Me and my girlfriend are running late one day, we're due to go out with friends in town if I remember correctly, and when we got on our local First bus service we are charged £4.20 together for the privilege of being taken about 20 minutes (walk time) down the road. We look at each other with a little bit of shock, it would probably only cost us £6-8 to get a taxi from the luxury of our front door let alone after traipsing all the way up to the main road. We think, if we were a group of 3 or more, why would we get the bus?

The cost of public transport

In just over two years fares will have risen a total of 29% on average for Bristol bus users, along with the scrapping of cheaper fare options along the way. Unfortunately such price rises were also given the ok to local taxi's operating in the city, so people that need to commute within the city have to deal with that cost of transport rising well above the rate of inflation. In real terms we're talking about an extra £200-£300 a year extra cost for commuters.

This isn't the only example of over-rampant expense in our public transport system that undermines its purpose either.

This latest indictment of Britain's trains comes despite the fact that fares have risen by more than 27 per cent since the creation of Network Rail, a private company which oversees infrastructure, in 2002. Ticket prices are expected to go up by as much as 45 per cent over the next eight years.

Some anecdotal evidence again. I was supposed to be grabbing a lift with a friend to go back to my family at Christmas, my thought being that if they are going that way anyway then might as well car share. Unfortunately that fell through and on short notice (though not too short, 5 days) I had to find another way to get home.

The answer comes in three shiny packages. 1) Drive to Bristol Airport, get a plane to Newquay and then get a lift from Newquay....hmmm, a little bit excessive for such a short journey. 2) Coach...yeah, that could work, it's just such a shame it takes 4 and a half hours to travel with stops, and I'm on the tall side so those seats are very uncomfortable for that length of time. 3) Train...ah....the train! Loyal and faithful! What? I can only get a train for £47 single?

The Trainline is a god awful site to navigate to try and find train times and book seats in advance, I'm sure everyone reading knows about it. However as hard as I searched for fares on my day of departure I couldn't find one acceptable time that would let me travel for less than £47. It would take me, if I drove, half a tank of petrol to get home, and currently that lands somewhere between £15-20. The uncomfortable and long winded coach journey was above £30 one way. But £47 for a train really is a large stretch. Luckily, as seems to happen a lot with the trainline, some cheaper tickets suddenly came to be sold yesterday so I got a good price, but only if I got on the train during the rush hour.

This I just couldn't understand...why does the train company wish to encourage me to use the train when it's already busy, packed full and feeling unsafe when it could give me an incentive to take the train when there are still seats available later in the day? I picked my day of travel specifically because it would be before the rush of commuting up and down the country, yet there is a distinct lack of effort by the train operators to try and encourage people like me to travel "off peak".

Both buses and trains are meant to be the accessible transport for the masses, initially obviously for those that can't afford to run a car or are unable to drive one...but more recently also to try and curb emissions of CO₂, yet on both fronts the governments complete inaction in favour of letting private business run the game their own way is completely demolishing both these purposes. If it weren't for the fact that both sets of transport were regularly late, missing and often grotty and disgusting I'd almost be tempted to claim that the businesses were trying to turn public transport into something for the rich eco-liberals of this nation to milk the cash cow getting fatter every day.

The environmental impact

Answers from the 8th of July 2004 seem to provide the best data for individual emissions caused by individual transport options. It's easy to see that car is worse than both coach and train for environmental impact. While fully loaded cars come a lot closer to the emissions for trains in terms of the journey I am particularly interested in, congestion or roadworks can easily put those emissions even for a full car back up to higher levels.

So with this in mind, with it clear that trains are the best possible way to promote lower emission travel across the country, unfortunately due to coach travel being more uncomfortable, longer, less frequent (in theory) and only marginally cheaper. And in town it goes without saying that buses full of passengers going for long distances inter-city are better than hoards of cars with 1 or 2 passengers and taxis. So why is it the Government has allowed Cars and high emission transport to become the more viable option?

What it reflects on government

Given that supposedly we are fighting to keep up with Kyoto targets, and of course were heavily involved in the Bali conference, you'd think that our government really gave a shit about the environment. However it is occurrences like the ones I detail above, every day that just go to show it's all about soundbites and not about action. Car emissions contribue to 10% of the emissions in the UK, this could be reduced to 6% by car sharing. How much more could it be reduced by if instead of car sharing those people had a reliable bus service that didn't greatly exceed the average spend they would normally have for operating the car including the premium on their insurance for being a car commuter? I'd completely unscientifically guess at at least another 2% or 3% if widely taken up.

But there is no incentive. Here in Bristol the cost of travel of the day per person is over £4 when purchased at peak times, compared to nearer £1-£2 for a car share. As I said, insurance would be saved, but there are margins where people start to forget that there is other money to be saved...that margin being when people can't see how they'll be saving any money at all for taking a less frequent and less familiar way into work. And do I even need to explain how a £47 train ticket compared to a £20 car journey isn't going to slightly ease congestions on our motorways and reduce emissions? The government at both a central and local level is conspicuous by its absence in dealing with this issue anywhere outside of London.

Is it time for the Government to be a bit more proactive? Certainly at local level it is long overdue for councils to start imposing limits on business, if not to break up monopolies that lead to unwarranted fare increases at least to protect the interests of the local environment and poorer residents. What we need is more sanctions on businesses that don't provide the service they state they will and to not sit idly by and let that company dictate prices. The local councils of this country lack any teeth and if it doesn't bare its claws on issues like this then it will forever be trampled on.

Nationally though it is obviously a good time to look back on the privatisation of the railway and to see if it was truly the right idea. While I don't believe re-nationalisation will solve our ills here, I have to ask how much involvement the government could start to take in an industry that is failing to meet its targets, failing to decrease car use and failing to deliver a fair price to its customers. Something more radical has to happen, and politicians need to grow some balls, if we are going to actually solve the transport issues of this country.

My personal view with regards to national travel is that we need to stop further punishing drivers with tax hikes and tolls, with evidence like which we have now it is clear that people are never going to choose crappy service that will constantly rise above inflation in its charges, and we need to start taking more control of fare prices. The most obvious way of doing this is by subsidising travel in one of the following ways (non-exhaustive list)...

1. Rewarding pledges, encouraging people to sign up to a national rail commuter scheme that provides a flexible way to pay for annual access to train journeys
2. Specifically discounted journeys at times key to cutting congestion
3. Operating a scheme whereby non-car owners get subsidised travel

The first option would encourage continued use of a service for a contracted period, ideally meaning that they receive cheaper travel for completely abandoning their car, but ultimately would only be good for regular commuters. The second option would be more centred around getting people off of the roads by giving very cheap transport at those times of high traffic. The third option doesn't tackle the congestion issue but at least provides non-car users with a fair price for the option that they've taken in tune with the governments wishes to reduce emissions. Are there other options? Definitely, this is a poorly thought out and off the cuff list, but it's clear that some of this type of thinking needs to happen sooner than later if we're going to start realistically looking towards that target of at least 25% drop in emissions stated in Bali.