Item — HN Reader

I think a big problem that keeps cars king is just how crap public transport is. If I want to get the bus from where I live, it’s less frequent than once an hour, is usually 30-40 minutes late (if it bothers to turn up at all) and when it does eventually turn up, the card machine is broken and there’s a fourth-generation product of petrol huffing on the seat behind who thinks a bus a good place to use his bluetooth speaker on full blast. I’ll then spend an hour and a half going six miles because the bus companies don’t really cooperate properly so the routes are often torturous.

It’s expensive too, but not as eye-wateringly expensive as the train I have to go well out of my way to get on (by taxi, bike, or car because going there by bus is virtually guaranteed to make you miss the train). These trains are often cancelled without warning ten minutes after they’re supposed to have shown up for an excuse chosen apparently at random from a litany of failure that generally amounts to “the network is crap but don’t worry, the subsidy is being spent on some franchise executive’s salary instead of some government bureaucrat’s salary so it’s way better than the old service!”.

Outside of London, a lot of British public transport is utterly unfit for purpose. They’ve only just got rid of the “temporary” solution dating to the early 80s of putting train wheels on surplus British Leyland buses and pretending they’re trains in some parts of the country. Why would anyone with the means to afford a car bother with this absolutely piss-poor display of failed public services given the choice?

2 comments

If you think that's bad, you haven't been to the US. Public transport is at least an order of magnitude worse here, with all the issues you mentioned and then some, such as contracting a wide variety of crippling diseases like drug-resistant Tuberculosis and MRSA and getting maimed / killed by folks with serious mental illness.

"failed public services"? Are we talking about the systems that were all privatized to make them more "efficient"?

Not in London of course, the one area you say is actually vaguely working, and is run as some kind of centrally planned, joined up transport system. So its not "failed public services" is it, its "intentionally sabotaged for ideological reasons private services that are currently being re-nationalized in many cases because it was such an unmitigated disaster and now have to recover from decades of intentional neglect and underfunding".

But as you say, why would anyone with enough money care about having an efficent, effective transport sytem for the country. It's not like the economy relies on it as a basic piece of infrastructure to move workers and products around in addition to general improvements in quality of life of citizens.

> "failed public services"? Are we talking about the systems that were all privatized to make them more "efficient"?

Honestly, I think this failure runs deeper than something like whether it's privatised or nationalised. These services were mostly rubbish when they were nationalised and they're still rubbish now under privatisation. Nobody sane thinks the era of privatisation is any good in my opinion, but it's not like what it replaced was exactly well-managed. We had things like the Beeching Axe in that era which absolutely screwed over many non-metropolitan communities and continues to even today especially in Wales.

The UK for the best part of a century has never been good at public transport on a national scale. Public or private, profit or non-profit, every single attempt to make it less of a skip fire has ended in failure. I think the only way we're going to see improvement is if we start looking at the root causes rather than ideologically-motivated political solutions. This isn't a political issue, it's a geographical and an engineering issue.

I'm fairly certain it's a political issue. There was some good stuff in the Beeching changes, the main flaw was the aim of trying to reduce the subsidies, while ignoring the subsidies being given to cars (which at that point were still pouring out lead into the atmosphere), which is fundamentally a (stupid) political decision.

Rural vs urban is a factor in things like this, but some countries just make a decision to have good trnsport (or health or internet) for everyone, and some countries decide that certain types of transport are for the poor and let them rot. Like many "that's just the way it is" arguments, it can be easily undermined by looking outside the specific country.

The UK seems to have done OK with broadband (at least compared with the US), though again politically motivated decisions in the past have hobbled early roll out of fibre-optic decades ago.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...

Note I just googled up that article, which seems fairly comprehensive, but I had engineers in the family who were involved and said pretty much the same thing at the time.