“You’d think as we go forward things would be getting better, but they’re actually getting worse.” This pointed comment on the state of Britain’s buses came from Janice, a 73-year-old pensioner standing next to me at a windswept bus stop in the Somerset coastal town of Burnham-on-Sea.The article continues in this vein. The Cliff Notes version is "Public transportation outside London sucks." And indeed it does.
Looking for a bus in the English countryside brings to mind the well-known aphorism about waiting for ages before two come along at once. Except, only the first part of this cliché holds true in any reliable sense: you certainly wait for ages, though a significant period of time usually elapses before a second bus arrives.
The dearth of public transport outside of England’s cities is shocking, especially for those accustomed to the comprehensive network that exists in London – where, of course, even when public transport lets you down there is typically a taxi close at hand (and you have the mobile phone reception to call one, unlikes many parts of rural England).
Having moved back to Somerset for the summer, I recently spent several days travelling around the county by bus in order to see how services compare to when I was growing up in the area. I live in a small village situated roughly half-way between Weston-Super-Mare and Taunton on the south west coast. There are shops located nearby – B&M Bargains, a few curry houses, as well as the obligatory hair salons and charity shops – but to find anything beyond groceries and cheap socks you have to venture further afield. This invariably requires a car or public transport. More than a quarter of Somerset’s population (28 per cent) is aged over 60, and they largely rely on the latter.
The first thing that strikes you about local buses, however, is how empty many of them are. On the 9.20 from Weston-Super-Mare to Burnham-on-Sea I found myself sitting alone on the upper deck – just four elderly passengers sat below. Rural bus services are essential for poorer or ageing communities, but as profit-making enterprises, they’re also unviable – something the introduction of free bus passes in 2007 has exacerbated. I was probably the only fee-paying customer aboard that bus.
Services are thus trapped in a vicious cycle in which fewer people travel by bus, so subsidies are withdrawn and fares hiked in order to sustain existing levels of coverage, and that in turn drives away those who can’t afford the higher fares. Figures from the Department for Transport show that passengers in Somerset took 7.2 million bus journeys in 2016-17, 2.6 million fewer than in 2009-10. It’s impossible to say for certain why this has happened, but fewer services and steeper fares seem an obvious starting point.
It is interesting how confusing these sorts of discussions become. Bloodworth - "as profit-making enterprises." But they are not profit-making enterprises in any fashion that that term is usually meant. The government contracts with bus operators for the provision of public transportation. But it is still a public service. The fact that contractors provide it more cheaply than civil servants, does not make it any less of a public service. A profit-making enterprise would be one that is sufficiently free of government regulations such that it can profitably schedule service when and where customers want that service. Public transport provides service when and where the government wants - not necessarily a Venn diagram with a lot overlap.
We had an interesting example of this distinction here in Atlanta a few years ago. MARTA is the regional public transport system including integrated bus and rail transportation. It is expensive to the consumer (more in terms of time but to some extent in terms of money), and it is expensive to the taxpayer in terms of subsidies, occasionally intermittent, routes not always convenient, schedules are not necessarily optimal, cleanliness also tends to be varied - typical issues for public transportation. But it is the sanctioned public transportation - you use it or you don't, that's your only choice. There is minimum choice.
Consequently, everyone who can uses a car. The upper middle class lobbies hard for more money to be spent on public transportation in the hope that everyone else will get off the road and make their own commutes in their BMWs faster and more convenient. But it never turns out that way. We spend more on public transportation and everyone continues to go by car.
About fifteen years ago, Royal Bus Lines, owned and operated by an immigrant, Carlos Ochoa, found some sort of loophole in the City charter. He began running a flexible bus service catering primarily to Hispanic immigrant communities. Smaller buses, owner-operators, flexible routes, clean enough, bilingual, cheaper fares, better schedules. The buses would stop wherever they saw a cluster of riders and made a simple and frequent loop between the communities and the nearest MARTA train station. And they cleaned MARTA's bus clock.
There were fisticuffs and incidents as MARTA bus drivers took exception to Royal Bus Line "stealing" potential MARTA riders. Kind of a local issue until things settled down.
But it served as an illustration of the inherent challenges of a public transportation system such as MARTA (or British buses) and what would be viewed as the real profit-making enterprise, Royal Bus Lines.
So Bloodworth is confusing public transportation and real competitive transportation alternatives. Which in some ways is not too surprising. Britain, as did the US, used to have private competitive bus and rail services up into the 1930s when many of them were nationalized or municipalized. In both countries, transportation has bifurcated between public transportation (buses and rail) and private (cars and a few long haul bus services).
There have been intermittent efforts, particularly under Thatcher in the 1970s and 80s to reintroduce some aspects of competitive private enterprise into "public" transportation but with fitful results.
Instead, in Britain, non-London populations become more and more isolated with worse and worse public transportation services and none of the Mandarin Class care.
Of course, it’s easy to slip into nostalgic reminiscing about the good old days of punctual and frequent public transport. Yet the available statistics – both local and across the country as a whole – do tell a discernible story of decline. Across Britain, more than 3,000 bus routes have been scrapped, reduced or altered in the last eight years, according to the Campaign for Better Transport. Britain’s bus network has fallen to levels not seen since the late 1980s. A lady I chatted to aboard the bus from Burnham-on-Sea to Taunton relayed to me how it took around four and a half hours for her to get to get to Taunton and back, a journey she made twice a week to take her disabled son to hospital. That 17-mile journey takes 40 minutes each way in a car.Where Bloodworth falls down is that he does an adequate job of at least identifying that there is a consequential problem that disproportionately affects the poor. Where he fails, is to actually consider alternatives. He wants government owned/operated public transportation to be better. He does not consider that there are alternatives that might be better such as allowing competition to determine what routes, schedules, and prices should be based on public demand.
Time is the only real commodity that the poor possess. During my research into precarious work in 2016, I learned that a low-income is nearly always synonymous with a great deal of wasted time. To be poor is to wait around at the whim of petty officialdom: for paperwork to be processed at the job centre, or, indeed, for the bus to turn up at the side of the road. It is inevitably the vulnerable and hard-up who are hardest hit when bus services are reduced or scrapped.
[snip]
The fact we don’t take these inconveniences seriously costs us all in the long run. Research commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation earlier this year found that a lack of punctuality on the part of buses was preventing many in the north of England from securing or keeping work. The Yorkshire Post recently reported on the cases of workers who had been fired because local buses had repeatedly failed to turn up to take them to work.
For city-dwellers, the decline of public transport in the countryside is something only noticed on a weekend away. And even then the stakes are inevitably lower: to be delayed on a day-trip to the country is an inconvenience; to lose your job because the bus didn’t show up is a potential catastrophe. This perhaps explains why, beyond the confines of the regional press – itself undergoing something of a crisis – the state of Britain’s buses receives scant political attention. Indeed, when the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn led on the issue of bus services at PMQs in July, he was assailed by online commentators for not leading with attacks on the Government over Brexit.
Bloodworth's conclusion is that we ought to trust the State to make better transportation decisions and spend more on transportation without acknowledging that the poor service and expense is directly a result of a state monopoly. Socialism is always great, it just hasn't been done right seems to be his conclusion.
On a happier note, we can count on Bill Bryson who agrees that the service is wretched. From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain.
The bus service from Bognor Regis to Brighton via Littlehampton is advertised as the Coastliner 700, which makes it sound sleek and stylish, possibly turbo-charged. I imagined myself sitting high above the ground in air-conditioned comfort in a plush velveteen seat, enjoying views over bright sea and rolling countryside through softly tinted glass, the kind so subtly coloured that you feel like turning to the person sitting beside you and saying, ‘Is this glass lightly tinted or is Littlehampton ever so slightly blue?’Which all sounds ineffably grim. And is.
In fact, the bus when it wheezed in had none of these features. It was a cramped and airless single-decker filled with hard metal edges and moulded plastic seats. It was the sort of vehicle you would expect to be put on if you were being transferred between prisons. But on the plus side it was cheap – £4.40 for the journey to Hove, which was less than I had spent on a pint of lager in London the night before.
I was still cautiously excited for I was about to travel through a succession of small and, I hoped, charming resorts: Littlehampton, Goring-by-Sea, Angmering, Worthing, Shoreham. I imagined them as the sort of happy villages that you would find in a Ladybird book from the 1950s – high streets with pleasant tearooms and shops with bright striped awnings selling pinwheels and beach balls, and people walking along holding cones with globes of yellow ice cream. But for the longest time – a good hour or more – we never went near the sea or even any identifiable communities. Instead we rolled through an endless clutter of suburbia on bypasses and dual carriageways, passing nothing but superstores (and there’s one of the least correct terms in modern British life), petrol stations, car dealerships and all the other vital ugliness of our age.
But Bryson always sees a glint of humor in any situation, caustic though it sometimes is.
An earlier passenger had discarded a pair of glossy magazines in the seat pocket beside mine and I lifted one out now in a moment of bored curiosity. It was one of those magazines with a strangely emphatic title – Hello!, OK!, Now!, What Now! Not Now! – and the cover lines all seemed to be about female celebrities who had gained a lot of weight recently, though none that I saw looked exactly sleek to begin with. I had no idea who any of them were, but their lives made fascinating reading. My favourite article – it may be my favourite thing in print ever – concerned an actress who took revenge on her feckless partner by charging a £7,500 vaginal makeover to him. Now that is what I call revenge. But what, pray, do you get with a vaginal makeover? Wi-fi? Sauna? Regrettably, the article failed to specify.
I was hooked. I found myself absorbed in the sumptuously mismanaged lives of celebrities whose common denominators appeared to be tiny brains, giant boobs, and a knack for entering into regrettable relationships. A little further on in the same issue I found the arresting headline ‘Don’t kill your baby for fame!’ This turned out to be a piece of advice from Katie Price (a dead ringer for the late model Jordan, if you ask me) to a rising star named Josie. Ms Price is not a writer to mince words. ‘Listen up, Josie,’ she wrote, ‘I think you’re absolutely disgusting. Having boobs and getting an abortion doesn’t make you famous!’ Though intellectually and emotionally I was inclined to agree with Katie on this point, it did rather seem from the article that Josie was living proof of the contrary.
The photographs of Josie depicted a young woman with breasts like party balloons and lips that brought to mind those floating booms they use to contain oil slicks. According to the article, she was expecting ‘her third son in two months’, which I think we can agree is quite a rate of reproduction even for someone from Essex. The article went on to say that Josie was so disappointed at having another boy and not the girl she had longed for that she had taken up smoking and drinking again as a signal of displeasure to her reproductive system. She was even contemplating having an abortion, which is why Ms Price had leapt so emotionally into the fray. The article noted in passing that young Josie was considering book deals from two publishers. If it turns out that my own publisher is one of them, I will personally burn down their offices.
I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don’t even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Toss-R, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: ‘They came from Planet Imbecile!’
From wherever they spring, they exist in droves now. As if to illustrate my point, just beyond Littlehampton a young man with baggy pants and an insouciant slouch boarded the bus and took a seat across from me. He was wearing a baseball cap several sizes too large for his head. Only his outsized ears kept it from falling over his eyes. The bill of the cap was steamrollered flat and still had its shiny, hologram-like price sticker attached. Across the brow in large capitals was the word ‘OBEY’. Earphones were sending booming sound waves through the magnificent interstellar void of his cranium, on a journey to find the distant, arid mote that was his brain. It must have been a little like the hunt for the Higgs boson. If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn’t have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.
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