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As usual with this sort of political proposal, it's nice as far as it goes, but it's a trivial and isolated measure in a huge system which needs much bigger fixes.
That's not a criticism of the LibDems in particular, because the other parties issue similarly glib proposals. In the era of 24 hour rolling news, it seems that no policy idea can be promoted unless it offers a simplistic headline-grabbing solution to a complex situation. This dumbled-down-to-kindergarten-level form of politics cannot accommodate the reality of much public polcy, which is that the only workable solutions are a complex mixture of related measures which require sustained implementation and tweaking over decades.
The UK's transport network is so large and complicated that fixing it will take decades, and it will need a huge range of measures, many of them expensive. That needs big investment every year for many years, and while £3billion for rail sounds great, this proposal appears to amount to £3billion over four or five years, which is about £600 million a year. Sounds like a lot, but it's about as much as was spent in one week last year on new cars alone (2 million registrations in 2009 is about 40,000 per week, guess average price of £15,000) ... and that doesn't even consider commercial vehicles.
Beefing up rail services sounds great, but even the trivial boost promised here will be useless to many people without decent connections. That means things such as more car parking at rail stations, secure bicycle storage at stations, bus connectiosn more frequent than the once-an-hour evening service to my home, and multi-modal interchanges so that people can get from train to bus without traipsing the streets to wait in the rain.
But the big factor that most such headline-grabbing announcements ignore is the need to redress the balance between transprt capacity and transport usage. Proposals such as this offer a patchy and marginal increase in the capacity of the transport system, while the rest of public policy drives up demand for transport. Six years of population increase through mass immigration has driven up demand. Centralising public services increases demand, and hospitals and schools have been getting fewer and bigger for decades, with predictable effects: morning rush hour congestion in Bradford disappears during the school holidays, because a huge proportion of the cars on the road are doing the school run. Businesses such as supermarkets are busy centralising their distribution systems, requiring lots of HGV mileage on the roads; and planning policy has driven retail trade to out-of-town shopping centres, while public transport goes to the city centres. Meanwhile the flexible labour market, with increasingly short-term employment, means that people can't live near work without moving home every year or two.
Transport experts of most persuasions agree on most of these factors. Politicians of most parties can look at the evidence and broadly agree on the range of factors at play, and they differ little on the range of solutions needed. But every one of them knows that it if they start treating the voters as intelligent adults by saying all of these things, the rolling news soundbite-gatherers will cut them off before they've got halfway through the first paragraph. So instead we get transport policy proposals delivered as little shiny nuggets with no context, and the winner has to focus on headline-grabbing "initiatives" rather than the decades-long sustained policy required to achieve change.
So we'd better learn to enjoy overcrowded trains, congested roads, lousy bus services, while we travel ever-increasing mileages, because our broken political system is incapable of fixing it.
Edited by NowWheels on 09/04/2010 at 11:58
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