Our local bus monopoly company, First Bus has come up with the stunning conclusion that gridlock in Bristol is the “worst in memory”. Well, no **** Sherlock! But don’t worry: everything is going to be all right. We’re going to have three Metrobus routes.
Bristol City Council, under the dead hand of Old Red Trousers, announced that public transport will be improved in due course but that comment misses the entire point: there is no public transport in Bristol. First Bus is a run-for-profit business, not a public service. That is to say that their raison d’être is making money and operating buses is the means by which they make it. It is how private enterprise works. The customer always comes last, or in the case of First Bus doesn’t always get there at all.
It is the post Thatcher consensus, to which I’m afraid I still do not subscribe. Public bad, private good. We, the public, used to own everything – water, telecommunications, gas and electric, the railways, buses – and now we own next to nothing, apart from the bits that don’t and can’t make money. These just happen to be things like the NHS, schools, emergency services and armed services. Actually, I’m wondering if I ought to edit this bit in case David Cameron comes up with the wheeze of flogging off the police to G4S.
I am not saying that everything should be owned by the state, far from it. I would like to see workers have greater influence in the companies for which they work (and indeed the public services too) but I don’t want the state to own Tesco or KFC. A mixed economy works best, in my book, where vital frontline services are in the realm of the state and the entrepreneurial world manages the private side of things. In Thatcher’s Britain – see: she’s still there in death, poisoning the society she said doesn’t exist – only the strong survive and the state provides the bare minimum. That is not a balanced society in my book because it also means that the wealth of the nation stays with the few, not the many.
Bristol’s useless buses are run for profit in the interest of shareholders and the poor bloody passengers are way down the pecking order. How do you, as a council, encourage a bus company to provide a better service, when they are only interested in the bottom line? If there is a route which doesn’t make money, sometimes the council will subsidise it whilst the bus operators cream off the lucrative routes. That is why First Bus does not offer a service.
I expect the so-called “Metrobus” to be the usual farce. It will arrive late, over budget and then the unregulated fares will be extortionate, effectively a tax on workers to bolster the company’s profits. You just know this will happen.
So what can be done in Bristol? You cannot uninvent the wheel, or the car for that matter, so we are stuck with what we have. George Ferguson’s war on the motorist continues unabated, making it impossible to park anywhere and so damaging businesses. The genie is out of the bottle, buses run purely for profit will never solve gridlock or give even a half-decent service and no one has the gumption or desire to build the tram service this city really needs.
With Bristol, transport policy is always an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. Don’t expect the Metrobus, or anything else, to make a difference anytime soon.
