Nannie2 - commenting on a piece in the 'Worcester News'
User ID: 863582
Worcestershire Parkway was a very ill-thought-out project which cost the council tax payer £20 million just to provide 500 parking spaces principally for commuters to London. The only Cross Country service which stops there is the hourly Nottingham to Cardiff and travel to Bristol and the southwest is not possible. Passengers travelling to the northeast, northwest and Scotland still have to change at Birmingham New Street. The useless hourly X50 bus service from the city to Parkway does not provide worthwhile connection times. Although the journey time from Parkway to Birmingham is 31 minutes whereas fromForegate Street it is 45 minutes the overall travel time is still much quicker from Foregate Street.
No other city of circa 100,000 population has three mainline stations and there were other options which should have been considered but the council simply ploughed ahead with Parkway which was first mooted in the 1980s based on a bogus Public Consultation exercise. No other solutions were rigourously submitted to technical and economic analysis and representations from Network Rail and Great Western Railway were simply ignored.
There was no reason why the idle industrial land at Shrub Hill could not have been developed to provide 500 parking spaces and with a bus station at Shrub Hill a multi-modal transport hub could have been created. Worcester's problems are exacerbated by the hideous separation of the National network preventing some Cross Country services traveling via Shrub Hill as this would provide the much-needed connection to the southwest.
Integration of bus, rail and active transport modes is what's required and yet our hapless County Council seem determined to fragment transport and frustrate passenger mobility which blights the local economy.
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