The recession continues to bite. Demand reduces and operators the length & breadth of the land continue to examine or implement mitigating measures. One of the ironies of life is that when there is the faintest whiff of a service cut, each letter of complaint invariably points to one thing: “I thought the government was trying to encourage more use of public transport”.
A good point and one that’s not immediately easy to answer. Sustainability is one thing but the bus service, too, needs to achieve that sustainability. There remain no quick fixes in shoring up a marginal or loss-making bus service.
It’s the same on the Isle of Wight at the moment where staff at wind-turbine manufacturer Vestas are sitting in because the company wishes to close its facility. On the face of it, it's ludicrous and shortsighted to force skilled “green collar” workers onto the street when we talk so much about renewable energy. Yet Vestas, like bus operators, have to consider the here and now as well as the future. Neither can neglect commercial sustainability.
In the same way, general businesses make decisions about sustainability that can seem at odds with government thinking on the environment. They rationalise offices or branches by closing or merging. This forces workers to travel further or to destinations perhaps less easily accessible by public transport.
The closure of a local business can have a devastating impact on a bus service. A worker who previously used a bus week in week out may be forced to find an alternative. 48 weekly tickets over 10 years sees a potential loss of £8,000 revenue, forever.
Thus, we still have our reliance on the private car. Society knows it needs to reduce its impact on carbon emissions but in so many ways does not make it easy for individuals to do so. This is society’s problem, not the bus operator’s. Operators have a duty to shareholders to make a contribution on capital invested and return a profit. Operators whose employees might be dubbed the original green collar workers can make a significant impact on carbon emission reductions but they aren’t so magnanimous in the teeth of recession that in doing so they can threaten their businesses.
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Teeth that Bite
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2 comments:
The area that I find most annoying is healthcare. So many Doctors' surgeries are closing to group together at health centres and then they expect a bus to be put on to take people from their old premises to their new. This is an area where the Government is in control, but it is clear that they do not factor in the cost of people travelling further in their calculations.
Surely the NHS should try to be more responsible and place new sites along good public transport routes. They should also put the doors near the road rather than making people walk across car parks to access buildings.
Indeed scrapping car parking charges has been discussed, as it is seen as unfair for market forces to operate in car parking at hospitals. It is acceptable to subsidise car travellers by providing free parking, but that largesse is not extended to bus passengers.
One important part of this problem is planning. If planning wasn't allowed to go ahead so willy-nilly gobbling up every green field that happens to be available, but instead demanded that new commercial, industrial and residential developments are only allowed where there is a minimum set quality of public transport, and if there isn't then the developers must provide it out of their own pocket, then this type of problem wouldn't be occurring.
In Switzerland, for example, there are laws that mean a court can, and sometimes does, overturn planning permission because public transport is inadequate to the site in question. There have recently been several cases of green-field traders agreeing to pick up the bill for bus service improvements in return for being allowed to go ahead with their development.
There need not be an argument of "I can't take the bus because there isn't one".
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