Zinnia Goes Off-Topic

Sorry, non-UK readers, but I need to vent.

Last week there was a ripple in our wee nation’s papers about a Government U-turn on road traffic management (har har de har har). ‘There are real, practical things we can do today to tackle congestion’, declaimed Ruth Kelly, our current transport secretary. The proposal is to let drivers use the hard shoulders of motorways which, for non-UK readers, are the inside lane, historically reserved for broken-down cars that would otherwise obstruct the traffic and for vehicles from the emergency services which need to get to places quickly. So where will the clapped-out cars and emergency vehicles go now? Nobody seems to know the answer to this question, but people say feebly ‘it’s been trialled on the M42’ which is a nothing motorway in the middle of the country that goes from nowhere to nowhere. So that’s all right then.

The U-turn to this idiotic scheme has been made from another idiotic scheme: road pricing. The original plan was allegedly to charge drivers on the busiest roads approx £1.30/mile, which could add up very quickly to an enormous amount of money. This is the usual New Labour strategy of proposing something completely preposterous, so when they ‘climb down’ and suggest something half as bad, everyone goes ‘ooh that’s a much better idea’, not realising that if the second suggestion had been made originally, it would have been greeted with almost as much outrage as the first. Even the Green campaigners were reported as saying, in response to the U-turn, ‘There is going to be a need for road pricing and the Government needs to be more proactive about introducing schemes’ (Stephen Joseph of the Campaign for Better Transport, reported here).

WHAT ABOUT PUBLIC TRANSPORT MISTER GREEN CAMPAIGNER???

Sorry to shout, but it seems to have been completely overlooked in the entire debate. I am lucky that the small market town where I live has a railway station on a branch line; there aren’t many of those left in England. We have around one train an hour, most days, for the half-hour journey to the nearest mainline station. (We used to have through trains to exciting places like the nearest airport and the nearest bit of seaside, but they were quietly done away with a couple of years ago.) The word ‘days’ is key here. In the last couple of weeks I have been invited to two early evening events in different places, each about an hour and a half’s train journey from here with one change. I’m not good at driving in the evenings because I get sleepy, and anyway free wine was on offer which is clearly incompatible with driving, so travelling by train seemed ideal. But in each case the last train back left at around 6.30 pm – thereby enabling me to be at the events in question for 15 minutes at best.

Time is not the only issue. Next weekend Top Bloke and I are going visiting in London. It takes a fair old while to drive there, and will cost about sixty quid in petrol, so I thought maybe we could go by train. We were going off-peak so I guessed it wouldn’t be too expensive. I looked on the Internet and, yes, there were trains at suitable times. I had visions of us reading companionably on the floor outside the toilet; maybe taking a trip to the buffet for a polystyrene cup of unpalatable tea; it was looking good. Then I clicked on to the page with the prices. The cheapest return tickets were seventy-two pounds. Each. We could have a week’s holiday in the Med for that (although cheap air travel is of course deeply immoral and wrong and bad and killing off the planet all by itself so quit with the comments already).

It’s not as bad as £1.30 per mile, but it does seem ridiculously expensive. I’d use the ‘national’ coach networks if they came anywhere near the town where I live, or even joined up with the aforementioned mainline train station, but no, they’re right across the other side of the city, and there is no direct bus joining the two. I should probably take a taxi…

A couple of years ago I spent a holiday in Italy. I took a train from Rome to a small town in rural Abruzzo, with one change; a journey of around three hours, through beautiful mountain scenery. Italian trains are utilitarian, with plastic seats, no tables, and toilets that simply have a large hole at the bottom which, at sixty miles an hour, is amusingly draughty. There’s no buffet for them to make extra profits out of (the Eyeties missed a trick there, what?), no trolley dolly, no frills at all. But there are lots of trains, they mostly run on time, there are enough seats, and they are astonishingly cheap: I think it was about a fiver each way.

Now I’m sure you will want to tell me about all sorts of historical and economic and political stuff, like how mainland Europe got its railways bombed to buggery in WWII so they’ve got much newer and better track to work with, and how Italy has high taxes that subsidise the trains so aren’t we better off here with ‘lower’ taxes and more ‘individual choice’, and how state control of a transport system is a good thing in Italy but not here for complicated reasons I shouldn’t bother my pretty little head about. I don’t care about any of that. I just want a public transport system that works and that I can afford. I want it really badly, and I don’t understand why I can’t have it, and I feel angry and helpless and a little bit like crying.