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We’re living through parlous times. The global financial situation grows ever more dire, more and more people are poorer and poorer, jobs are scarce, petrol is more expensive and public transport is becoming a greater necessity. Yet – just as under Labour and Conservative governments – rural buses provide a worse and worse service. Public transport policy-making continues to be in the hands of people who (may) intend well and probably think they know what they are talking about, but do not do so from any personal experience!
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This is because the people who make the policy are principally town and city-dwellers. These are people whose experience of rail closures is restricted to the vanishing of Trafalgar Square tube station, people who expect to walk out of an office and onto a bus, people who have a choice of publicly funded transport options to get them from a to b. These are people who only discover their transport-richness when there is a strike or a breakdown – and who are then outraged at briefly having to face the same lifestyle as the rest of us. They expect automatically to be able to get on a bus or a tube or a local train on an evening or a Sunday or a bank holiday when in the city. The countryside? they don’t need buses to exist outside the M25. You reach your little place in the country by car.
In fact, they don’t know they’re born.
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Maybe its not surprising that such folks do not realise that for many of us outside towns and cities it is a luxury to get reliable public transport after six pm, on a weekday. (Or indeed to get any public transport at any time.)
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Everyone in Britain helps support these planners’ ignorance of the facts of life, because
we spend more on their public transport. A lot more. A couple of years back, 42% of the UK’s public spending on buses was being spent in London to serve 15% of the population. In the same year (2009/10) each Londoner had £103.43 spent on their bus transport. As opposed to the £13.47 per capita spend we people in Suffolk received.
bbSo when we country bumpkins come up to London and are impressed by how easy it is to get about, just remember, its because we are generously paying for this out of our own pockets!
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Why? Because decisions have been made for years by a series of governments who are deeply prejudiced against poorer country dwellers, because they either don’t believe in or have no concern for rural poverty, that’s why!
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This being the case, we need to fight for parity. Suffolk would do a lot better if its County Council Cabinet actually lobbied the Coalition government for a more equitable spend on public transport. (This isn’t a matter of party politics but of innate fairness. They didn’t lobby the Labour government either.) Instead, time and time again, Suffolk’s County Council uses the current – iniquitous – situation as an alibi for their own lack of interest, or spine.
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In China they have a saying to explain why things are not as they should be “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away” 山 高 黄 帝 远.
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So come on, SCC’s Cabinet – join us in shouting so loudly that the emperors of transport hear us in Whitehall, and on that pretty red bus in Parliament Square!
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