Stick and Carrot Transport

Yesterday, lorry drivers attempted to bring the middle of Edinburgh to a standstill, in yet another protest over the price of fuel. I was in the capital, although I missed the protest itself. I did catch the slightly hypocritical sight of a Greenpeace lorry driving around towing a pro-fuel tax poster. It seems to me that the whole debate is missing the point. Not only are fuel prices not that high, but why focus eternally on the stick, not the carrot?

Fuel prices aren't that high? I suspect a few readers may consider me ill-informed to express such a view. But think about it in perspective. My car, including financing costs, cost me about £10,000 brand new. I'd expect it to do about 100,000 miles in its life time, so the car cost me about ten pence a mile. Many people pay a lot more for their cars, or keep them for a lot less time, both of which would push the price per mile up. I'd also expect the car to last ten years or more. Each year I'll need to buy road tax and insurance (about £350), MOT (£50), services (£100) and various repairs. Averaged across the life of a car, running costs of another £1000 each year don't seem unlikely. Which is another ten pence a mile. Finally, I need to put petrol in the car. Even at the infamous pound a litre (which I have never seen, and neither I suspect has anyone reading this) that would still only be around ten pence a mile. In fact, I've never paid anything over 85 pence a litre. So, for my relatively cheap car, fuel costs are under a third of the total cost per mile. For those driving more expensive cars, the cost of fuel is even less of a concern.

I know that buying petrol feels like a great expense. Paying forty quid every week or two is a noticeable drain on the finances. But put your car in perspective - fuel is not the major cost of car ownership. Even if you can somehow justify the belief that the taxes on cars is a major part of your costs, you need to consider what you get for the money. Government spending on roads routinely far outstrips income from taxes on vehicles and fuels. Road transport is incredibly well subsidised by the tax payer, a quarter of whom do not own cars.

None of which will be of the slightest interest to the lorry drivers who are attempting to restart the protests. The haulage industry is better off now than it was before the last protests. The cost of running vehicles has remained constant in real terms, and vehicle excise on lorries has halved. And road haulage is the single most subsidised form of transport. In the context of the UK, it isn't entirely clear what the drivers have to complain about. The comparison to mainland Europe perhaps has some basis - fuel prices are generally lower on the continent. However, most European countries make heavy use of road tolls to raise funds - something which is almost unknown in this country. Many roads on the mainland are also not up to the standard we enjoy. Strangely, these facts don't seem to feature heavily in the lorry drivers' complaints.

If the stick of taxes is justified, where is the carrot? Saving the planet from global warming means moving people out of cars. The cost of road transport might encourage people to seek other alternatives - but where are they? Public transport in this country suffers from three major problems. Public transport primarily goes from the centre of one town to the centre of another. Public transport does not run at the times people want, or as regularly. And public transport is not reliable.

All three problems amount to the same general issue - people want transport that matches their own needs. Too often a journey that would take a few minutes by car will take an hour or two by public transport. Why give up your car when the same journey involves several changes, long waits for buses or trains that may not turn up, and travel via towns that are not even vaguely on the direct route. Public transport will not be attractive to the bulk of the population until there is a service every fifteen minutes - day and night - that directly connects every town and village to every other town and village nearby, and a fifteen minute service that connects every part of a town to every other part of the same town. Anything less and the car will remain the only viable transport option for many people.

Even if the fundamental problems with public transport are solved, there are still issues that need to be tackled before public transport becomes attractive. Safety and cleanliness are major problems. Luggage space is another. Most such problems could be countered by reversing the current approach of providing as few vehicles, with as few staff as possible. More frequent buses would mean fewer passengers per vehicle, leaving more room for luggage. The reintroduction of conductors would provide an authority figure who could deal with all but the worst anti-social behaviour. Spare capacity would allow vehicles to be properly cleaned and serviced without interrupting scheduled journeys.

All these improvements to public transport will take massive investment, almost certainly from the public purse. Yet we are happy for tax payers' money to be spent on cars and lorries, why not on saving the planet?

Graham Robinson. 16th June 2004.

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