Manchester - No to congestion charge

[lilelvis2000]

Same here, and everything starts with at least half a mile walk to get a bus that may or may not turn up because it's the first one of the day and the driver CBA getting out of bed.

I voted no, most of the public transport is owned by private companies anyway so maybe they should use their profits from the past few years to add a few extra buses, cars, trams, whatever.

Hardly a world-class system, just increasing capacity and making vague promises about bus fare reductions, oh and if you vote yes we'll look at re-sequencing the traffic lights to make traffic flow smoother

And just to really make my mind up, they sneakily extended the outer ring that was supposed to be contained by the M60. Just at Jn19 of the M62 it suddenly extended outwards which would collar me nearly every time I wanted to go anywhere. Wasn't on any of the initial proposal maps, but was included in the voting pack was an updated map.

What else would sudenly change following a yes vote?

I imagine that given a Yes then after 5-10 years they would have extended it out even further.

This will never work with private bussing. Its my understanding that the councils cannot see the companies true operating costs for routes. They just trust the figures they are given by said companies. So after dishing out huge sums of cash...guess where it will go?

It could have worked if manchester was to operate like London transport. Othewise the owners of Stagecoach, First et al would reap the benefits. I imagine they are very dissapointed! I'll need to find some quotes from them.

Any idea when they'll try again..if ever. Or are they waiting for the government to install a national system and ride on top of that.

[scooby]

And just to really make my mind up, they sneakily extended the outer ring that was supposed to be contained by the M60. Just at Jn19 of the M62 it suddenly extended outwards which would collar me nearly every time I wanted to go anywhere. Wasn't on any of the initial proposal maps, but was included in the voting pack was an updated map.

What else would sudenly change following a yes vote?

I noticed that!! they were heavily saying that travelling round the M60 wouldnt catch you. but looking at the maps, anyone heading clockwise would be caught at that point. That would be an awful lot of extra dosh.

[the_rangdo]

Half a mile you say? Gosh, yes, I can see how essential a car would be in a place as isolated as that.

Cheers for the sarcasm

So after that half a mile walk I then find said bus (normally the 167 up here in the sticks) has decided not to turn up. It's only every half hour and I want to get to M'cr. So do I wait another half an hour, or do I walk another half mile back home and ride in the car? Half a mile I can handle if there's something reliable at the end of it.

The other option is go to Rochdale train station to pick up the train (assuming the other bus turns up), the same one that went missing when the snow hit last week, cos of course it's grim in the north and 2cm of snow means we're doomed. They couldn't find a train somewhere along the track FFS

And if you don't actually want to travel into the centre of M'cr and, heaven-forbid, travel radially from one provincial centre to another, zippo benefit at all.

We've a looooooong way to go to get to world-class transport, £2.75bn (not all of which would be spent on actual transport improvements) wouldn't even make a dent in the real bill.

[the_rangdo]

And what does Hazel Blears have to say onthe subject

All of us now in Greater Manchester, councillors, MPs, and Ministers need to look at the situation and see where we go from here. I think many people did not realise that the charge would not come in until 2013.

So basically we're all thick and didn't know we had 5 years to save up for it.