I don't have a car, and rail is the only real option for the vast majority of medium/long distance journeys. I went to a steam fair in the summer about 25 miles as the crow flies, and it took THREE-FOUR hours to get there by bus.
Nobody was on the buses, because they are so slow. Whether the Somerset and Dorset would have been quicker since they ripped it out over 40 years ago, I don't know. But it was quite clear the only option for most people was car.
As Yorkie points out, these reports tend to be either written by right wing types who just don't want to pay anything towards society in some cases, or lobbyists, to lock us all into motor breakdown cover or buying expensive cars.
The whole idea, as the report points out, we have a menu of things we decide we want to pay for is a farce.
There's lots of things I don't want to pay for, such as wars in Iraq, other's people's kids education (if I wanted to be selfish) and so on. I'm sure everyone reading has lists of things they don't want to pay for, or would like to pay for, but it's called society.
Am I really best placed to make a decision whether we should be paying for wars in iraq? I doubt it. If local people didn't want a line, this would affect people in a distant town who might have relatives in that town, who had no other way of getting there and so on. Or say, in the future, people that voted NOT to keep the line had children. Then those children had no way of getting to/from work or out on leisure. Or say, they had an accident later in life, and couldn't drive and needed public transport; the decision rationale is now completely different.
I might come across as keen on rail, and while it is my mode of choice admittedly, but its the only feasible option. What these people forget, is they want to inflict non-stop fare rises and (if we implemented this report) service cuts on people that don't have much choice.
This is what so miffs me about the likes of Bob Crow who doesn't give a damn he is taking more and more money from me, to go about my business when they go on strike and demand a pay rise. It's not a magic pot in the sky, the money comes from ordinary people. The same applies to greedy fat cats.
But why don't you buy a car you cry? Well I could eventually, right now my circumstances do not fit it. And surely, we all go through times in life, especially when were young, old, in education or hard up, when we want to travel long distances, or go out at night, or travel into cities, or travel abroad where decent public transport is very handy, and is part of the fabric of the nation.
Even people who have cars are affected by these decisions. Some people in large towns and cities spend an age getting anywhere because of congestion. They can lose 30 mins to 2 hours every day just trying to get a few short miles from A-B.
Let's say, someone is losing 90 mins each day just travelling each way going to and from work, sat in traffic over 330 days a year. That's 495 hours per year. Over 45 years, that's 22,275 hours of life just lost or over 2.5 years. That's waking hours just wasted.
We don't mind paying for expensive operations or medicine to give us 2.5 years of life on the NHS, but we do question in this country it seems spending far less on a decent alternative to give us these options, whether we drive or not.
