On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:41:44 +0100, magwitch wrote:

Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.

As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now: unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which happens to
be damaging the planet.

But I still don't get how PT *on its own* can ever be sufficiently
attractive for the significant number of people who don't happen to live
within city boundaries. A bus every ten minutes taking a reasonable route
to every single destination just isn't practical - what's needed first is
a fundamental shift in the way people work and shop and manage their time,
such that there's less need in the first place to do so many journeys or
micro-manage them to tight timescales.

Only then does PT become feasible - but as usual the emerging plan seems
to be screw over the public by removing choice, rather than thinking about
the bigger picture and tackling the wider issues so that more people *can*
use PT.

Business as usual I suppose - short-term measures which soon do more harm
than good, just so that whoever happens to be in power can be seen to be
Doing Something. Then when it all screws up five years down the line and
all that money's been wasted, someone else comes in and repeats the cycle.
It's about time we got someone in charge who thinks not 4-5 years ahead
but 40-50 or even longer... :-(

cheers

Jules