Recent content by The Ham

There's issues with road electrification, the biggest is that the proposals I've seen have a lower hight than standard bridges (i.e. those bridges only just high enough not to require a hight limit sign). There are ways to deal with that, but that's going to mean taller lorries having routes to...

Indeed, batteries aren't a great solution when there's high useage, effectively where there's 4+tph (maybe 3tph if the lengths aren't that far) it makes sense to put up wires. For all the talk of 150 mile battery trains, that means that either you've got to: - run services on ~60 mile lines or...

The issue with batteries is that a single train drawing that much power isn't too much of an issue, however at Exeter there's likely to be several trains all wanting power as you'll have the local services as well. Also, you have the issue that is all well and good working to the minimums when...

Which is fine when everything works well, however personally I'd put wires up at Salisbury (gains you charge for GWR services as well as SWR services and removes some of the pressure on the third rail to charge the Salisbury/Southampton services). Likewise, extend the wires from Exeter to as...

The thing is that batteries still need to charge, if the length is the OHLE isn't long enough then battery trains aren't going to work. If the requirements for batteries is that they end back at the wires with limited range, then they increases the risk of things going wrong. For example if...

Part of the big difference in the business case for HS2 was that growth was based on 2.5% growth, which until COVID was significantly below what was happening. The 10 years prior to COVID (2009-2019) that rate of growth would have meant for every 100 passengers in 2009 there should have been...

Which is why LTN 1/20 says that there should be a minimum horizontal separation between carriageway and cycleway which increases with speed of traffic. For example at 70mph the recommended distance is 3.5m with an absolute minimum of 3m. Whilst that's still probably not great it's going to...

Since the publication of LTN 1/20 and the creation of Active Travel England this should be less of a thing. Of course there's still going to be examples, however they should be the exception rather than the rule (which they were all too recently).

Sorry to hear that you were hit by a car, however, I would suggest that it's worth getting back out on your bike. Whilst statistics aren't always reassuring, the risk of serious injury or death is 1 per million miles and whilst this is 20 times higher than by car many people do significantly...

When giving the tax rates I said above UBI, the assumption being that the UBI would be the tax free amount and then any earnings were taxed.

What's the train frequencies and if they are the same, when we're they restored? If (for example) Manchester is still at 2tph or only was restored to 3tph within the last 12 months then it still being -14% is probably not too bad.

Charging points have increased by 35% in the last year...

As others have said there £14bn is the level of support of the railways, £25bn is the operating costs. There's 37 million tax payers, and so the figure of £1,000 per tax payer allows for a further £12bn of costs to run the buses (an estimate based on TfL road revenue of £5bn, First having a...

It's quite likely that once people have tried Lumo (as it's tickets are a similar price to flying) they then question why they are using Lumo at a fixed time when there's another train (LNER) which runs at a better time for them which is only a few pounds more. Then having found that rail is...

You perhaps don't want to encourage people turning up at stations with thumpers in the hope that their train turns up on time.