Are we in the last days of public transport?
In his regular column for Passenger Transport magazine, pteg Director Jonathan Bray explores the potential of disruptive technology to turn the world of public transport upside down.
The ‘big mo’ is now with devolution and bus regulation
An unstoppable momentum appears to be building around devolution and bus regulation. What a difference a week makes. It’s not clear yet whether this is quite a Berlin Wall moment on buses and devolution – but at the very least it’s the equivalent of mass demonstrations in Leipzig. And we all know where that led […]
Nine things I learnt at our 'Urban Freight: The Last Mile Challenge for Cities' conference
On Friday 26th September 2014, pteg, together with Landor Links and Transport for London, held a conference on ‘Urban Freight: The Last Mile Challenge for Cities’. The event was attended by over 60 UK and international delegates and speakers from transport authorities, freight operators, retailers, campaign groups, charities, consultancies and research bodies. The ‘last mile’ of […]
Greater devolution is coming. Shift up!
The North will rise again. Not in ten thousand years … Shift up! So, said Mark E Smith of the peerless and irascible band The Fall, in the brooding, relentless, mancabilly epic which is ‘The North Will Rise Again’. And post the Scottish referendum it does feel like there is a ‘shift up’ in the […]
Liberate us from the London-based elite
The relationship between London and the rest of the country is the most important single factor in transport policy. Every time the London-based policy elite are taken out of decision-making on local transport, local transport gets better. First of all a spoiler alert – this isn’t going to be a London bashing article or a […]
What a way to cost a railway
The railway’s cost allocation system is dumping costs on the sector least able to afford them – regional rail. It must be changed. And so it came to pass that the Office of Rail Regulation issued the subsidy figures for the different parts of the railway which were engraved on tablets of stone. And a […]
It's time to rethink bus punctuality
‘It’s all meaningless: a line of dots and a set of random numbers; no more than a sleight of hand…’ quote from ‘The Maintenance of Headway’ by Magnus Mills As far as I know the vast treasure house of world literature only contains one novel where the characters lives revolve entirely around the monitoring and […]
We need a fairer way to allocate costs
And so it came to pass that the Office of Rail Regulation issued the subsidy figures for the different parts of the railway which were engraved on tablets of stone. And a hush descended as the great multitude of executives, lawyers, consultants, officials and economists, and others of the vast and well renumerated tribes of […]
Treasures of the pteg YouTube archive
Many rainy lunchtimes in the making, we are proud to present the treasures of the pteg YouTube archive… YouTube is stuffed with archive train videos – there’s less out there on the buses, trams, ferries, trams and transit systems of our big regional cities. Well let me rephrase that – there’s less out there that’s […]
Status quo is risky, not bus franchising
A simple and consistent livery for Tyne and Wear buses, forming part of Nexus’s proposal for a Quality Contract Scheme. Plans to introduce a Quality Contract Scheme in Tyne & Wear should excite anyone who wants to see better public transport. Not surprisingly those who are making monopoly profits from bus deregulation are currently active […]