Transport needs to be removed as a politicians’ plaything, as their intervention becomes more destructive and in the end it is the passenger who suffers from their need for re-election
INSIDE TRACK
My title this month is a phrase that one hears more and more these days. It usually means that you are about to hear a proposal that no sane intelligent person would make, but because some out of touch and badly informed politician thinks it is a good idea, they think it is going to happen. There are the big things, such as Sadiq Khan’s destruction of the London bus network and Transport for Greater Manchester’s franchising lunacy, and there are many smaller events.
I shall explain three minor events affecting companies I am involved with, and finally Merseyside, which is an example of another destructive plan that is spreading. I have anonymised the first three to protect the guilty.
There is a half-hourly commercial service in a market town run by a PLC. It passes the operator’s depot, so is often affected by no bus or driver availability. Eventually the PLC realises it loses money and deregisters. It goes out to tender and we win it, and combined with a school it is possible that with a bit of reliability it could be commercial again.
In the next round of cuts, the PLC cancels a service to a nearby village. The council takes two 60min blocks out of the half-hourly service to provide a service to this village, which only carries three or four passengers a day. Passenger numbers on the town service fall by 40%, so no chance of it ever being commercial. The nearby village would have been best served by demand responsive transport.
