>>1081069It depends on the point of view. Wether government policy regarding transportation should react to demand tendencies, thus cutting back on public transit if immediate demand is low, or wether it should favor public transit as to induce demand, and try to get to the latent demand.
In the 1960's it was pretty clear that it was the former. It hadn't really gotten to the point of extreme traffic congestion we got as a consequence of it. And that's what goes to show that it was an erroneous concept in the long run. Noone expected cars would be so inefficient in moving people.
Nowadays there's a divide between those points of view, despite the fact that reacting to demand tendencies was a complete and utter failure. Some cultures tend more to one side, others more to the other. The tendency to induce demand in public transit has become somewhat commonplace though. And that's where Beeching's concept was wrong. In many of the branch lines you could have established convenient, low-demand services with small trains which are cheap to operate. Switzerland is an example of a country full of branch lines which as a general rule still have at least an hourly frequency, but they instead adapt train set capacity to suit the line's demand.