transport

Alice Miles in The Times has an opinion on transport. Apparently

drivers in Britain have it miles easier than other travellers — car driving is cheaper, more convenient and usually faster

OK so far, but in the very next phrase:

and still motorists get incessantly pandered to by the Government.

Wrong! But thank you for playing. Driving is a large net revenue raiser for government. Trains are a revenue loser. It is the drivers proping up trains via subsidy that stops them being even more expensive and less convenient. She continues with this 'poor little highly subsidised London train user' drivel including

What has Mr Darling done for the rail user recently?

other than subsidising, obviously

Fares went up by 4.5 per cent at the new year; up by 9 per cent on some tickets.

So think how much they would have gone up by had it not been for the money piled into the system from central government, some of which is coming from the revenue raised from cars.

“Strip search” X-ray machines are being installed at mainline stations to humiliate passengers and disrupt journeys further.

Yep that's new Labour for you. Why settle for intrusive CCTV when you can have a far more expensive, intrusive, humiliating, and pointless way of stamping your authority on the peons. They would be putting these things up everywhere if they got their way.

And Sir Rod Eddington has been appointed to “assess the long-term transport needs of the economy” — without taking environmental considerations into account. (Shame on you, Gordon Brown, who set up the terms of the inquiry.) I wonder which form of transport the former head of British Airways is going to favour.

Probably aircraft, but even if they included enviromental considerations trains would still come in lower than the motor car, since modern motor cars are less poluting than trains.

Commuters by rail get it bad enough, with extra penalties for needing to take a train that gets them to work before 10.30am. But it is the non-business traveller who is treated with the utmost contempt.

perhaps because they are not the real customers since they are not where the money comes from, the money comes from government so why should they care about those people that insist on travelling in their trains and making them untidy? Private transport beats public, everytime, and in practically every way.