Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways

Leisure is already more than half of the trips on UK rail. It’s mostly people living their lives. Reducing demand seems mostly a dead end to me except perhaps along very busy commuting corridors, of which there aren’t that many and of which demand is still high at weekends because work hubs also tend to be leisure hubs.

Very surprised by that statistic. For me it's something like a 99-1 split for business travel.

by far the most common method of public transport for commuting is by bus, which is why the Gov spent all that money subsidising bus fares in the last couple of years.

Thought I'd look up some hard data and wow, surprising.

In 2022 at least, a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail.

Hardly seems worth all the hassle.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic...

Chart 4 is a summary of (domestic) travel modes and purposes.

You’re making a somewhat classic correlation = causation mistake here. I.e. because most people use cars, they must prefer cars over alternatives.

In reality a big part of why people use cars is because there isn't a practical alternative, because we either haven’t built it, or we tore it down in the 70s/80s. There was a period where the UK government honestly thought that public transport was going to cease existing, and be replaced by private cars. The decades since have clearly demonstrated why that isn’t true, as usage of public transport has grown year-on-year despite chronic underfunding, and the slow dismantling of services.