Overview
- An overview of my ideas for Public Transport
Preamble
Most people have ideas about anythign they com into contact, even more so if said contact is regular. In this series of articles, I will detail some of my ideas and hopefully this will invite some constructive critisim of them.
Transportation has a single purpose; to move freight from A to B, it just so happens that some of that freight consists of human passengers rather than more traditional items such as aggregates or mail. Carrying this concept forward, 'A' and 'B' essentially can only be either a destination or a source. In the case of a transport network, the destinations are commercial centres and the sources are residential communities. The more sources you have available the greater the traffic reaching your destinations, and the greater the economic growth available to it.
As nice as leisure use of the railways is, their reason d'etre is commerce, pure and simple. The freight that travels over them pays its way, as do the hundreds of thousands of commuters that pass over the country's network twice a day, every weekday. Roads are indeed the more economic case for low-capacity movements of objects ( be they passengers or goods ), however they simply cannot compete with the bulk transportation capacity of a fully utilised railway. The people who use the railway to get to and from work do so as a captive audience, as almost certainly they do not have alternative routes that are just as "good", and as such the provision of additional capacity a very low-risk investment. If the railway infrastructure was private the shareholders would demand that addional lines were laid so that more passengers could be served and thus bring in more revenue. It's a basic business equation: More passengers using your service = More revenue ( and provided you manage your business properly ) = more profit.
