From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?
From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains:
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?