Subsidised bus fares

 Subsidised Bus Fares.

    Hurray! At last my ideas are getting through. On 18th July I wrote to Stagecoach Oxford a longish letter, of which this is a part:

Dear Stagecoach Oxford,

....... It is a dilemma for Stagecoach. Overtime and higher wages would presumably cure the ‘Sunday sickness’ problem. But not enough people use the buses. I would have it (by law, using subsidies) that any single bus fare must be cheaper than the same trip by car. But then, I am not prime minister. ........

     Yours sincerely, Ian West

    And this morning, on BBC radio 4 Today:

"'Bus journeys in England will be capped at £2 from January to March next year in a bid to ease the rising cost of living', the government has said."

    The government has not grasped the whole proposition, but this announcement is a beginning. They seem to be looking at it as a way to ameliorate a  cost of living crisis in the next six months. I am considering the whole rationale of public transport, fuel economy, climate change, levelling up, etc., not only for short journeys and not only for 3 months, but continuing well into the future; more as a matter of principle than as an expedient.

    It is amazing, all the same, that my core idea might have got through to the Department for Transport and to its energetic minister Grant Shapps. Perhaps Martin Griffiths (Stagecoach Chief Executive), or Ray O'Toole (Stagecoach Chairman) is one of his buddies, though that seems a bit unlikely.  Stagecoach owns a formidable number of transport companies around the world, and I only contacted the Customer Service officer in Oxford. I doubt my letter got read, let alone passed up the chain.

    Paul Tuohy, chief executive of Campaign for Better Transport, says he also was calling for a £2 cap. And well he may have been; for he seems to be a good egg. He also might have noticed the stream of empty buses on car-infested roads, and come to the same conclusion that I did, who am chief executive only of my own tiny household.