The UK's rail network needs an extra �8bn of public money for essential improvements, according to rail regulator, Tom Winsor.

The transport headache is becoming ever more intense, it seems and the set-backs wrought by the Hatfield train crash, exactly three years ago, are still being felt.

It's hardly any better on the roads, with chronic congestion and parking restrictions turning a simple drive into an ordeal.

Yet solutions are out there - a fact proved by the experiences, told this week, of three BBC News Online users who agreed to swap their normal transport for more environmentally-friendly alternatives.

On Thursday, Richard Bowker, the government's man who oversees the rail industry, used an interview with this website to re-emphasise the importance of delivering a modern and efficient railway.

And in a separate interview, Transport Minister Kim Howells spoke out about media coverage of rail accidents distorting views on rail safety, urged councils to do more to encourage cycling and said the government was "looking very seriously" at a car charging system.

Do you agree? What can be done to improve Britain's crumbling transport system? Should more steps be taken to encourage drivers to leave their cars at home?

Transport Minister, Dr Kim Howells answered your questions in a LIVE interactive forum.

Transcript

Newshost:
Hello and welcome to this BBC News Interactive forum, I'm John Andrew. Today the Rail Regulator, Tom Winsor, has claimed that the UK's rail network needs an extra �8 billion of public money for essential improvements. Despite the billions being poured into upgrading and maintaining the system, the improvements are, it seems, coming painfully slowly. Many new trains of course, but still plenty of overcrowding and delays on many routes. And it's hardly much better on the roads, with chronic congestion and parking restrictions, often turning a simple drive into an ordeal.

Well, joining us to discuss today's story along with the other issues that you've raised is the Transport Minister, Kim Howells, who is in our Cardiff studio. Welcome to you Minister.

Can I ask you first of all about the �8 billion pound issue today? This is what the rail regulator is saying is needed to upgrade the system. Are we going to get it?

Kim Howells:
Well we'll certainly have a look at everything that comes into the department in terms of claims. But we're putting a huge amount of money into the railways at the moment. Twice as much per year as has ever been put in before. So we'd have to look very carefully because this is taxpayers' money we're using and there are many things it could be allocated for. After all only 7% of journeys are by rail and we've got 25 million cars on the road in this country. So we've got to make sure as well as having the railways in good shape and buses in good shape, we've got the road in good shape too.

Newshost:
You mention there that it has to come from the taxpayer. Two of our ex-mails are on that very issue. We've got one from Ian Hodges, England: As a car user why should I be expected to pay for the upgrade to the railway system? What benefits do I receive by paying more for a service which I would never use?

James Hartnell, Milton, UK: How can the general public as a whole be asked to subsidise the ailing train network through taxation when the percentage of the population that use it is very small?

Kim Howells:
Well they're good questions of course. But there are some answers which are not difficult to understand. The first thing is that as road users, they'll benefit from the fact that there's less congestion on the road. For example, if you happen to live around a major city, then especially there you'll find that there's no other way of getting people into the jobs that they occupy in the city centres. If you haven't got a rail network, or you haven't got a subsidised bus network coming into the city centres then of course car drivers are going to find it almost impossible to be able to access those places. So we all benefit in the end.

But they are very fair questions to ask and there ought to be a much bigger public debate - not just a debate, for example, between the Greens and the Government about what constitutes a proper subsidy for public transport.

Newshost:
A couple of moans here Minister about our system compared with the system in the rest or Europe or abroad. Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, UK: As a regular rail traveller over the last 20 years I can say categorically that the level of organisation, punctuality, reliability and overcrowding has now reached an appalling level. I lived in France for 3 years and the SNCF is fantastic.

Demian Attwell, UK: I'm bored of making apologies to foreign guests visiting London and the UK about the state of our public transport system. How, as a modern industrialised nation and the inventor of the railway system, have we come to be in this predicament?

Would you agree with them?

Kim Howells:
No I don't agree with them. I've travelled on many railways in Europe which are hopeless - they jiggle along, they're dirty, they're late. We mustn't only compare the very best lines in France, like the TGV, with our worst lines in Britain. There are hardly any cities, of any great size, in Europe that don't have problems with their public transport.

Now we've got a long way to go to catch up with the best of them. But we're making headway. Very soon we're going to have the youngest rolling stock anywhere in Europe and we're putting huge amounts of money into this.

The real problem of course is that for 30 years there was no money put into our public transport and that was a disgrace. We are trying to making up for it. But it's going to take a very long time to do. We only began to realise just what an awful state a lot of our railway system infrastructure was in after the disaster at Hatfield. Since then we've been pulling out all the stops, putting massive amounts of taxpayers' money into getting the railways right and we'll continue doing it. But it's not an easy and it's not a quick job.

Newshost:
Here's a question from Cameron White, UK who complains about the cost of rail travel. He says: I'm travelling with my wife from Cheltenham to Carlisle for next weekend. If we use the train, it'll cost �393.00 in fares. If I use my own car, it's only �50.00. Why would anyone want to go by train?

Kim Howells:
Well I don't know about that exact route of course. I do know that you can get Apex fares which are a lot cheaper than that. But obviously I have to take his word for it that it costs that much. But you have to ask yourself this, if the railways don't get money from what they call the fare box - in other words the price that we pay for our tickets - where are they going to get that money from - they're going to get it from the taxpayer. Now taxpayers - the vast majority of people in this country - do not use the railways and yet it is their tax that goes to subsidies the railways. So there's no easy answer to this. Either we pay the going price for the rail tickets that we purchase or else we ask other people to subsidise our journeys.

Now in an ideal world of course, it would be cheaper to travel on public transport because that system would not need huge amounts of money going into it in order to make it safe and to make it fast and to make it comfortable. But that's not the ideal world we live in. We've got to put billions of pounds into rebuilding that rail network so that it does become good value for money. But in the meantime we have to pay for it.

Newshost:
Stewart Ells from Matlock says: Why isn't all the money paid in tax on fuel, road tax etc. specifically used for transport improvements?

Kim Howells:
Well that's a question in way that every user asks every government - it's another form of taxation of course. At certain times we spend huge amounts of money on the roads and at other times, not so much. At the moment, we're allocating an awful lot of money for road transport - over �60 billion over the 10 year plan. That means of course that a large part of the money, which is paid by road users, in the form of road tax and so on, is actually going back into the transport infrastructure - although he's quite right to say, not necessarily all of it into roads.

But that's the way taxation works. If somebody's paying equal tax who uses the road very rarely in different parts of the country, we'd expect those people to be able to enjoy the benefits of general taxation. And the fact is of course is that the taxes we pay to use the roads are part of general taxation these days.

Newshost:
We've had some questions on overcrowding which was an issue, I think, in a report earlier in the week. Chris Hurst, England says: What's the point in still having first class carriages on trains when they are often empty on anything but long distance trains?

Kim Howells:
That indeed is a judgement of course which the train operating companies have to make. We can't tell them how many first-class carriages or standard class carriages to put on any train. I've noticed it myself many times that there've been people standing all the way through first-class carriages and so one because the standard class carriages are full. Now those are judgements which the train operating companies have to make for themselves. That's their commercial prerogative and I'm sure that they use that judgement very carefully and try to balance the number of coaches. But it does seem strange, you're quite right, to many of us who travel the railways.

Newshost:
Mary Boroughs, Northern Ireland makes another novel suggestion. I'm sure you've heard it before. She asks: Why aren't train coaches just made into double-deckers or even one and a half-deckers? At a stroke, passenger capacity would be doubled.

Kim Howells:
Well it doesn't quite work out like that and it's partly in effect of something you said a little earlier. We did invent the railways - indeed, we're coming up now very soon to the anniversary of the first railways. The fact is that we built our tunnels too low and the gauge of our railways is different from many other parts of the world and also because we live in geographically a very varied country, so we've got lots of rail tunnels and it's very difficult to re-bore tunnels - very expensive. So we can't do what they can do in some countries which is to vary out rolling stock according to demand.

What we have to do is try to put more people onto those trains, usually by adding more carriages. But that comes very expensive because a modern piece of rolling stock - one of the most up-to-date carriages - can cost �900,000 to construct. These are very, very expensive items and it's not an easy thing to be able to find the money to pay for those.

Newshost:
We've had quite a few live e-mails. One here from Paul in Berkhampstead on cycling: Why don't you stop just talking about encouraging cycling and actually spend money making it safer and more practical?

In other words, many more cycle lanes.

Kim Howells:
We're spending a huge amount of money on cycling at the moment. And I must say this to him, it very much depends where you are in the country and how serious local authorities are about developing cycle-ways and safe routes to school for young cyclists and so on.

I'm a very keen cyclist and I live in a local authority, where the provision for cyclists is very, very poor and that's a decision that the local authority has made. It's not as if they haven't got the money to do it. There's never been as much money as there is at the moment allocated for cycling around Britain, but often very poor provision for cyclists; we've very much third-class citizens. But that doesn't go for all local authorities. Some take it very seriously and we've got some very good long distance routes now where cyclists can feel safe and cycle in ways they couldn't do previously. I think probably and honestly provision for cyclists is better now than I can ever remember it and I've been cycling since the 1950s.

Newshost:
A couple of questions also here on, effectively, re-nationalisation This is from Andy Crick, Oxfordshire, UK: When will the Government see sense and admit that privatisation of rail and bus travel has been a disaster and work towards providing a "public" transport system which will function and therefore ease road congestion?

Nick Beesley, UK: Why doesn't the Government bite the bullet and re-nationalise the whole railway system - trains, maintenance, the lot?

Kim Howells:
Well first of all because we don't believe in it and that's the blunt answer I guess. The old British Rail system was good value for money, there's no question about it, but it was not a great rail system. It didn't provide everything that people wanted and I'm old enough to remember that it could provide sometimes an absolutely terrible service despite the heroic efforts of the men and women who worked on that service.

I think we've got the means of providing a much, much better service. It may need some restructuring in the future - no question about that - but I don't think that nationalisation and the command economy that we used to have is really the answer. I think that very often it was a very poor answer and the same thing went for buses as well, I may add.

I think we've got parts of the country which have got very good bus services at the moment - better than existed previously. Not always an improvement on what did exist previously. But we've got the makings, I think, of a very fine transportation system. The thing is that we need to use imaginatively. We have to be much more focused on customers than the old British Rail service was. I think probably if we can construct the kind of partnerships that I'm interested in doing, we can make a very good public transport service in this country.

Newshost:
Onto the roads again now. A live e-mail from Simon Jones, Chester: Why don't we have car share roads like in the United States?

I think, Leeds may have experimented with that. But why not more of those schemes?

Kim Howells:
Yes, there are some interesting experiments going on and Leeds is one of them. I've been very impressed with some of the ideas in the United States. I was in Los Angeles last year and I saw lanes which you can only go into to speed along those freeways, if you've got more than one person in the car. I think that's one of the issues we've got to address.

Very often we've got good, clean cars now in terms of atmospheric emissions - they've got very good petrol consumption, much better efficiency than they had previously. But often only one person in them - and that's the driver. If we could work out better ways of sharing cars - the workplace is a very good place for starting these schemes and for running them - then I think we can use our cars and our roads, much more efficiently than we do at the moment.

But it's going to take some big culture changes and there are many of us, you know, who are very reluctant to do that. We like getting into our cars, we like the privacy, we like turning on the music or the news, we love the comfort and the ability to go where we want, when we want. The problem is we are congesting the highways in ways which even 10 years ago, we could never have imagined would happen.

Newshost:
We have time for one last question - a cheeky question from Chris who asks: What method of transport does Kim Howells use to get to work?

Kim Howells:
I walk from my house to the railway station in Pontypridd. I usually get the 7.27 a.m. down to Cardiff Central and I usually get the 8.25 from there to Paddington. So I'm an inveterate user of public transport. Today I caught a train down from Pontypridd to Cardiff and Cardiff to Rumney. I actually walked part of the line and I caught it back. In fact I've still got my steel toecap boots on which I had to put on because I was walking trackside.

Newshost:
But you would admit to using the odd ministerial car presumably?

Kim Howells:
Yes, absolutely. Sometimes of course, because life becomes very hectic, it's the only way of making sure you turn up on time.

Newshost:
Well that's all we've got time for. My thanks to Kim Howells for joining us and of course to all of you who sent in your questions and your e-mails. Sorry we couldn't get through all of them but I hope you've been enlightened by today's discussion. From me, John Andrew, goodbye.