Suddenly, unexpectedly, the bus is losing its appeal. Up to 30% of services are at risk of being cut off. So what the hell is Britain supposed to do with the ancient monster that is the traditional British bus?
First, let’s admit that over the decades most buses have changed very little, remaining noisy, dirty, expensive, and monstrously large. Honestly, do we really need those old, scary double-deckers in small and medium-sized towns and villages? It’s time to replace them with smaller, more suitable and more fuel-efficient vehicles – including ‘community cars’.
If you’ve found that standing on a windy platform is a pain, try experiencing the even more excruciating process of languishing at the bus stop on a cold, dark, wet morning or night. . That’s the hole. Soul destruction. There must be a better way. And have.
The gap between the 24/7 quality, comfort, and convenience of a car versus having to daily become a human commodity on a bus (assuming a car gets on board eventually) never been bigger. The car industry isn’t perfect, but it has raised its game in terms of product quality and desirability. To be fair, taxitrains, airlines and Ride bicycle Industries have also moved over time.
But bus business? It needs reinventing. It can’t be true that when you’re just a few miles away from any major town or city, you’ll find out that there are probably as few as four buses a day.
Bus companies, the UK Government and local authorities all need to ask themselves if it is right and fair to spend taxpayers’ money on this, and more appropriate, decide if Is there a better way?
At the same time, the Passenger Transport Federation (official slogan: “What do we do? We influence governments”) needs to think about what it says. For example, on a national broadcast a few days ago, it stated “the car should be the last ride”. Exactly who? On what grounds? Rarely have I heard of a commercial organization trying to convince drivers and passengers to leave their purchased and paid motorbikes so pathetic at home and use a coach or bus instead. It was a shallow, biased, and unconvincing claim to make.
And the car-hating coalition went from bad to worse when it stated that “a 15% increase in vehicle trips per year could lead to an estimated 47 million cars off the road”. Why, when we only have 30 million cars to start with?
At least in rural areas, the case for abandoning buses and replacing them with more reliable, more comfortable and smaller vehicles has never been stronger. If every village or small town had at least one Dacia Jogger and one or two designated local drivers who can have a flexible, reasonably priced, pre-booked, on-site tour bus for everyone. All government cash buys a lot of Runners.
So with this type of locally centralized, car-based public transit system that operates door-to-door, with tired, tattered buses, vandalized bus stops and Greedy bus entrepreneurs in luxury corporate offices make a fortune from questionable state aid.
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