I drove from our home in South Gloucestershire to Clifton today, taking my son to his part time job. He could have taken the bus or the train – our non-integrated transport system means he’d need to shell out for additional tickets if he was to use both – but they would have taken him ages and he’d have been heavily reliant on connections. Basically, £4.50 on the bus, £4.70 on the train which I think is a lot of money to pay for hopelessly unreliable, slow forms of transport. I don’t know how much I spent on petrol but I doubt it would have been almost a tenner for both of us. Driving was far quicker but not without its issues.
For one thing, there appear to be roadworks everywhere, from the paving over of Harry Stoke in South Gloucestershire to a clunky one-way system on Blackboy Hill. I use my Tom Tom, which uses live traffic information, for just about every journey these days otherwise it could take days to get anywhere.
But it’s not just the roadworks and road closures, it’s the sheer volume of traffic. During the school holidays at a time when many people are still working from home and all the way from here to Clifton it felt like peak rush hour. Nearly everyone drives in Bristol because there is no alternative.
I wince when I read the so called Green campaigners demanding that motorists are publicly flogged before being hanged, in a vegan-friendly way, obviously, and their cars destroyed in the most humane way possible, forcing us to cycle up hill and down dale, or being ripped off by First Bus.
All this on the day when we had confirmation that Climate Change – or “the weather” as gob shite TV unfunnyman Mike Parry called it this morning – is officially a fact, just like gravity, evolution and Joey Barton being in trouble with someone and something. We’re handing our children a poisoned chalice in the form of an overheating planet where we will be relying on rising sea levels to put out the forest fires. And to do just about anything, I have to use my car.
It’s so obvious what must happen. Public transport must become relevant and affordable. And in order to achieve those ends, the government needs to step in. Instead of requiring a mortgage to take a train to anywhere, fares have to match what it costs to travel by car. Instead of charging £4.50 for a day rider in Bristol, charge a couple of quid, tops. Make a single journey cost a quid. That will require running buses – and trains – on a not for profit basis, which means nationalisation, run as a Public Service. Buses and trains are not currently services: they are run solely as a cash cow for shareholders and big city fat cats.
Climate Change is not project fear: it’s project reality. And I suspect most of us want to play our part by slowing it down at the very least, if not stopping it altogether. People like me are just waiting for better public transport which goes where I want it to at a price I can afford. However, in the meantime I am pumping more crap into the atmosphere that’s making things even worse and I don’t feel I have a choice in the matter.
I’ve got to go out again later and I will have to drive again because there’s no direct bus service to where I need to go. Bristol is still a great city, but there are many things dragging it down, not least our so-called leaders who have so little vision for our city an urgent trip to Specsavers might be overdue.
Something must be done, all right. Cheap, reliable public transport across the city, a commitment to building a light rail transit system within a decade and the total integration of existing bus and rail services starting today. The trouble is our government is about to reintroduce austerity, this time on steroids. The government has massively slashed funding to local authorities in the last 11 years. When and if Rishi Sunak gets his way, you can wave goodbye to any hopes of improving public transport anywhere or improvements to anything else for that matter.
