These statistics come from Common Space in Scotland this morning, but I strongly suspect that they would be consistent in England and Wales as well:
The new Transport Scotland statistics cover 2017
- New data shows fall in bus passenger use by 7.5 per cent over the past five years, while fares are up 18 per cent over the same period of time
- The number of motor vehicles reached its highest ever level, with two-thirds saying they travelled to work by car or van
- Transport is the biggest contributor to Scotland's carbon emissions, and emission levels have remained static since 1990
- Environmentalists and opposition parties call for public and community owned bus networks to be included in “timid” Transport Bill
- Transport Secretary said he continued to be “concerned” about bus usage falling, but that the Transport Bill would help address this
As they note:
Environmentalists have said that transport statistics published today must be a wake up call for politicians to tackle the chronic decline in bus usage, the number one mode of public transport in Scotland.
The Transport Scotland statistics show bus passenger numbers have fallen by 7.5 per cent over the past five years, while the number of motor vehicles reached its highest level ever in Scotland at three million.
I would add a twist. People often ask how a Green New Deal can be delivered locally. This issue explains part of my answer, which is deal with your buses.
The biggest problem in UK transport, and the reason why so many rely on the car is the 'last mile problem' i.e. how you get from home to the station, or to town where the long distance coach is, or wherever. Some would, of course, say that's what taxis are for, but I use them once in a blue moon. They'd also say that was what the bicycle was invented for, and as someone often found atop one I have some sympathy. Bit for a great many reasons they are not for everyone and everywhere.
I use buses a great deal in London. I like them. At home I hardly ever use them at all. They don't go where I want. And they are too infrequent. The result is many resort to the car. And as Common Space point out, cost is also a factor for many.
If emissions are to be tackled then the bus issue has to be tackled. There have to be more of them, more often, on better routes, at lower cost, with subsidy provided if required to transform local transport with the result that the last mile problem can be solved. That's what the Green New Deal would look like. It may not be big, bold or that costly. It may not deliver massive political reward. But it would create real change. And that's what matters.
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and better cycling/pedestrian infrastructure.
The beauty of liberalising the taxi market, applying a carbon tax to all combustion, and putting tolls on expensive bridges is that you don’t need to know if your solution of more buses is the right one.
The last mile is a problem as you say. But so too is scheduling, the desirability or not of home working, ride-sharing, carrying shopping and luggage, what we do with more leisure time, and whether to take a flight from Glasgow to Orkney or go by other means. The carbon tax doesn’t prescribe the answer, but it does let the people prescribe their own answers. It also means you can ensure the scheme to reduce emissions by the optimal amount is extended to other countries if you charge it to incoming flights, motor vehicles, trains, and imported goods if the country of origin doesn’t have one.
The Green New Deal is simply too dependent on the central planners being right.
The Green New Deal recognises that carbon tax has not worked
And there are limits to what tax can do
See my discussion on the Washington Post on this issue this week
Norris Holgate says:
“The beauty of liberalising the taxi market, applying a carbon tax to all combustion, and putting tolls on expensive bridges is that you don’t need to know if your solution of more buses is the right one.”
I’m not sure there is ‘beauty’ in any of these proposals. If you mean that the only way we are going to reduce carbon pollution is by pricing people out of travelling then I can see your point, but I disagree totally with it.
Those who can afford it will continue to behave in exactly the same way they do now, on the complacent and mistaken assumption that they are paying for the privilege, and their behaviour will set the desirable aspiration for those who will struggle to pay.
You describe the neoliberal elitist wet dream.
I agree with you Andy
The market cannot solve such problems precisely because there are unequal votes in the market as we have it, which the theory upon which this wet dream is written pretends do not exist
The thing is Norris, the carbon tax solution is not a suitable way to deal with changing people’s behaviour.
You speak of choices but really people will all too often take a softer choice to offset something rather than do without what they have come to rely on for all sorts of reasons and many of them could be valid. What offsetting does is displace the problem and puts it out of the mind’s eye. It creates a false consciousness that we have a solved a problem.
And what info do we give people to help make those choices? How many adverts do you see selling the latest 4 x 4 as opposed to going on the bus? Look Norris – you know the answer, right?
I think you also ought to remember that we did have a joined up transport infrastructure in this country once, with trams, trolley buses, buses and railway lines that seemed to work. We did not have so much congestion or pollution then. That was very centrally and locally planned and it worked . And it could do again.
But more to the point, it will have to do it again. Transport planning (or the lack of) has shown us the real limits of individual self-realisation through car ownership.
This is timely as I’m reading of schools threatening to fine parents for parking near schools when they’re, er, picking up or dropping off their schoolchildren. No mention of any available alternatives, but clearly the time is ripe for school buses.
Living rurally, public transport can be a pretty awkward and restricted. My youngest son: a non driver, had an awkward journey to work involving two miles to a bus stop, a bus journey of four then another mile walk to work. I encouraged him (he was reluctant) to invest his first two months wages in an electric bike.
Now he loves it. No lifts to beg, no waiting, no bus hassles & no walking. He works front of house and the power assistance means he doesn’t arrive in a messy sweat: if it rains good lightweight waterproofs keep him dry and presentable. Best of all his bike will have paid for itself within ten months on the bus fare costs alone.
Some kind of hybrid between the cheap but sometimes UK weather-problematic usefulness of an electric bike and the absurd expense and extravagance of an electric car is the way forward.
If we could make a bike with even some degree of cover we’d be making massive porgress
Having clocked past my sixtieth birthday and being in enlightened Scotland I get free bus travel.
No way will I be running a car again unless it is going to earn its keep for work/business purposes. It has to be said that I don’t live ‘out in the country’ so am relatively well served by buses. The biggest downside is the lack of buses in the evening ruling out evening events in places beyond (what I regard as) acceptable walking distance and actually also in the early morning.
Reducing the frequency of services leads to a vicious spiral of reduced bus travel. But of course it takes courage and cash and time to expand services. It’s so much easier to let them atrophy and shut them down, a management technique railway enthusiasts are very familiar with.
Rural or urban travel by bike can be very frightening. Motorists are extremely intolerant of all other forms of transport and adopt a Mr Toad-like attitude as soon as they get behind a steering wheel. We really do need more cycle tracks in many areas. Where disused railway lines have been converted as cycle tracks the modest slopes required by trains have proved a boon.
All new road building schemes should incorporate a cycle lane (unless there is good reason not to) and a lot of existing roads could easily have provision added ….the sort of project the Green New Deal might include amongst it’s goals perhaps (?).
Three years of regular cycling to work (albeit only fifteen to twenty minutes each way) made me realise that British weather is not nearly as bad as I though it is. My biggest enemy was darkness particularly in traffic; car drivers don’t dip headlights for cyclists. (Or pedestrians !)
Cycling in your sixties is good for you, I tell myself…..
I do it, often
In moderate traffic and when you aren’t breathing heavy urban traffic fumes I have no doubt it’s a great way to travel.
Somebody, I can’t remember who….reckoned the bicycle was by far the most efficient form of transport ever devised. I think he had a strong case….
I cycle in my 50’s more than ever before (especially now I do not need the car to ferry youngsters around to and from school) and would heartily recommend it (no pun intended).
Don’t race, just keep going. Ignore those youngsters who go past you and contain your ego. You’re doing it for you – no one else. You’re not in your 20’s anymore. You are competing against yourself, the urge to have an easy (but potentially shorter) life.
In traffic try to breathe in through your nose. The nose is designed to filter out the air as you take it down. If you don’t believe me, blow your nose when you get home and be grateful that what you see did not go into your lungs! Try to avoid getting stuck behind those awful diesel buses.
And also, get your breathing right. If you going up hill or want to go faster you will have to breath more – gears or no gears. It is as simple as that. And the longer you stick at it, the less tired you will feel, the easier it will get. I promise you it does get better. When I arrive at work by bike I am wide awake and have already thought out my day.
I would also recommend a rowing machine to those for those whom a bike is out of the question.
Agree with all that
I remember chasing my way up hills for the sake of it
I now take whatever pace I like and take simple pleasure from getting there
I’d also add I brake more than I used to going downhill these days. Some is just age-related caution. Some is that there is more mass, I am afraid to say
Email Address Supplied says:
“I would also recommend a rowing machine to those for those whom a bike is out of the question.”
Silly person !!!
How can you get to work on a rowing machine ? 🙂
Andy is right – I have had people shouting obscenities and chucking stuff at me from cars on more occasions than I’d like to admit but my attitude is all about me. What the cycling is doing for me matters most and what it is doing is keeping my cardo-vascular system working under load – that is my main objective. And as for the blood whirring around my brain – well – as I said I get to work fully awake and ready for action. Not only that, when I cycle up a hill without stopping I see that as an accomplishment and I also that even at 54, the more I do it, the easier it gets.
I have cycled the complete journey to work of 22 miles along a road running from the peaks into the principal town where I work, and the upper reaches of the road are particularly remote, badly lit with lots of chicanes and a max speed of 50mph. It can be pretty hairy at night so I am lit up like Christmas tree. In winter I cycle and commute by train between home and where I work using the bike to get to the station but when the clocks change I ride the 10 miles to and from the town where I work to the first stop on the line. Nothing flashy – I just ride and keep going.
As for keeping dry etc., I am lucky enough to shower at work if I need to. Other than that I would recommend people do not buy the Lycra riding gear for commuting. The Lycra stuff seems designed for athletic people who ride non-stop at high speed. In commuting there’s a of lot starting and stopping so you can get cold very quickly. I tend to use mountaineering or walking gear for bike riding as it seems best suited to the discontinuity of urban travel. I may not look sleek and speedy as the cycling body politic seems to dictate, but I don’t care – I am comfortable what ever the weather.
The worst thing to be without in summer is water and some sun bloc.
I also choose my gear carefully. I have grown to dislike Gortex because its manufacture is quite polluting (it’s related to Teflon I think) and use a Paramo cycling jacket which – whilst heavier than Gortex – keeps me just as dry and comfortable but also warmer (you have to re-proof yourself every now and then).
Cycling is fun, its life affirming (on my route us cyclists always say good morning or nod our heads at each other in support) you always get to talk to fellow cyclists on the train or at traffic lights – its a sort social leveller – about your exploits and near misses.
The only thing I worry about is if cycling will help us to live a bit longer and healthier, then what have we got to look forward to given the sate of economic and social thinking!!!!!
🙂
I’m in my early 70’s and have recently taken up road cycling again. For many years we have, and still do, cycle off road (gently) – we cycled and pushed through the Lairig Ghru before mountain bikes were thought of.
I’ve just come back from Spain where cycling is an altogether different game and not just because of the weather. I’ve been in rural mountainous areas, not cities. The road surfaces are incredible, they are wide with good margins which you can move into if needed, there’s very little traffic, and best of all, nearly every driver is considerate. They wait behind you, no matter how slowly you’re going (even uphill) and only overtake when the road is really clear and then give you wide berth.
And lots of people cycle and walk even where it’s very hilly and incredibly steep. (Walking is often done in groups – 4 or 5 women, elderly couples, family groups of several generations. (I’ve even seen fathers talking to their children and playing with them))
I believe there is strict liability in case of an accident with a cyclist and it’s mandatory to allow a 1.5m overtaking gap. In towns and villages there are lots of wide speed bumps, which also double as pedestrian crossings and as soon as a pedestrian shows signs of crossing the driver has to stop. A street in even a smallish village/town can have half a dozen crossings in just a few hundred metres.
Bus travel seems very cheap and I’m regularly astonished by the number of banks in even quite small towns. This is supposed to be a relatively poor country compared to the UK, but coming back today was something of a culture shock as far as the condition of the roads and amount of traffic was concerned. Spain would be a great place to live, if it weren’t for its nasty right wing government, something we in Britain don’t have to worry about – oh, wait a minute…..
Some simple things, then, could make life much more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians but a GND should go further and, unlike our road-lobby-government whose response to congestion is “Smart Motorways”, argue for integrated, (the term may need to be explained to the Dept.) cheap, reliable, regular public transport in all its forms and reaching all parts of the country and get many of these bloody cars and lorries (and the people in them) off the roads and out of our villages, towns and cities and into more environmentally sustainable forms of transport. It’s not a “human right” to be able to drive a car when and where you want and then park it outside an ATM on double yellow lines or on the pavement because you’re too damn lazy to walk or cycle.
Thanks
@Graham Hewitt
It’s a while now since I was in Spain , but I entirely concur with what you say about the Spanish attitude to cycling, and cyclists.
Even longer ago I was in Adelaide where motorists give way to pedestrians on junctions ….the pedestrian on the main road has priority over a motorist joining the road. Try that in Britain and you’ll be sworn at hooted at or run over. It felt very civilised and like being a timewarp …..
We have become accustomed to the tyranny of the motor car.
It would be good to see someone like Jeremy Clarkson leading a move to making the fun of Top Gear available to petrolheads with the provision of more affordable racing and play environments for big kids to play with their motorised toys. The public highway is not an appropriate place for these antics.
@Andy. One of the sadnesses of leaving the EU is that we are saying we have nothing to learn from other European countries.
Ahh ,if only we had kept all those tram lines, I remember when the experts told us that trams were out of date and buses would be better then council bus services were privatised by Margaret thatcher who said competition would lead to lower prices better services and more varied services.It was all a lie, not just a mistake but a lie, we knew it at the time but were powerless just like now with brexit we know it’s a lie that brexit will be better but we are powerless to stop the change.
We now have giant buses trying to negotiate narrow streets and giant trucks passing through little villages we used to send freight by rail but it’s all on the road now including nuclear warheads sent across the country on the back of a truck in a convoy as if a couple of police vans and a couple of police motorcyclists one at the front one at the back, makes it all safe.
We let the conservatives into the decision making process and have ended up with a black version of Alice in wonderland where one buffoon and another appears in Westminster parliament to spout off a load of absolute guff and we look at them realising that they are like a cartoon character but have a huge say and influence on how we live our lives.
UK people are persuaded by the power of television and the newspapers who contrive to jointly lie about the reality of proposed changes in our life that will result when we brexit, the loss of the NHS ,more duff privatisation ,reduced quality riskier essential stuff that we used to cherish will arrive and will cost more,our countryside will be damaged and our health happiness and well-being will suffer.
Yes we need buses simply because it’s silly seeing so many cars with just one person in them,an absolute waste of energy and huge cause of pollution and congestion.
Yes we need NHS hospitals it’s silly that we actually allow private hospitals to use NHS equipment and facilities and allow NHS employees to also work for those private hospitals just imagine if you worked for a private company and you told your boss you were going to work for their competitor on the side and would use your bosses equipment and facilities whilst doing so ? It would get you the sack but government MP,s have their finger in the pie being shareholders in these private hospitals and that is why they wrote law that allows this unjust idiocy to thrive.
Private schools that avoid taxes even though they make profits by being allowed to call themselves charities and then have the audacity to take government funds for development.
Only in UK with a parliament as corrupt as Westminster could this happen.
Andy
I thought you’d respond about the rowing machine recommendation that way. Eh laddie – predictable or what?!!!
Having used one for nearly a year, I can honestly say as an ‘over 50’ that they give you a good work out particularly for the upper body and again you only have to compete against yourself. Also they are very safe being static and usually in a gym but also portable enough to have one at home too.
As a means of getting you to work or elsewhere they are useless of course.
But you never know – I might be need to kayak to work one day. In fact, looking at the ice caps – it seems even more likely! My local river follows the railway line I take to work.
Anyhow, on that note I’d better be off to practice my Eskimo roll – see you later.
Email Address Supplied says:
“I thought you’d respond about the rowing machine recommendation that way. Eh laddie — predictable or what?!!!”
Sorry EAS, couldn’t resist the ‘predictable’ quip.
But I like ‘Laddie’. More of that please 🙂
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