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 […]
Ten years of the pteg Support Unit: Part one
pteg has been going for far longer than ten years, but it was a decade ago when the PTEs decided that to work more effectively as a network, and to punch their weight in Whitehall they needed a Support Unit to bring greater focus. I have been there throughout (first as Assistant Director and then […]
Ten years of the pteg Support Unit: Part two
In the second of a series of three blog posts, pteg Support Unit Director Jonathan Bray continues his look back over ten years of the pteg Support Unit. Ten years of the pteg Support Unit: The unstoppable force of devolution Devolution has seen Merseyrail Electrics transform into one of the best performing rail networks in the […]
Ten years of the pteg Support Unit: Part three
In the last of a series of three blog posts, pteg Support Unit Director Jonathan Bray concludes his look back over ten years of the pteg Support Unit. Ten years of pteg: the way we work and the way cities will work in the future Focus on what transport does for people, economies, cities, the […]