The Hindu : Nine hours to Waterloo

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 16, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Nine hours to Waterloo

By Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

We in Britain pay for the fiction that the free market can run a transport system.

IF NAPOLEON had had to use British public transport, he would have reached Waterloo hours late, bewildered and exhausted, and raging at the huge sums of public money being poured into the private pockets of the railway companies. And he would have found that Wellington had claimed a walkover and gone home. The recent experience of a trainload of British passengers is but the latest in the sorry tale of British transport. Their journey is one that I often make myself — the 110 km from Southampton Airport to London Waterloo normally takes 70 minutes, but these 100 passengers on the 09.22 the other day found that it took nine hours. They were trundled across Hampshire and even Wiltshire, at right angles to their intended direction, initially because a railway worker had been electrocuted on the line, and then because a freight train broke down, a rail buckled in shade temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius, and speed was restricted because of the heat. At one point, the passengers were crammed into one carriage; they had to smash an emergency exit to get air, as the guard refused to open the electric doors (he locked himself in his cabin). The rail company did not make water available to the passengers for six hours, but it gave them refunds on arrival. Some of the reasons given by the rail companies have passed into folklore; these include leaves on the track, the wrong kind of snow, and other implausible, if technically, accurate explanations.

The passengers hardest hit are those who have to commute by rail; one passenger, stuck in a stationary rush-hour train, telephoned the rail company on his mobile and was told, "You tell us, you're on the train." Passengers who found a carriage completely bare were told, "For your comfort and safety, all the seats in this carriage have been removed." Even half the newly-elected Labour Cabinet, on their way to the party conference in northern England in 1997, were shunted into a siding without explanation and left there for hours.

Much of this is blamed on rail privatisation in the early 1990s — a privatisation too much even for Margaret Thatcher. In all 25 franchises were issued, and the stations, track, and signalling went to another, now defunct, company, which became a byword for waste and incompetence. For some years, there was chaos. Passengers — called `customers' by the new regime — had to buy 3 or 4 tickets for one journey, if they had to change between trains operated by different companies; the companies, rabid free-marketeers all, would not talk to each other, so dangers went unreported; penalised for lateness, the companies stopped holding connecting trains, especially if other companies' trains were late. Several serious crashes revealed cutbacks in staff and in safety and maintenance, especially by contractors.

Some of the problems have been at least partially addressed, but fares keep rising and there is constant talk of cutting services. Meanwhile, the rail operators get bigger and bigger public subsidies. The current British Government, which has a reputation for rampant timidity, shells out whenever the rail companies ask; Treasury civil servants say it is cheaper to keep giving the money than to renationalise the railways — an argument which ignores the costs borne by the public and the national economy in delays, wasted time, stress, late delivery, and so on.

The public, nevertheless, wants to use railways; passenger use has risen by one-third in a decade, and anger has been expressed at the U.K. Post Office's decision to use only road services. (It is not widely known that the Cabinet Minister who implemented the first severe rail cutbacks in the 1960s had been a paid consultant to the road haulage industry.)

Yet roads are no solution for a country, which, alone in the European Union, has no coordinated transport policy. Secondly, increased car use has caused more problems. Road deaths amount to 4000 per year, orders of magnitude more than rail deaths; the volume of non-fatal injury too, is very much higher on the roads. Pressure on the Government also comes from the motor lobby, a cult of the car which bears little relation to the reality of U.K. roads, namely traffic jams, multiple crashes, breakdowns, parking problems, and road rage — the phenomenon of aggressive driving and violent confrontations between motorists. Further, most U.K. car journeys are under a mile long; millions of children are now driven to and from school, and evidence has been published of rising obesity among them.

As to buses, U.K. buses are cheaper than trains, but the privatised bus companies have cut routes sharply; many residential areas of cities have no buses after 7 p.m., and none on Sunday mornings. Rural buses are virtually non-existent, and now rail companies are buying bus companies.

The British public can be forgiven for cynicism about their transport system. Some determined characters, such as the High Court Judge, Sir Richard Scott, ride a bicycle to work. Some cyclists, such as myself, choose not to drive, and daily risk being mowed down by the motorised monsters with which we share the roads in all weathers and all seasons. Most people, however, just carry on driving. And we all pay for the fiction that the free market can run a transport system.

(Dr. Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.)

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