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December 18, 2005
Upside Down
It's all upside down.
Melksham is growing. Traffic on the roads is growing to beyond the point of congestion ... and it's growing on the trains too, which can comfortably take the extra load. So "they" are pruning the train service to a withered arm and piling more traffic on the roads
"Traffic figures are low" they tell me, and point me to ticket sales figures that are a year out of date but were the latest available when the invitation to tender went out. "What do you mean by low" I ask, and they don't reply. But I know that if they keep growing compound by 35% per annum ... as they have for five years, and they did in the year recently published, that they won't be low for long.
Quoting Private Eye (not my normal reading, but Dad had a copy): "Growing Road congestion is a potential banana skin for the Department of Transport and its new policy of slashing tail services in English regions. But officials have a cunning plan: ignore it"
Posted by gje at December 18, 2005 06:12 PM