Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

One aspect of public transport I've yet to mention is one of the oldest surviving modes: the taxi. I've decided to tackle this issue for a couple of reasons, which I'll discuss in more detail below. Even though we've come a long way from the era of the hansom cab (invented in 1843), the basic principle remains the same as it did in Victorian times. Let's take a secenario from one of Conan Doyle's famous stories: a bloke sits around in Baker Street in a black horse-drawn vehicle, chain-smoking, chatting to the other drivers, drinking tea and reading a paper. Suddenly Holmes throws open the door of the vehicle, leaps inside and shouts, 'Whitechapel, my good man – and ride like the wind!' The driver has done The Knowledge, of course, so finding his way through the foggy streets isn't a problem. Holmes pays him when they reach their destination and goes off in search of whichever ne'er-do-well he's pursuing. Meanwhile, the driver presumably sit...

This kinda forms a supplement to my previous entry. That outlined the difficulties posed by having so many different transport operators in South-east Wales, and no overall structure to make ticketing easy and affordable. My friend and I are planning a trip to Caerphilly Castle (weather permitting, of course). Problem: find the cheapest way of doing it. You see, we'd initially have to pay to get from beyond Aberdare to Caerphilly – by bus and/or train – and then pay to get into the castle. Not cheap, as you'll see from the tables below. But luckily for us, I know the area quite well as I've travelled it extensively over the last forty years. I know bus routes have changed – and timetables and fares have certainly changed – but the basic framework is still there. I also get newsletters from the public transport providers, so I get to hear about their special offers. Summer is always a good time for these because it's tourist season. The real trick is to combine as m...

On my birthday three years ago, I was making my regular visit to London when the front page of the Western Mail caught my eye in Cardiff. I can't remember the exact headline , but it seemed that a committee of the Welsh Assembly had recommended an Oyster-style card covering the whole of Wales. The first thing that came into my head was 'What a good idea!' As a frequent visitor to London, I'd found out just how efficiently the Oyster card allows you to travel around the city. I'd also found out how much money it can save you over a period of time. (Or even a single day, when you compare it to the Travelcard.) I bought the paper and read the full story on the coach. The second thing that came into my head was 'What a stupid idea!' You see, the contrast between London and Wales couldn't be more apparent. Greater London is pretty much one continuous, flattish, dense urban sprawl covering over 1,500 square kilometres. It's criss-crossed by dozens of...

About six weeks ago I decided to initiate Operation Motorcycle Silencer for the fourth year in a row. Every summer Aberdare Park hosts the Welsh National Road Races, organised by the Aberaman Motorcycle Club. I don't begrudge it for a second, because it brings a welcome boost to our local economy, it's a chance for old friends to catch up and to make new friends, and it puts one of the finest Victorian municipal parks in Wales firmly on the map. But (as you can probably imagine) it's a fairly loud affair. Even though modern bikes run a lot more quietly than their older brothers, you bring a couple of thousand of the buggers into one place and the noise level soon becomes pretty challenging. As I live literally two streets from the circuit, as often as possible I've decided to spend the Saturday as far from Trecynon as I can possibly be. After receiving a 25% discount voucher from National Express, and with the latest copy-edit running on schedule, it seemed that Lo...

Most of the time, at least, the good people at Transport for London really understand how public transport needs to work. (I've got some examples of when it doesn't work, which I'll show you again.) They've announced a new innovation this week, called the Hopper fare. I don't know how it would work in practice, but here's the blurb from the TfL website: Make a journey using pay as you go (contactless or Oyster) on a bus or tram, and you can now make unlimited bus and tram journeys for free within one hour of first touching in. Touch in using the same card on all the bus and tram journeys you make and the free fares will be applied automatically. Hopper fares apply to all pay as you go journeys. You can now travel on Tube, DLR, London Overground, TfL Rail, Emirates Air Line, River Bus or National Rail services between Hopper journeys, and Hopper fares will still apply. Hopper fares will not apply if your Oyster card has a negative pay as you go balance af...

I know I've discussed this subject several times already, but I'm going to revisit it with good reason. Over the past couple of weeks, new bus stop indicators have been erected on routes in and around Aberdare. The main reason for the change seems to be that the new signs include up-to-date contact details for Traveline Cymru. Here are the old and new signs from the same location – outside Aberdare Library – so you can see the difference for yourselves.             I think the new signs look much clearer than the old ones, some of which were really starting to show their age. In addition, they no longer list services like the X55 (Aberdare to Swansea) which were discontinued the best part of a decade ago. But there's a snag. Have a look at the whole signpost. Have you spotted it yet? Yeah, you've got it – there's nowhere for the timetable(s) to be displayed. On the old stands (or a fair percentage of them, at least), there was a rectangular panel at approxi...

A couple of months ago I told you about the late-night shenanigans I experienced while travelling home from Cardiff (see I Don't Like Thursdays ). Well, you can imagine my surprise when, on 5 December, an email from Arriva Trains Wales pinged into my inbox: Case Reference: ATW-161007-BFD Dear Mr O'Gorman, Thank you for contacting us about your journey on 06 October between Cardiff and Aberdare. I am sorry to learn that your journey was disrupted, and that you were caused a delay as a result. In order for me to fully investigate and resolve your compensation claim I do need some more information from you. Could you therefore please confirm the following? • As you have requested to be paid by bank transfer please confirm the account name, sort code and account number we should pay your compensation to. I look forward to hearing from you in due course. Yours sincerely Neil Curness Customer Relations Advisor Arriva Trains Wales I emailed them back with my details, and congratulated...

It only occurred to me a few days ago that October 2016 marks thirty years of bus 'deregulation' (i.e. privatisation) across most of the UK. You won't have heard anything about this momentous occasion on the TV or radio news, of course. Nor will you have read anti-nostalgic articles about 'the bad old days' in the national press. That's because bus service were only deregulated outside Greater London – and, of course, as far as the Westminster Bubble of politicians, journalists, newspaper columnists and business lobbyists are concerned, that's pretty much the extent of the Observable Universe. As for the rest of us, as I've pointed out on several occasions, deregulation panned out exactly as the prophets of doom (myself included) said it would. The results included wonderful spin-offs of the capitalist system: cheaper fares initially, which quickly shot back up after cut-throat competition forced smaller operators off the road; fewer services running on...

For some unexplained reason, Arriva Trains Wales always manages to unleash chaos on Thursdays. I noticed this when I was working in Cardiff, about fifteen years ago. Platform 6 at Cardiff Central on Thursday evenings would be a free-for-all, with trains coming in late, going off late, running out of sequence, or not turning up entirely. After a few months I used to finish work and go for a pint, instead of fighting through the scrum, and catch a later train. Yesterday I was in Cardiff, and decided to stay late in town to check out a couple of new places which have opened. I don't think it had occurred to me that it was Thursday until I arrived at the station, when all Hell broke loose as usual. Here's the text of a compensation claim I've just submitted to ATW via their website. I've learned an important lesson this week: Never go anywhere by train on a Thursday. Or a weekend. Or pretty much any time in the next ten years, until the upgrade is complete and services are ...

My regular readers will already be familiar with the rigmarole necessary to book National Express coach tickets online. You have to jump through several hoops simply to travel between the capital of England and the capital of Wales – a process which takes far more time and demands far more patience than the average passenger has to spare. But, gentle reader, that's just the start of it. Booking a coach ticket online is an absolute piece of piss compared to buying an advance ticket via the Arriva Trains Wales website. I'm travelling to Bristol tomorrow, so I decided to see what the fares were. I was surprised to learn that an off-peak day return from Aberdare was £14.90. That puts Bristol – some forty minutes from Cardiff – in more or less the same price band as a day return to London by coach. Anyway … I tried to log in to my account, but (needless to say) I'd forgotten my password. I first registered with Arriva Trains Wales about five years ago, just for their news update...

I still haven't finished working on the second half of my analysis of bus services within the Cynon Valley. I know it's taking ages, but every time I start making progress the companies change their timetables again. The most recent changes I heard about only a couple of weeks ago. It appears that services after the evening 'rush hour' (or what passes for rush hour in the Valleys, anyway) have been drastically curtailed. I'm reliably informed that after 6 p.m. you'll be unable to catch a bus to Llwydcoed, Cwmbach or Cwmdare. That puts these outlying districts on a par with Penderyn, Rhigos, Abernant, Perthcelyn and Cefnpennar, with no services at all on Sundays either. It's always baffled me why there's such a rapid drop in services after 6 p.m and at weekends. Logic would suggest that there'd be more demand for public transport, not less. After you get home from work, it's nice to go out for a couple of pints in the evening. Young people, too, ...

Every time I go to Mountain Ash, I feel as though I'm stepping back in time slightly. Last week, I definitely did, because I found this handy information display on the bus stop at the old Bruce Hotel. No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. Even though the photo isn't very clear, that's definitely a timetable for Spring 2003. It's been a long time since a Shamrock bus troubled the people of the Cynon Valley (thank God!)

An interesting article by Ian Steadman appeared in the New Statesman blog today. It's not directly related to South Wales, but its general thrust ties in with what I've been arguing for the past few months. Why not check it out? Public transport bodies: producing lots of data, not necessarily making the most of it , New Statesman , July 21, 2014

On Monday July 21, Stagecoach in South Wales are fully implementing the timetable changes which I told you about in The Last Bus to Everywhere . Having said that, some of them seem to have taken place already. I was in Caerphilly last week, and the buses to and from Bargoed are now operated by a company called Harris Coaches. I still don't know what's happening to the buses between Pontypridd and Bridgend, or Pontypridd and Blackwood, or the other services I listed after the Stagecoach announcement. I daresay I'll find out next time I plan a day out, only to find that my ticket isn't valid for some (or all) of the journey. [As I was finishing this entry, my informant from Caerphilly CBC very kindly filled in some gaps. New Adventure Travel are taking on the 244, although on a slightly different route. He also told me that tickets from different operators would be interavailable. It's nice to have some good news to pass on for a change.] I'll take most of these c...

I've spent the past few days travelling around South Wales (and beyond) with a Megarider Gold ticket issued by Stagecoach. It's surprising how much ground you can cover when you put your mind to it. Having been in and out of several county boroughs, I've been able to compare their respective approaches to bus information. It's a fairly uneven picture, unsurprisingly. I went into some detail about Rhondda Cynon Taf's timetable displays (or lack thereof) in Misinformation, Disinformation and Non-Information . My observations were mostly made in and around Aberdare. After spending some time in Pontypridd Bus Station I can report that the situation there is pretty similar. Unless I've missed it, there doesn't seem to be a single at-a-glance notice listing the various destinations and service numbers. Instead, I had to traipse from one end to the other while hunting for the right departure bay. It's far from ideal, especially when there are a large number of ...

Arriva Trains Wales sell a ticket called the Valley Lines Day Explorer and Night Rider. For just £11.00, it which offers 'unlimited travel' by train and Stagecoach bus in the area shown. I decided to buy one of these yesterday, and spend a day filling in some gaps on my copy of Stuart Baker's Rail Atlas: Great Britain and Ireland . Since it's an off-peak ticket, I knew that I could expect a time restriction on it. I got to the ticket office in Aberdare in time for the 0852 train and asked for a Day Explorer ticket. The lady behind the counter told me that she couldn't sell me the ticket until 0930. She suggested that I had a word with the conductor, as he might not be aware of the restrictions. Instead, I headed for Aberdare Library, where a quick search online turned up Arriva's own Terms and Conditions for the offer: I printed this page off (eventually!) and stuck it in my pocket. Armed with this information, I returned to the ticket office. By now I was too l...

In 'What Do You Want?' – 'Information!' , I told you about the getting-blood-from-a-stone-like process of trying to find out details of bus services in England when I was phoning from Wales. That was nearly six years ago. I've no idea whether things have improved since. I might give them a call when I can face another uphill struggle. Subsequently I've highlighted the inadequacies of the Traveline Cymru website, and the paucity of information on bus company websites. The situation is exactly the same once you log off and return to the Real World. In my local area (Aberdare), Stagecoach drivers occasionally have timetable booklets which passengers can pick up. Occasionally… However, these – by definition – list only the Stagecoach services. The various buses operated by Globe Coaches, N.A.T. Group, First Call and other local companies don't merit a mention. In fact, unless you happen to see one of these buses while you're out and about, you probably won...