Travelling circus
Well today sees the publication of the Executive’s capitulation to London Labour transport policy. Without even reading the detail I can tell you that it is doomed to fail. Why? It adopts the already failed idea that increased taxes will encourage people to give up being on time for work using the car.
Rather than changing road layouts etc. to ease (rather than cause) traffic congestion, the Executive thinks it can achieve what no other Western government has managed, and force people to use public transport.
The primary advantage of the car is not that public transport takes five times as long ((I ain’t exaggerating here, my daily journey to uni would take about 20 minutes by car, on the bus it can often top an hour and a half)), but reliability. When you want to make a journey by car, you know that (barring the intervention of the local neds) it will be where it is supposed to be. It will not turn up 20 minutes late with no explanation. It will not be driven by an obnoxious halfwit who looks like the experience of wearing clean clothes is new to him. ((No sexism – I have just never encountered any obnoxious female bus drivers. The (two IIRC) female bus drivers I have encountered in my year-and-a-half of regular bus use have been polite and professional, unlike most of the wildlife employed by FirstBus))
Getting everyone to use public transport is a nice idea in the saving-an-environment-thats-screwed-anyway manual, but given that (unless railways are extended significantly so that everyone can get to a station on foot) it is doomed to fail. It might be better to spend public money on environmental measures that actually work, like renewable power.