Transport has been hovering in and out of the forefront of current affairs for some time. Some facts are irrefutable. Roads, in some areas at least, have become so congested that it has become very inefficient to use a motor car. There must come a time when, for some journeys anyway, it becomes more profitable to not step immediately out of of one’s door into a metal box that in theory will take you exactly where you want to go. This is not an attack on the motor car. If you live in a rural area life is almost impossible without one. If you live in an urban area a motor car is almost equally essential if you need to travel contrary to how the public transport systems are set out.

Railways are an efficient way to transport large numbers of people quite quickly, in principle at least, but they are not the most flexible, especially since Dr. Beeching axed so many feeder lines in the 1960’s. These lines may not have been profitable in themselves, but many of them generated traffic for the main lines, especially for goods.

In any case the vast majority of railway travellers will need some other form of transport to get to and from a station. And if you think the railways are in a bad state you probably haven’t tried to catch a ‘bus recently. Even interchange facilities, whilst very good in some towns and cities are fairly hopeless in others.

Road passenger transport has become an absolute disgrace, where most areas do not have the competition that was originally intended and now have to put up with a monopoly even worse that the BTC. Many advertised journeys do not even operate, ‘owing to staff shortage’. Private companies keep telling us that they have to work to market forces when it comes to prices: surely the same ethic should apply to employee’s wages; if you can’t get the staff then you’re not paying them enough. Simple isn’t it?

The solution to British transport problems is far more complicated than can be expressed here, but it must lie in flexibility, i.e. different solutions for different areas and circumstances. Governments tend to be incapable of flexibility and government ‘solutions’ will therefore necessarily blunder from one stance to another with the result that most of the public will stumble from poor services to no services and as long as some politician promises tax cuts or more testing of children every four or five years we will just sit back recumbent.