For the record, both my partner and I have kept up with our vaccine schedule, and both mask (I’m on immunosuppressive medication) - I’ve likely not caught it once, and he’s only caught it once, likely bc he got careless. I still travel fairly frequently, internationally. We go out, have fun. Neither of our lives have stopped, we’re just more careful. Keep our distance from others. As an added bonus, I don’t have to smell the underground anymore, at all. Personally masking is 100% worth it. Improved my health and his, and doesn’t really impede on us. Though I am tired of nurses asking if I’m I’ll bc I’m in a mask when I go in for appointments :/

My answer’s going to be different depending on if you’re asking for barriers to use or policy issues.

As far as use goes, transit needs to be frequent enough to be useful and go to where people need it to. It sounds simple put like that but you hear a lot about once daily bus service to some of these towns and then everyone wonders why we’re so car dependent.

Access is also important and often overlooked in these discussions. Because of course disabled people who have no ability to drive will use transit. Para-transit style services have such heavy limitations that in many areas it can’t be used for work and sometimes not even appointments. It keeps people who otherwise might be working out of work which benefits no one.

Policy wise, funding. It’s a chicken and egg situation. No one wants to fund poorly used service, and no one uses the poorly funded service because it isn’t fit for purpose.

It’s been really lovely here. This is honestly the first time in recent memory that I haven’t had to carefully curate everything to filter out the absolute shite. I’ve enjoyed having a slower paced place to keep up with news and just have a chat

One of the ones I remember watching was Geoff Marshall - he’s got a very heavy UK focus if not exclusively.

I, personally, think we can never have too much train/public transit content and would love to see more of it. I’ve been moaning quite a lot about how shite YouTube is of late. Content creation isn’t exactly easy but I’d welcome seeing more people in the space.

I’m not shocked but I am quite peeved. Naturally the government would side with landowners - the rest of us are too poor. Additionally, England has quite the history of gating off spaces (parks and the like) for the upper classes and restricting access for the common people.

So it’s not shocking. But irksome nonetheless.