Last week I drove to Glasgow.
There were two of us in the car. I used a tank full of petrol to get there, and a tank full of petrol to get back. The petrol alone cost me about £150. I did not need the car when I got there. We were staying for the weekend, and everything we wanted to do was within walking distance of the hotel. So the car was purely a means of transport to get us there and back.
Should I have chosen a ‘green’ alternative? I considered it. Return train fares to Glasgow are approximately £150, even when bought weeks in advance. So the public transport route would have cost me nearly double the cost of using a car.
It’s crazy to think that a society that wants to encourage less use of fossil fuels is organised in a way that pushes people to drive cars when the only reason to drive is cost.
Public transport should be free. Completely free.
I know from personal experience that, ever since I became old enough to qualify for free public transport in London, my car use has been reduced drastically. Of course there are times when I need to carry stuff around that would make trains and buses awkward. But nowadays nearly all of my London journeys are done on buses or on the underground.
If we are serious about ‘saving the planet’ there is a hell of a lot more we can do, apart from adding a tax on plastic bags. The powers that be would like us to focus our attention on the most trivial objectives; objectives that have little or no impact on the profitability of big businesses.
All public transport should be owned by everybody, and controlled by the workers within the industry, with a mandate to provide the most efficient service to the public, in terms of cost and effective use of public resources.
The myth that publicly run services are less efficient than privately owned and managed services is precisely that – a myth. The East Coast mainline was run and managed by the public sector for 5 years, generating customer satisfaction scores as good as many of the vaunted private sector customer-focused franchises, and returning £5bn to the government as income.
Bring the transport network back into public ownership, and let the people who work in the industry decide the most efficient way to run the service. The people at the sharp end know best.