green army surplus jacket. The woman on the bus was sitting in the front seat, behind the driver. She was wearing a pink wind breaker and was carrying a matching pink umbrella. She was approximately 50 yrs old and very thin. Wrinkles marked the corner of her eyes .I think she had a brain injury of some kind. Her eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything and she had applied her lipstick in such a way that it had smeared to one side of her mouth.
First of the difference between public transportation and private car is convenience in travel. There are many type of transportations that people can choose to travelling such as bus and van. People can save time to go work in morning and to back when they finished working. Even though, people have to go to work in a crowded bus, people can avoid and also less traffic jams from using their own car on the road. If they go to work or somewhere by private car, they will get serious when they get stick in their car for a long time. People do not have to find parking when they go out to work or shopping. Moreover, public transportation saves environment because it helps people decrease air pollution from using private car.
If you use public transport you spend on your journey as and when you need to travel, whereas if you own a car you are paying for it all the time, even if you are not using it, as insurance, tax and MOTs need constantly maintaining.
Most people take the urban public transportation system for granted. It is used in every aspect of our daily lives: work, education, medical necessities, recreation, etc. It is also important for the transportation of goods and services, which aids the growth and maintenance of our economy. Urban public transportation is the critical component of our quality of life and economic stability. The MBTA, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, is Boston and Eastern Massachusetts’s major transportation service. The MBTA has played a central role in the development of Boston and surrounding cities and towns for more than a century; providing service from 175 cities and towns into Boston. On an average weekday over 1.2 million trips are made on the subway, buses, commuter lines and other services in the mass transit system. With an international airport, a ship port, the highways, and the rail lines to connect regional cities and towns to national and international destinations and markets, Boston’s urban public transportation system has made the region’s growing role in the global economy possible.
It is considered a holistic approach that might be involved some factors providing an overall speed of journey (Mannering, Walter, and Scott, 2004). Wyatt (1997) states that the rail transportation has been made the urban areas to develop the transport network places with producing a good network to be placed over location with a poor network. For example in European Union (EU), the rail company had been employing around 570,000 people across passenger and freight operations in year 2012. From here, the rail transport is critical by the EU strategy to improve their economic condition. This rail sector had been makes a large contribution in oversea country.