It's the whole 'spend money to make money' argument, isn't it?
If more money is spent on things like ticket machines, ticket barriers, staff etc, then more money will be made in revenue or in the prevention of lost revenue. The decision on whether to spend the money will be like any other business, does the benefit justify the spend?
It is even more critical to get that decision correct when using large amounts of public money. The public tend not to like having their money being spent on a whim. However, in certain circumstances, the initial large outlay of public money will reduce the subsidy the public have to pay for the service, if not rid of it altogether. This is the part that the public often do not understand. They are already paying for many services without using them. If people were given greater access to these services, they would simply pay fares instead of subsidies. Everyone's a winner in that situation.
Whatever the decision is, it is important that it is not made on flawed principles and, I'm afraid to say, this report is based on many false assumptions and highlights the lack of business intuition in the area of transport planning. They believe, for example, that it is far more feasible to spend £500m on a trolleybus system and then build a park and ride at the end of it (which would cost passengers approx. £6 per day and take approx. 40 minutes each way) than spend £7m on a park and ride a couple of miles away at Woodside (which would cost passengers approx. £4 per day and take 15 mins each way).
This report was compiled by a similar group of people who were responsible for the publication of the Railway Station Entry/Exits 2015 that was released a few days into the new year. The table showed that almost all stations in the region had had a decent increase in passenger numbers and some had a very large increase. One such station was New Pudsey, where passenger entry/exit had increased by approx. 100,000 in a single year. In the table notes beside the station, the comments read "no known reason for increase". Of course, the fact that the car park was almost doubled in size and the station building was revamped the year before clearly had nothing to do with it....
These two cases are examples of why I believe the local transport plan to be fundamentally flawed and why the decision making needs to be completely overhauled. Once this is done (along with a little private funding), LBA may have a better opportunity of getting connected to the network.
Though it may not be the correct thing to run a business on a shoestring at all times, as you say Aviador, it is important to be sensible, to have the right people making the decisions and spend the money on the right projects.
