Getting Around -- A Final Post

Posted by Colin Harvey Oct 16, 2009

This blog post --which has now passed 1000 words—started out as a rant and metamorphosed, the more I thought about some of the issues I’ve run into in the last week.

It’s obviously Anglo-centric, and every country has different problems. The USA’s issues are informed by the vast distances involved and the rise of suburbia. Continental Europe has even higher population pressures in some places than the UK, while in the others car ownership is lower. So I make no apology for the British-ness of these musings.

Caught as it is in a schizophrenic attitude toward the US and the EU, Britain at times seems to want to embrace the worst of both worlds. So we have a drive to take people out of ‘selfish’ single car usage (and I’ve tried car pooling, btw, and with certain rare exceptions it just does not work) while at the same time deeming it acceptable for private monopolies (and they are monopolies, however they manage to circumvent EU anti-competition laws) to make profit out of a social need.

The small private company running a dedicated service between Bristol and Keynsham show that a low cost service will take people off the roads, if that’s the real priority.

If First have to prop up ‘unprofitable’ routes by using other routes to subsidize them, perhaps those routes should be returned to genuine public ownership -- because many of the unprofitable routes are already subsidized by local councils, yet another example of a bastard hybrid.

We need to decide as a society --not via collections of single interest lobby groups-- where our priorities are; is making money out of transport more important than minimizing our CO2 emissions? If so, so be it.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, though.