After the lockdown, who’d risk getting on an overcrowded train? – David Behrens

But how is that going to happen? The suggestion by Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, that business hours might be staggered to avoid the rush-hour crush betrays a deep underestimation of the scale of overcrowding in our cities. You would have to make people clock on at three in the morning to even out the flow.

Besides, trains and buses were never designed for social distancing. Quite the opposite, in fact, in the case of the “metro” train carriage layouts promoted by Mr Shapps’ department. Metro in this context is a euphemism for fewer seats and more people squeezing together in the enlarged standing areas.

Use East Coast Main Line’s old trains for social distancing commutes – Letters

Once off the train, the crush at the station is another breeding ground for germs – not just coronavirus but every other sneeze and splutter. To return to that environment now would make a mockery of having locked ourselves indoors for the last seven weeks.

If only we had miniature transportation units of our own that could carry just the members of our immediate family in safety and comfort. Bright red ones, perhaps, with a Fiat or Ford badge on the front.

Herein lies an uncomfortable truth for the transport planners – because for as long as we are required to maintain social distancing, private cars are the best and most sensible option for those who have them. Yet every transport policy of the last few decades has been predicated against them.

There are sound environmental reasons for that, obviously. But equally obvious is the need to suspend them for the time being. Charges could be waived at council car parks in town and city centres; lane restrictions relaxed.

Now Boris Johnson must take the decision of his life – Matthew Flinders

There is a precedent for this already: several cities announced at the start of the lockdown that they would suspend parking fees and penalty notices to make life easier for key workers. But in West Yorkshire, the “Combined Authority” – a body of questionable value at the best of times – has given no hint of any initiative. Instead, its latest missive merely holds out the begging bowl in the Government’s direction and bleats that “this type of planning cannot be done overnight”.

It didn’t need to be done overnight, though. They’ve had seven weeks to come up with something constructive.

The inertia that has characterised this and every other transport policy in our region was laid bare in another report this week, which found that congestion on the trans-Pennine line had reduced some freight trains to literally the speed of a horse and cart. This, said the authors, was because commuter and goods carriages were forced to compete for too little space on the tracks between Liverpool and Hull, with the bottlenecks of Manchester and Leeds in between.

Opening parks would ease lockdown pressures – The Yorkshire Post says

And as anyone who has travelled between those cities will know, it isn’t only cargo that is held up. In the run-up to last Christmas, before life itself was derailed, four in 10 TransPennine Express trains were either late or cancelled. The managing director left not long after, though I expect he’s still on a platform somewhere, waiting for a train home.

Mr Shapps will soon receive the definitive report on the future of rail from Keith Williams, the former British Airways boss commissioned to review the industry after the botched timetable chaos of exactly two years ago. He is expected to do away with the present system of franchises – which the lockdown has sidelined anyway – in favour of what Mr Shapps has hinted will be a “public-private railway” run by a new public body that will take the heat off his department.

But the report will also now have to address the issues the pandemic has created. If public safety is to be our priority as a nation – and what has the lockdown been for if not that? – we cannot return to a network so dangerously overcrowded and fundamentally unhygienic.

Both Mr Williams and Mr Shapps have a job to do in convincing us that public transport can be a valid and safe long-term option – and that will take a lot more work than simply asking us to go to work an hour later, and preferably on a goods train.

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