Talk:Office of Rail and Road

Contradiction
The article says (twice) that the office is independent of government, yet it says elsewhere that the board members are appointed by the Secretary of State for Transport

Encyclopedias are for lay readers, not for experts in public administration, and to a lay reader this is a contridaction : indepence from government and appointed by government can't both be true. Perhaps it is clearer to say that it is autonomous, quasi-autonomous or semi-autonomous.

--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 08:58, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
 * is NMGD, hope i've now clarified it? ninety:one 14:34, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Station usage figures
Annual passenger station usage reports are produced for the ORR, currently by Delta Rail. The figures are widely pushed into WP articles. The enormous changes shown at some stations give cause for concern about the validity of using the figures in WP. The figures may be the best that the rail industry can produce for its own purposes and may tend towards meeting its ends better but they are not precise headcounts.

The following references say quite explicitly that methodology has changed and that some of the less credible figures are discounted. 250 stations were excluded for having apparently incredible increases, the worst six had increases ranging from 37 to 1273 fold, not percentage.

The increase in use of "travel", as opposed to purely "rail", tickets makes year on year comparison unreliable. An attempt to extract the warnings from these two was far too long. Please read them.
 * http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/upload/pdf/stn_usage_report_0708.pdf
 * http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/server/show/nav.1529

--SilasW (talk) 19:54, 20 March 2009 (UTC)