What I've always thought about public tranpsort

When it comes to government portfolios, the one that exercises me the most on domestic matters is the transport department. I use the trains since I do not drive but the previous Labour government thought that it would continue the Thatcherite policy - as in so many areas - of favouring the car (and the aeroplane) to the exclusion of all public transport. This has not inclined my mind to take up driving, so I just get fed up that that Blair and Brown couldn't care less about the detriment to those who travel in the company of many others. Moreover, Blair said they would do what worked - a lie as so mnay others. What he meant was that he would do what was right-wing hence the disastrous PPP initiative for the London Underground - a piece of political spite towards Londoners, subsequently vicariously vindicated when London chose Ken Livingstone as an independent candidate - all of which is unravelling now. The previous Labour administration couldn't run a bath on transport, let alone the coherent over-arching strategy promised us - as with rail nationalisation - by John Prescott. Below is a Guardian editorial - yes, I know, but it lays into boths sides with gusto.

If Bernie Madoff were ever released from prison, he might consider a second career managing the finances of Britain's transport system, which is coming to resemble his horrific Ponzi scheme. All sorts of promises have been made to all sorts of people, but there is not enough money to pay the bills. The whole false edifice must soon come crashing down under the force of its own economic illogicality. Higher rail fares and worse services are inevitable; so are potholed roads, more overcrowding, abandoned improvements and – eventually – public outrage. Transport faces calamity at the hands of its own incoherent bureaucracy.

The problem is not underfunding by the taxpayer, and nor are the coming cuts all to blame. The problem is that an awful lot of money is being spent, almost all of it inefficiently. Managers at the top have made millions – the current annual salaries and bonuses of Network Rail's six directors amount to £3.6m. But that is only the extreme end of a regulatory and funding structure that would have seemed unfathomably complex even to bureaucrats in the latter days of the Byzantine empire. A whole host of organisations get most of their money from the state, and some of it from passengers, and then do deals with each other in a pretend game of free-market efficiency. Nothing actually adds up; real profits vanish into losses, while losses float on a sea of debt and no one is in charge. Even though the taxpayer puts almost £5bn a year into the rail network, and more than £3bn into Transport for London, both bodies have been racking up loans. Network Rail already owes £23bn. That is set to rise to more than £30bn by 2014, with interest payments of more than £5bn a year that will by then exceed the total state rail subsidy. How this can be paid, no one seems to know. None of this debt is listed on the government's books, even though it is all underwritten by the taxpayer.
Quietly, on election night, Boris Johnson announced that in London he was taking over the remains of Gordon Brown's disastrous public-private partnership for the tube. As a result, Boris Johnson becomes the first Tory since Ted Heath to nationalise something; but more than that he has had to spend £310m buying out the private Tube Lines company simply in order to delay its planned refurbishment of the Northern Line, which otherwise he was contractually obliged to fund and could not afford. Alice in Wonderland would have been thrilled.
On the roads, the transport secretary Philip Hammond confirmed yesterday, there will be standstill, with no major investment. If that sounds environmentally justifiable, then the railways will have to take the strain of a growing population and – it is to be hoped – a growing economy which will need better transport. But even a small fall in the transport budget will have a massive impact on investment and fares. Schemes which have long-term benefits, such as the electrification of the mainline to Wales, are being scrapped for short-term savings. Fares will take the strain – Mr Hammond has twice hinted that the inflation cap will have to be lifted. But they cannot rise enough to fund a planned £9bn investment programme, which is being wastefully run and funded entirely by extending Network Rail's unsustainable debt.
Savings must – and can – be found: Labour had already planned to cut the rail subsidy, and the coalition budget will make the cuts deeper. But the pain should be shared. It makes no sense to protect the £1bn cost of free national bus travel for all over-60s, for instance, as the coalition has promised for political gain. The benefit should at most be local.
The current government will get the blame for accelerating the fall, but this coming catastrophe is as much the fault of the last two administrations for creating an unsustainable structure. Britain has discovered a very costly way of running a moderately good transport system. It doesn't work and it can't last.

Makes a French civil servant doing five hours a week for £30,000 a year look remarkably good value, eh?