Terry Harper wrote:
On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 01:06:41 +0100, Dave Arquati
wrote:


Terry Harper wrote:

It may not solve M25 congestion, but it would allow individuals to
avoid it by encouraging park and ride.

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.


A large part of then M25 traffic is transferring from one motorway to
another. It draws traffic out from the inner area, and in from the
outer sector, simply because there are no better alternatives. I went
to a family funeral in Sunbury on Tuesday, and my route took me via
the M23, then M25 and then M3. Before the M25 I would probably have
gone A272, A24, A244 then A3 to the Scilly lsles, then via Hampton
Court bridge, or else over Walton bridge from Esher. Both shorter
routes, but much more congested and taking considerably longer.

People heading in towards London are frequently looking for somewhere
to leave their cars and continue by public transport, as many threads
on this board will testify. Depending on their ultimate destination,
they may well use the M25 to get to another motorway, which is a
better approach to that place than is ploughing through the centre. In
other cases, they would like a railway line which gets them to their
destination. Only Thameslink offers a cross-London route for this
purpose, ignoring the West London Line as being orbital.

There is such a huge variety of origins and destinations for these trips
that Thameslink itself will make little difference to M25 traffic. AFAIR
about half of traffic on the M25 is long-distance, with origins and
destinations nowhere near the M25, and the other half is short or medium
distance trips around the south east. Thameslink 2000 may provide a
direct route from Croydon to St Albans, Dartford to Enfield etc. but
despite providing an alternative for those trips, it does nothing for a
huge variety of other trips. An illustrative exercise might be to take a
single origin like Croydon and list all destinations (or more
realistically, all towns above a particular size) within 15 miles of the
M25, and then count how many of those destinations can be reached using
Thameslink - or indeed any rail service with one or no changes.

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