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Planner1

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Everything posted by Planner1

  1. The things that might improve could be: Branding - all the vehicles would have the same livery, the vehicles would be to an agreed standard, there would be a single source of timetable information. Ticketing- there would be a single ticketing structure Downsides would be that there’s a big financial risk. If the tenders for operating the routes come back more expensive than the authorities estimate, decisions have to be made on what can be cut or where the extra money is coming from. Politicians won’t be able to point to operators anymore, they will have to take responsibility. People on here with industry knowledge will tell you that the public ownership / operation of public transport led to poor standards of safety / vehicles / maintenance and deregulation was in part caused by this.
  2. Not silly at all. Yes, poverty / deprivation is factored into decision making at local, regional and national levels. Policies and strategies adopted by councils, MCA’s etc tend to have something about equity in them. Decisions are linked to policies and strategies. You’ll see this specifically mentioned in reports to council bodies / committees / decision makers, which contain specific questions about the impacts on equity. As others have pointed out on here, imposing a measure which requires people to swap to a newer vehicle disproportionately affects those on lower incomes. Existing taxes and regulations are what they are. When politicians are introducing something new, they will consider the impacts.
  3. You’d expect that the government looked at all their potential options, but once they had been successfully prosecuted under an existing law, would changing that law be an option to get them out of the consequences?
  4. That comes across as a very callous statement. For someone of genuinely limited means, changing their vehicle can be a significant issue.
  5. Other places like Bath and North East Somerset seem to be able to deliver a comprehensive monitoring and reporting regime, see this page. Would be disappointing if SCC can’t do something similar.
  6. Surely it’s about complying with the law. Legal limits on air quality are being exceeded. The charging is one of the options the government put in place for the mandated councils. Those who proposed one of the non charging options had to produce a business case and modelling to prove it would work. Some could, others couldn’t. So, you have no evidence to support your opinion that it’s being done to make money, but continue to peddle that view anyway.
  7. Parking enforcement isnt dealt with by the licensing dept. The enforcement team do try to deal with ranking issues but what usually happens is when the CEO’s turn up, the taxis drive off and come back when they are gone. Some of the access road into the station is private land and the council can’t enforce it anyway.
  8. As you will no doubt be well aware, people tend to take notice and act when it costs them something. I believe if you asked any of the councils which have been mandated, they’d tell you they would have preferred not to have to charge. So will you answer the question posed? Do you think the government introduced CAZ’s in order to make money for a few local councils.
  9. Do you actually think the government went to all the trouble of setting up CAZ’s to help local councils make money? The reason CAZ’s are there is well documented and it’s very clear why the government have acted. I find it rather odd that you and others are still trying to make out it’s some form of money making scheme.
  10. I’ve only seen them once. They were operated by a private company. Looked like the one in the picture. My guess would be that the contractor carrying out the works had them in place for security reasons. Theft from construction sites is a significant issue after all. In the initial post the OP mentions some steps to a trail being closed, so it’s not clear whether any highway ( which can be a footpath etc) closure is involved. The things are automatic devices. They record images when they detect movement and give out recorded voice messages. They just need adjusting if they are triggering when people are passing on the public highway, thats all. I’d guess there are contact details on the device if anyone wants to mention it to the suppliers/operators.
  11. I’ve seen them used on a road closure in Derbyshire a few months back.
  12. This is poor and unsafe advice. Public highways are sometimes closed. That might be because of a safety issue or work is in progress and it isn’t safe for the public to use the highway. The cameras / messages are just reinforcing that the highway is closed and people should not be in the restricted area. Telling people to ignore this isn’t a great idea.
  13. This has never been about generating cash for local councils. It has all been mandated and set up by the government. Do you think the Tory government put all that effort into making revenue raising opportunities for councils?
  14. Remember this is all being mandated by the government, who were forced by the courts to act to rectify illegal levels of air quality as soon as possible, following a successful prosecution by environmental activists. Its pretty clear the government were hoping that ongoing vehicle fleet renewal would eventually solve the issue, but that wasn’t soon enough for the activists and the courts. If they hadn’t have acted, there was potential for the courts to impose huge fines, which the government can passport on to local authorities where the illegal air quality levels exist.
  15. Might be a better idea to speak to the land owner or security company. The position of the camera / sensors probably just needs adjusting if it’s picking people up outside the fenced off works area.
  16. Sheffield produced a lot of armaments. Equally possible it was a scrap shell case that went into the scrap pile and eventually got buried etc.
  17. “Monitoring Station” perhaps makes it sound more technical than it really is. They just put up diffusion tubes, which are a small plastic tube clipped to a holder on lamp posts etc. they look like the one in this article. As I recall, there’s only one actual monitoring station in the city centre, which is at Devonshire Green, in the car park at junction of Wellington St and Fitzwilliam St.
  18. As I understand it, the monitoring has to show full compliance for at least 2 years for the scheme to be decommissioned. That subject is discussed in this article on the Bradford CAZ scheme. Whether the government would allow Sheffield’s to be decommissioned if Sheaf St is non compliant because of train emissions is another question.
  19. Are you sure they belong to the police? Contractors use camera systems like the one pictured in another post on sections of road that have been closed, to monitor people ignoring the closure and protect against theft etc.
  20. Is there a council report that’s come out? If they are just quoting the number of compliant vehicles entering the zone, some of it will certainly be down to re-routing to avoid the charges.
  21. Very hard to say. The most polluting vehicles are buses, taxis and trucks. Grants have been available to help operators with the cost of new vehicles or retrofitting. How many of them would have changed anyway is impossible to say without asking every owner / operator. Larger bus and truck owners tend to have a cycle of vehicle replacement and are constantly updating their fleets. Taxis in Sheffield have tended to operate older vehicles as they have claimed in the past not to earn enough to justify the cost of new ones.
  22. I was discussing electric mini buses with someone the other day. They said that there have been problems with a demand responsive electric minibus scheme in Leeds as the real world range of the electric vehicles was much less than the manufacturer reckoned. Very limited choice of vehicles too. I was told there was only 1 manufacturer making vehicles which met the specification. Might be a reason not to go for electric mini buses here.
  23. You’re entitled to your opinions. My observation is that wherever you go, people have the same complaints about their local authorities. They tend to think their council / MCA etc is incompetent, that their roads are in the worst condition, that their public transport is the worst etc. I have dealt with a lot of local authorities of differing sizes across several regions. Their resources, and often level of competence, tends to be in proportion to their size (ie population) which directly influences the amount of funding they have. This council here were backed into a corner really on highway maintenance. The only way they were going to get the money to fix the roads was through a PFI contract, so that’s what they did. You might criticise the way they funded highway maintenance before the Amey contract. I wasn’t involved in maintenance, but years ago my boss at the council used to tell me that the council used to get the maintenance funding from the government in what was known as a block grant, along with money for other functions. It wasn’t ring fenced, so they didn’t have to use it for the purpose given. I was told that for a number of years they used a proportion of the maintenance money to fund other stuff. I never saw the details, so can’t confirm if that was true, but the manager had no reason to lie. Basically central government underfunds local government in a major way. That’s why many local authorities across the country are pretty much bankrupt. Local authorities are always having to prioritise spending, there’s never enough money. Some think the private sector would do things better. Amey are private sector, are they better?
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