Dan Gravell wrote:
Dave Arquati wrote:

Park and ride to where? If to central London, then those individuals
won't use the M25 for the greater part of their journey. The M25 has
encouraged a whole host of local and medium distance orbital journeys
which are extremely difficult to address with public transport.


I'm interested by this, you saying that because the M25 was built and
people started making different journeys, those journeys are now hard to
satisfy by rail?

That's precisely what I'm saying. I think the ORBIT multimodal study
pointed this out too, but I'm afraid I don't have any links to hand.

Doesn't a (further) orbital rail system provide this?

No. The M25 doesn't just generate journeys solely along its own route,
it encourages them along radial routes too - so a huge number of
journeys are now made which use the M25 as part of a longer journey. For
example, Maidenhead to Watford, Luton to Uxbridge, Tunbridge Wells to
Croydon... the list is practically endless.

Although you might be able to provide a rail-based alternative to
M25-only journeys (which would be incredibly expensive!), it wouldn't
really help with the part-M25 journeys. If we constructed an interchange
station for every point our hypothetical M25 railway crossed a radial
route, then there would be a possible public transport journey between
any two M25-area towns - but it would often require two changes, and
would therefore be slower and less attractive than a car.

Now, of course, the M25 has not only generated new and diverse journeys
but has encouraged development along its route - notably at Lakeside and
Bluewater - which totally depends on the M25 for access.

The only way to combat M25 congestion now is to introduce area-wide road
user charging and widen it all to at least 4 lanes each way. That way,
the growth induced by widening will be curtailed by the charges, and the
result should (in theory) be a more reliable and useful motorway.

The more likely result is that the government will decide to widen, but
won't have the political willpower to introduce charging, and we'll be
back to square one (or more like square -1) in a few years' time.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London