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BBC reported last night that a gas leak near Salisbury station was affecting services, and it seems that this has spilled over onto today. It appears that Exeter-Waterloo services are currently (1140 Thursday) being terminated at Salisbury - IL32 is shown on RTT as still "at platform" in...

Nor can they work out environmentally, with just one or two people carried in a 12- or 15-seat minibus. And in rural areas, the dead mileage will often tend to be worse than for a taxi. Where taxis take bookings by phone, the person on the phone will often be in a position to nudge users to...

I concede that Crossrail shows the potential to attract new users if you can offer a journey time that is markedly faster than by car. But what percentage of the UK population could you hope to serve with new rail/metro/busway lines, if you want the cost to be even vaguely affordable? Assuming...

When people talk about improving bus services, they tend to ignore the extra emissions, both tail-pipe emissions from diesel, and Non-Exhaust Emissions such as tyre particulates. "Better" services almost always means new routes or more frequent services, so many more bus-km. And while there...

Communities do not see routes as vital or not-vital - there is no mechanism for a community to express a collective view. If you did a survey, I suspect many non-bus-users would nevertheless value having a service there, rather like BBC research many years back identified that few people...

How utterly depressing. I met with Derbyshire County Council staff last summer to share my analysis of the Yorbus operation in North Yorkshire - underlining not just the horribly low utilisation (97% of trips could have been covered by a normal taxi - even if you required that no strangers...

Thanks for the help on this. Bustimes.org data showed the relevant trip failing to run on 9 occasions in January (one of which was clearly because of the weather), and I have written to the local authority accordingly.

I can see that works fine for a single-vehicle operator. But for an operator with many vehicles on complex diagrams, doesn't that mean that proving a cancellation would involve checking every one of their vehicles to show that none of them had run the particular service?

Many Thanks for three very helpful - and rapid - answers. It is indeed a local authority supported service and I have written to ask the authority what data they get and are willing to share. As to bustimes - apologies if I am being dim, but I can't see how to access historic data. Am I looking...

Our Parish Council is worried about performance of the local six-times-a-day bus service, and before going further, I want to establish exactly how bad things are. I can see that Bustimes will show at-the-time locations (when it works), but can't I find any archived source that would allow...

Back in the late 1970's or 80s, I remember that on a Bank Holiday weekend, the last 516 after mid-afternoon Saturday was on Tuesday morning. Quite incredible for the only service in arguably the prime valley of the country's "top" National Park.

In this example, and other similar cases, there are repeated points where the advice is to make a request to a TOC and (and often make a choice of actions) ahead of travel. That seems to work for social media users, but what should others do? Whenever I email EMR, I get an automatic reply...

If this consultation is like other TF consultations, their questions about affordability etc will only be asked to people that their survey team encounter on trains. That way, they will have avoided hearing of the unhappiness of those who would have travelled by train if they could have afforded...

In thinking about the environmental impact of running buses frequently enough to (perhaps) tempt car users, I want to compare the emissions (and ideally other pollutants, eg particulates from tyres) per km for a car/taxi, a minibus, a single decker, and a double decker. Data on cars are easy...

So anyone in the NE considering the chance to progress their careers by moving to London will be deterred by the prospect that weekend trips home (to keep in touch with family and friends) will be unaffordably expensive. That will be particularly tough on the young (think Billy Elliott). As I...

How about this as a method for getting a reasonable feel for the extent to which suburban car users might be expected to voluntarily take public transport instead: Choose a drive-time value. Say 20 minutes as perhaps something close to the "modal" value of car trip. Calculate the travel time by...

Many climate-change initiatives appear to assume that a good proportion of people with cars could be tempted to leave their car at home and take public transport if only the frequency was greater, or the cost lower. Clearly, building major new hard infrastructure (heavy rail, metro, busways)...

It was so depressing to see so many DRT launches in Roger French's 100 events video (and a long list of closures in one of the captions.) Can anyone suggest a "pure" DRT service that is getting anywhere near an acceptable cost per ride? (Pure = anywhere to anywhere, without any timetable, and...

Presumably it would be quite reasonable to abandon a journey in the light of a cancellations that were showing at the worst point in this shambols. But if trains have later been reinstated, might there be problems in proving the cancellations when seeking a refund? Is there any public data that...

Are there any cases of stations with platforms on only some of the lines, with the risk that a train that normally "passes through" the station (on a line with a platform) might, on occasion, be routed through on a line without a platform, and so leave you theoretically vulnerable to having your...