Name:
Simon Norton
Occupation: Academic
Hometown: Cambridge
County: Cambs
Comments: Three points.
Firstly,
even if subsidies to road traffic were removed there would still be justification
for supporting public transport on the grounds that lower fares would increase
utility by reducing the wastage caused by empty seats.
Nigel
Replies
The
argument throughout my paper is that if subsidies are required because people
are unable to access their needs, the subsidy should be paid to those people
and they can choose how they spend that money, whether to access their needs
locally with less or no transport, or to access their needs where available by
public or private transport.
Where
public transport or roads are subsidised, the state is making that choice for
the public, depriving the public of the choice of keeping their money accessing
their needs locally. This has shifted the economic balance away from the
provision of facilities such as shops, employment, health care education etc
from local communities to large centralised providers. This has also
facilitated the building of residential accommodation in dispersed locations
without the facilities necessary for sustainable communities forcing the
residents to use transport to access their needs.
It
is of course virtually impossible to set prices precisely to match supply and
demand. Spare capacity is a mixture of excess supply and price set above the
optimum economic price. There is always the danger of political interference
forcing a price too low creating excess demand without enough revenue to cover
the costs of increasing supply to meet demand. This is endemic on large parts
of both road and rail networks and indeed buses in some of the big cities.
Pricing is best left to commercial organisations with the incentives of
maximising profits to ensure the optimum price is set neither too high or too
low, and to subsidise the weaker members of society directly if they do not
have the resources to access their needs at the commercial price.
Secondly,
the needs of buses are different to those of cars and we need an assurance that
even if local roads are closed to other through traffic buses will still be
able to get through, for example if this is necessary to complete a route
through a chain of villages.
Nigel
Replies
Agree.
My hometown is proposing a pedestrian priority area in the High Street area.
This is proposed by taking the pavement surface texture across the road so that
road vehicles feel they are driving in a pedestrian area. Buses will continue
to be allowed through as will delivery lorries and residential cars. Where this
sort of approach is used there are dramatic reductions in road casualties, and
pedestrians feel much safer, but vehicles have not been prohibited suggest you
read "Traffic Calming in Practice", County Surveyors Society, Landor
Publishing, ISBN 1 899650 008 this compares different methods of traffic
calming. Also look up the work of Carman Hass-Clau the world’s most
distinguished expert in traffic calming.
Thirdly,
while it would indeed be in the interests of private operators to develop an
integrated network that does not mean that they have the ability to develop the
administrative structures that this would require. If we have learnt anything
from bus and rail privatisation and deregulation, it is that the planning of
networks needs to be left to a central authority (for each area) with the
further duties of cooperating with their neighbours and covering their areas
comprehensively.
Nigel
Replies
Where
I live integration has improved beyond recognition since privatisation though
there is still a long way to go. There has been a mushrooming of Railbus
initiatives where through tickets have become available between train and bus -
often valid on several different bus companies.
At
nationalisation in the 1940's the British Transport Commission were given the
task of coordinating all public transport, including bus and rail, but they
failed miserably and being state controlled there were no competitors to get it
right. Indeed their efforts with all the money spent as directed by the
Government together with the false accounting of roads resulted in the
financial disaster that gave the Government the excuse for the Beeching cuts
and the withering away of bus services that isolated so many in our society.
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