Comment on Where have all the buses gone? Their neglect is an English national failure | John Harris
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 1 year ago
At some point cars became a symbol of individualism. The number of people (men, really) I’ve worked with who insist on “buying” a new car every year was astonishing. Cars got bigger and bigger and flashier and flashier. All on finance though. Seemed like a weird, maschocistic addiction to me. Almost like they’d been brainwashed into car consumption.
What we actually need is a completely free at point of use public transport system. Break the weird car addition and help deal with the climate crisis.
thehatfox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It will take mixture of carrot and stick to get people out of cars. We need policy that makes public transport more appealing, which involves reliability as much as pricing, and policy that discourages driving when there are alternatives.
I agree we defiantly need to lower the cot of using public transport though. The focus on profitability needs to be broken. Nobody asks if the road network makes money, it’s taken as a given that it helps power the economy. The same thinking should apply to public transport, spending on transport is an investment in the country itself.
blackn1ght@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Personally it’s not the cost of the bus that doesn’t appeal, but the frequency of the buses and how long the journey takes. This probably isn’t an issue in a big city where buses are very regular, but when they’re once an hour and they take at least twice as long as a car then it’s difficult to choose the bus when you can just hop in the car that’s on your drive or outside your house and go direct to where you want to go.
I don’t know what the realistic answer is. You could argue that we need more buses, but you’d have to flood the roads with buses to have a decent schedule for all possible routes, where they’re practically free at the point of use to entice people away from cars.
Tesco@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve been car free now for close to a decade but am close to giving up, honestly. The buses that used to be every 10 minutes are progressively getting less frequent to the point it’s usually every half an hour, but not uncommon for them to be every hour.
It’s impossible to plan your day around a bus schedule that constantly changes with no warning, so I just end up not bothering to go out a lot of the time.
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 1 year ago
It will. Even if we could imagine a completely free, properly-networked public transport infrastructure, people would also need access to vehicles conveniently without having to own one.
Cars in UK (and probably all countries really) are like guns in the US. Suggesting that they give up theirs for a greater good is seen as some sort of immasculising curtailment of their God-given freedom.
Mex@feddit.uk 1 year ago
The policies should be to try and make the car not the first and only choice.