Tokenism and the Bus Pass

In an earlier blog, Popular Policies are Doomed, I was making the claim that whenever something becomes popular in the UK it has to be curtailed. The Bus Pass is one of the recent victims of its own success. In the12 months I have held a senior persons bus pass I have yet to use it in Herefordshire. The reason for this is that it is a 3 mile walk to the nearest bus stop with a useful service, although I cant expect to get a bus back after 6pm.

Our other services don’t operate out of school terms and only run one in the morning and one back in the evening. The two market day buses give little time before they return from Hereford and Abergavenny respectively. I have used the pass in Birmingham a few times and once on a park and ride in Kent. I could go to Cardiff and back for nothing, but without a toilet break I don’t think the two hour trip would be much of an outing. It does of course involve a five mile drive to pick the bus up in the first place. Consequently, for me, it doesn’t add up to a hill of discarded tickets, but for others it is a liberating opportunity.

It’s these ‘others’ who are therefore causing the Association of Local Authorities to winge. Local authorities have to fork out the cost of reimbursing the bus operators. This would not be a problem but the promised reimbursement from central government has been falling short of the actual cost. The local authorities are now saying that people who have a car should not be entitled to a free bus pass especially when they could afford to pay proper fares anyway. The Government, having made the gesture are now quite happy, or so it seems, to see the idea of free bus travel for the older citizen to gradually fade away while the local authorities can be blamed. The scheme has already been withdrawn from limited stop services, park and ride and city sightseeing tours. This latter category, it could be argued, is hardly travel anyway, but these are just the start..

What the local authorities don’t seem to realise is that they should be encouraging people to get onto public transport and they probably wouldn’t disagree with this, until they have to pay for it. The same can be said of central government if they are reneging on the undertaking to reimburse local authorities. The withdrawal of park and ride from the scheme really shows how seriously this claimed encouragement to get us out of our cars and onto public transport is taken. Not much.

Having been scarred by commuting for 13 years by the poisonous combination of Great Western and Thames Trains I am reluctant to risk my valuable leisure time by travelling by train, usually at great expense. By buying a train ticket you have decided to forgo the expense already incurred by keeping and running a car. Your tax and depreciation costs are still being incurred while your car stands idle. No recognition of this is given. Instead you have to take on the double whammy of paying a high train fare as well, and in my experience, a huge gamble as to whether you will have a pleasant journey due to poor management of the system and a total failure to understand the phrase, ‘customer care’. In any case, subsidised travel should be extended to everyone if there is a genuine determination to reduce car journeys. The other poisonous combination of John Major’s Thomas the Tank Engine privatisation and Tony Blair’s failure to think a joined up thought on the topic has meant that the public transport system outside the big cities is very patchy and practically non-existent for evening travel. If I stop using my car I give up the only reliable transport I know at the moment. This of course suits all the token environmentalists in government well, because I not only pay the full costs, the taxes I pay for the privilege leaves some cash free to spend on all kinds of other daft token schemes which are supposed to make us think that New Labour is environmentally sound. The current thinking is about as joined up as a transatlantic bus service.

Dacier