I promise not to go on about trains too often, but I think this photo used on the Traveline Cymru website says all you need to know about how public transport is viewed in Wales.
The week after the announcement that Wales is to get its first electrified railway line, it’s good to see Traveline Cymru working under the assumption that public transport in Wales means empty, narrow-gauge steam trains, rather than, say, broadband-enabled TGVs.
Obviously this is how the public sees it, but you would think that the people charged with getting the public to use the damn things would put a little bit more work into making it look as though there have been some improvements in the last 150 years.
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Well said.
Dear Mr Townsend,
Thank you for your comments about Traveline Cymru.
Traveline endeavour to provide information about all public transport services throughout the UK via various call centres and websites.
The imagery used on the Traveline Cymru website is used to indicate the wide variety of information Traveline provide from steam trains (as pictured) such as those on the Ffestiniog Railway, Snowdon Mountain Railway etc, to air travel (another of the images), to traditional rail travel (again pictured), walking, cycling, road travel etc. The images in this box (and indeed the header banner) change every time the page is visited to indicate the variety of information available.
Once there is imagery of the new electrified railway service available, we will also be including those images. Traveline Cymru believe that the introduction of these new services in Wales is a massive step forward for public transport in this country and for the general public wishing to use it.
If you have any further queries, comments regarding Traveline Cymru please contact us via our website.
Best wishes
Yeah to be fair to Traveline Cymru, there are no good trains to take a picture of. I think Traveline should be commended for providing a one-stop-shop of dissapointment. If it wasn’t for these guys it would take me several phone calls to work out how slow my train to Aberystwyth would be.
Maybe if Labour and PLaid had used some european money to improve our transport infrastructure during years when you could invent money, rather than pissing it all into existing WAG budget streams, we’d be in better shape today. Go to countries like Slovenia, Croatia, Czech rep. and see how they used their euro millions – IT, Rail and road. We blew it all on coffee mornings and the empty techniums that WAG tries so hard not to fill. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar
Hello Travelline Cymru… thanks a lot for coming on the site to respond.. I think lots of Welsh Lib Dems would like to talk to you about service and how it could be improved (and hopefully the bits they already like).. do you have any plans to come to our conference to do that?
I was of course being facetious, as I knew there were other images too. And to be fair to Traveline Cymru, the site has improved greatly as time has gone on: it is far easier to search for journeys now than it was a year or so ago, for example.
But I think there is a serious point underneath this. Public transport needs to be presented as an attractive option for journeys of all kinds – and the biggest challenge is getting people to use public transport for the daily commute and for those short journeys across town – as well as for day trips and holidays.
Since marketing, branding and image are such fundaemtal tools in attracting people to one’s product, it seems that those responsible for public transporrt in Wales (Arriva and First included in this category too) are in severe danger of failing to target the key demographic that needs to be targeted if public transport is to have a future as a viable alternative to the car – i.e. the bulk of the population for whom public transport is seen as slow, unreliable and antiquated.
Images of sleepy valleys, picturesque countryside, castles, steam trrains and ramblers will do little to address this fairly basic branding failure. Like canals (there’s a picture of them too) – they’re pretty to look at, enjoyable to use once in a while, but hell, you sure wouldn’t travel to work on a narrow boat.
The Traveline Cymru website, for all its recent improvements, still looks like a site aimed at American tourists, and I suspect if any analysis was carried out, the findings would show that tourists probably are the principal users of the site.
An air of business-like efficiency, contemporary relevance and forward-thinking ambition would do much to improve the way public transport is viewed in Wales. I would imagine that websites, posters, etc would be an easy place to start.