PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSPORT

My much-loved Jaguar, sadly not running now

It all went back to Christmas a couple of years ago. I was driving my much-loved Jaguar to some friends on what proved to be a very wet (not a white) Christmas. I drove into a puddle and, to cut a long and painful story short, found my car being flooded. It was a write off and I never got to drive it again. Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that someone local gave us a lift back to our cottage and another man turned up to rescue us and did not charge extra for working on Christmas day. Would he have done that in Britain? I doubt it.

Anyway, we became a one-car couple after that. I paid something towards our Toyota which Leena uses mostly. She chose it and is driving it to the stables as I write. Meanwhile, I rely on public transport to get around. It takes about two and a half hours to get to London door to door by train so I do not go early in the morning, but travel the night before and stay in my house in Brixton if I do. It is little too far to commute, although I sometimes go back in the afternoon

if I am doing a half-day tour. I usually enjoy going to London for work on the train.

 

However, sometimes the vagaries of public transport let me down both in and outside the capital. Recently, a points failure meant that the Victoria line was out and I had to take a roundabout journey to get back to Brixton. More seriously, a journey to London involved a roundabout trip via Brighton because of – you guessed it – a points failure. Instead of taking a couple of hours it required a whole morning. Fortunately, at neither time was in a hurry. I am all in favour of train travel but it does require the proper functioning of equipment.

 

I am worried that one day I will have to make an apologetic phone call to an operator saying that I cannot be where I am supposed to be at the appointed time. In fact, now I think about it, I had to do that once a year or so ago. The delay was actually caused by a car breaking down in the tunnel towards Heathrow and, although I had left a couple of hours to get to the airport hotel I was due at, I was running late. Fortunately, so was everyone else and the reason for the delay was accepted by the operator and hardly noticed by the clients.

 

I always leave plenty of time to get to the hotel/airport I am expected at as I factor in possible delays in the public transport system. If they do not occur, I arrive early but I do not mind being early and it is better to be early rather than late, If I have to wait at the lobby of the hotel, there are worse places to read the paper as I do so. Being very early is probably a bit naff, not to say naïve, but I have never quite been able to take a colleague seriously who I felt was cutting her arrival at the hotel too fine – a little close for comfort.

 

In an ideal world we would all take public transpor to get around and people would leave their cars at home. I never take my car into central London these days and rely on buses and the underground system. (Actually two thirds of it is above ground but that is a different story to be told another day.) However, we do not live in an ideal world and, frankly, will never will. It was the attempt to do so that caused communism to fail so dramatically. People preferred the occasional and admitted failures of capitalism to the unadmitted failures of communism in the end.

 

An essential part of building a successful society is learning from your mistakes and that means admitting to them in the first place. One thing I most remember from the film The Death of Stalin is the belief, expressed early in the film, that plane crashes never occur in Russia because socialism has made a perfect society where mistakes never happen. Dream on comrades. We all make mistakes and it is important in learning from them to first of all acknowledge them. Lots of fortunes were made by people who slipped up first.

 

Henry Ford is a name that springs to mind here, He had several false starts before he started he successfully started making cars. Ford, by the way, was a notorious antisemite and a far from admirable man but he had a certain knack. He is reported to have said that you can have any colour you want as long as its black. In fact, he later produced cars in several colours, reasoning that his customers would want more of a choice, but in the early days of mass-production black was both the cheapest and quickest drying type of paint available.

 

The fact is that any free society has to draw a balance between public provision and private choice. You have to wait for public transport but can drive your car whenever you want. However, you have to pay for it, both in parking, which is both difficult and expensive in central London, and because of the congestion charge imposed on car drivers or a combination of the two. The mayor of London might have introduced the congestion charge but he would never have done so without government approval.

 

As a result, as I tell clients, I never take the car into central London. This is partly because  I sometimes end a tour at a different place to where I have begun and it would be a pain to go back to collect the car; partly because it is expensive and difficult to park; and partly because I am now old enough to travel for free on public transport with my freedom pass. Maybe, by the way, we give older people too easy a ride but old people tend to vote and no politician wants to upset them – as good an argument for voting as I have ever heard. 

 

Public transport is socialism in practice, private driving is capitalistic. However, allowing or encouraging everyone to drive cars would not only cause much worse air pollution but clog up the roads more than they are already. Making everyone take public transport may seem fairer but it would always have a hint of ‘we know best’ about it and the chaos caused by the inevitable failure of the system on occasions would never work in a free society where disgruntled people could vote four or five years.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com