One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an exception to test the rule. Occasionally a subject crops up which lies some way beyond the horizon of even — perhaps especially — the most well-informed of our readers; little details one would be slightly disappointed to discover were known to the average Spectator reader. And on these rare occasions, remedial explanation is required.
So, then: buses are those big red things full of poor people you see clogging up the traffic in the middle of London. You may have been stuck behind one on your way to lunch at Simpson’s; you may even have ridden on one, when you were a child and both impecunious and possessed of a sense of adventure. There are a lot, lot more of them these days, though — which is rather the point of this article.
Buses are an interesting phenomenon. They are one of those things about which one is not allowed to have an opinion that diverges from the norm; they are, per se, a bloody good thing, and anyone who says otherwise is quite beyond the pale — and not to be simply disagreed with, but universally vilified. They are the sort of transport equivalent of aid to Africa. Just recently a chap called Richard Austen-Baker made a fairly stringent case against buses in the letters pages of Private Eye magazine — and you would not believe the hatred and sanctimony poured upon him from other readers, objections which went way beyond the objective and into the realms of politically correct loathing. And if you swallow the argument that buses are an unreservedly good thing, you also have to swallow that bus lanes are a good thing and cars are bad, bad, bad. As Transport 2000 put it: ‘Cars are an inefficient use of scarce road space. A bus carrying up to 90 passengers takes up the same space as three cars.’
This is, when you think about it, an argument which is both disingenuous and flawed — and yet it is an argument which has been adopted by every city council in the land. It takes no account of a whole bunch of other variables. First, that bus transport is painfully, excruciatingly slow. Sadly, I do not have the statistics on how many man-hours are lost to the economy, or simply to the lives of ordinary people, by taking a bus as opposed to a more rapid form of transport (such as, say, walking, or crawling on your belly). Second, it ignores the obvious point that while buses may carry more people, they also cause more traffic jams than any other form of transport, especially Ken Livingstone’s newish ‘bendy-buses’, which find it impossible to negotiate the tight corners of London’s pre-Victorian road system and mess up the traffic for hours every day.
Then there is the crime — buses, and especially night buses (of which there are more and more) — are neither pleasant nor safe environments, especially now that the conductors have been expunged for economic reasons. Further, there is the knock-on effect of their profusion: car drivers, maddened by the queue of 12 buses crawling past yet another new set of traffic lights in the centre of town, tend to veer off down side streets, increasing the risk of accidents and turning residential roads into snarling, clogged rat-runs. And then there is the cost: these lumbering behemoths are not cheap to use and are very costly to run, both environmentally and simply financially. The minimum cash fare for a short journey in Zone One in London will soon rise by 33 per cent to a staggering £2; two or three people using a taxi rather than a bus will find their expenditure on a single journey significantly reduced. And, finally, there is the disingenuity — that a bus carrying ‘up to’ 90 passengers is more efficient than a car. What if the ‘up to’ bit refers to just three people, or even ten? What are the variables we must examine then, on expenditure of public money and the relentless burning of fossil fuel and the contribution to London’s perpetual gridlock?
Take a look at the roads when the bus drivers, mercifully, go on strike for a day. Traffic flows around our city-centres like blood through veins suddenly devoid of cholesterol. The downtrodden masses, the people one usually espies through the window of the 68 as it crawls for an hour or so along the Walworth Road — well, they got to where they were going, somehow, didn’t they? And probably a hell of a lot quicker. And this is the corollary: buses are the form of transport of the ‘poor’, not because the ‘poor’ wish to use them but because city hall has decreed that buses are their lot and that’s that. Most of the poor have cars; but they are prohibited from using these because of the extortionate congestion charge — an anti-poor, regressive tax if ever there was one — and the cost of parking. The ‘poor’ have never, to my knowledge, insisted that they wish, for ideological and environmental reasons, to travel by a communitarian form of transport; my guess is, given the choice, they would prefer to drive, all things being equal.
The congestion charge, incidentally, did, very briefly, ease congestion in central London (and displace it to those areas just beyond the centre). But now I reckon that the congestion is as bad as ever, from purely anecdotal evidence and observation. I wonder if this is more to do with the record number of buses on our roads rather than those selfish car-users. The Mayor will tell you that bus ‘ridership’ grew by 38 per cent between 1999 and 2004 and there is no reason to doubt these figures. People will clamber aboard a bus for an hour or so of numbing misery if there is no real alternative for them: don’t forget, the cost of a very short Tube ride in Zone One will soon be an astronomical £4; take a car and one way or another they’ll be bankrupted. My point, really, is that buses should not exist in a zone which is beyond debate, that their efficacy is at least challengeable. And I write this as someone who has never driven a car in his life.
Offer ends in:
