Why is there not more cycle storage on trains?

[Amanda P]

Changing tack ever-so-slightly, why is a bike harmless and OK on a crowded, cramped, moving train, but a deadly hazard in a ticket office Travel Centre?

Having made a few journeys with a loaded bike recently, the problem one runs into is that if you take your bike into a ticket office and queue up with all the wheelchair users, pushchair-pushers and wheelers of armchair-sized wheely suitcases, a jobsworth pops up and asks you to take your bike outside, as it's a hazard. (The humungous suitcases, wheelchairs and pushchairs, apparently, aren't).

Outside the ticket office, the moment you walk away, there will be announcement telling you that unattended baggage will be immediately removed and destroyed. Then there'll be one telling the owner of the bicycle by the ticket office Travel Centre to return and stand by it or it will be removed by the Transport Police.

So you're damned if you keep it with you, damned if you don't.

What the hell exactly are you supposed to do with it?! And why is it so hazardous and threatening in the station, and yet so safe on the train?

Moreover, once it's on the train, your (compulsorily booked) seat is likely to be several carriages away from it. Isn't that unattended?

[/wipes froth from corners of mouth]

 

[hackbike 666]

Well quite. It isn't privatisation, or the managers, it is capacity. There are vastly more people travelling by train these days, so space for people has to take priority above space for bikes. That problem would exist whoever owned the trains.

....and lack of expansion...Same old stations some short some long...Not many extended so on my side they mainly take 8 cars on the suburban when definitely 12 would be better...When I went to Japan and had to use a station called Ginza Itchome I used to get lost as it has twelve exits and that's just one of the smaller Ginza stations...Sure beats the hell out of Oxford Circus or Clapham Junction...

 

[Ticktockmy]

Changing tack ever-so-slightly, why is a bike harmless and OK on a crowded, cramped, moving train, but a deadly hazard in a ticket office Travel Centre?

Having made a few journeys with a loaded bike recently, the problem one runs into is that if you take your bike into a ticket office and queue up with all the wheelchair users, pushchair-pushers and wheelers of armchair-sized wheely suitcases, a jobsworth pops up and asks you to take your bike outside, as it's a hazard. (The humungous suitcases, wheelchairs and pushchairs, apparently, aren't).

Outside the ticket office, the moment you walk away, there will be announcement telling you that unattended baggage will be immediately removed and destroyed. Then there'll be one telling the owner of the bicycle by the ticket office Travel Centre to return and stand by it or it will be removed by the Transport Police.

So you're damned if you keep it with you, damned if you don't.

What the hell exactly are you supposed to do with it?! And why is it so hazardous and threatening in the station, and yet so safe on the train?

Moreover, once it's on the train, your (compulsorily booked) seat is likely to be several carriages away from it. Isn't that unattended?

[/wipes froth from corners of mouth]

Had that happen to me in Glasgow Queens street station, last year, having just cycled in pouring rain from the main station to catch my onward train to Oban, I had a endless string of Numpties say you cannot leave that there, or there, one fool having moved me a few times, waited fo rme to leave it for a few moments so i could grab a coffee, he then had a annoucment made asking for the owner of the bike to return to it, Knowing full well I was only a few feet away from him. Silly bugger then run into a flow of Sarcasim, which he did not understand.LOL on seeing a member of the Transport police I ask if it was ok if I left the bike where I had put it so as to get a coffee, he said not problem sir, as we know who the owners is now...LOL that pissed on the numpties firework.