Normally I would not bother to unpick the economic nonsense of Corbynista Owen Jones, but he has the sort of article up on the Guardian that passes for conventional thinking among a sizeable chunk of the population, so I am going to quickly have a pop at it:
Travel outside London….Britain’s deregulated bus system reveals itself as the source of widespread, justified disgruntlement – an overpriced, inefficient, poor-quality mess. According to a report to be published this week, since deregulation in 1986 – unleashed with the promise that “more people would travel” – bus trips in big cities outside London have collapsed from 2bn to 1bn a year. In London, on the other hand, where everything from how much we pay to which routes exist is decided by the mayor and Transport for London, bus use since the 1980s has gone in the opposite direction: from around 1bn to more than 2bn trips a year. Britain’s bus privatisation disaster is a story of profit before need, and a discomfiting tale for those who believe the private sector automatically trumps the public realm.
Jones doesn’t use the term, but he presumably thinks that the fact of there being far fewer bus services in the UK than a certain period in the past is a case of what economists call “market failure” – where there is a lot of supposed demand for X, but and under-supply of it, which needs to be fixed by, you guessed, the State (supported by the taxpayer, the very same people who are supposedly unable to pay for the under-supplied service). There are several issues here. First of all, services run by a municipality (ie, a monopoly with no competition) typically don’t lend themselves to good consumer service. Second, in a large metropolis such as London, where an organisation such as Transport for London runs things, there is still quite a lot of competition (cycling, walking, cars, etc) the abuse that any monopoly power has is constrained, although the situation is far from ideal. Funnily enough, the other day TFL, which had been lobbied by taxi drivers to go after Uber, seems to have decided against it, which is good news.
In the countryside, it may well be true that there are a dearth of buses. It may not be profitable to run them on certain routes, but is that an argument against private provision and for state control? In very sparsely populated parts of the country, it is a serious mis-allocation of scarce resources to provide such things when there are more urgent requirements instead for the resources in question. Second, if a person goes to live in the country, part of the pro/con of living in the back of beyond is that you don’t have lots of rapid-transit transport nearby. You may have to rely on having a car, driven by either you, or by a neighbour, partner, etc. That is part of the trade-off that comes from choosing to live in the sticks, rather than in the city. Why should those who have chosen the option to live in the country, or to stay there, be subsidised in transport terms by those who do not? In some cases, the persons paying for the subsidy will be far less well off than those taking advantage of it. That is the sort of regressive transfer of wealth that I assumed a lefty such as Jones would be against. This sort of issue also explains why, other things being equal, the cost of buying a home in central London is far higher than, say, the middle of Norfolk or Yorkshire.
Jones states that because, in his view, people “need” X that it is the responsibility, in the event of some alleged market failure, for the State to step in. But leaving aside whether the need is real or a figment of Jones’ socialist imagination, consider a basic example of a human need: food. Food is, despite some interventions and distortions created by the State, such as import tariffs and subsidies for farmers, largely handled in the private sector here. Ask yourself whether we would be better off in having food supplied by something such as Transport for London, or Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s or Asda. It does not even come close, does it?
I cycle nearly everywhere in my home town of Manchester, including a nine mile commute in to the city every morning and back at night.
It is much quicker than sitting in traffic jams or searching for parking spots.
The buses are plentiful, but often nearly empty, and usually only used by poorer people or students at peak times.
After cycling through thousands of Manchester traffic jams over the decades, seeing the same stationary cars and drivers again and again every morning and evening, I am now convinced that many people so love their cars that they are prepared to endure lengthy delays twice a day in what they probably claim are their busy lives.
Or better yet, ask a Ukrainian.
Well, to be fair, he has a point as in a fair beef. Bus “deregulation” was a “fail”. Not in principle but in practice. The lack of through tickets and on and on. Like a great many ’80s+ privatisations it resulted in more state. An example is the Newcastle keeping the PTE (passenger transport executive) and then now “deregulated” getting an overall additional equivalent, “Nexus” running on parallel lines so to speak. Like the phones. de-nationalise BT and we get OfCom but worse than that BT was de-natted in such a monopoly position to strangle the new at birth. Hell’s teeth even the Spartans gave them a night on a bare mountain. They gave BT the Cu and castrated the fibre merchants. What could possibly go wrong…
Tell you what? I have broadband via Sky (but not really via Sky – it’s them piggy-backing on BT) and it sucks. I don’t blame Sky because they are doing the best they can with a (I used to work for BT and anyone below the most junior grade of management ought to be hung with their antedeluvian copper wire) system that is essentially open to a non-competition.
Some parts of the UK are cabled (c. 50% residential) but quoth the Raven, “Nevermore”. I am not. I see these BT Openreach vans all the time and they tinker much but achieve little and show much butt-crack. Now in certain contexts I love a bit of crack. I love it when Ms Kylie Minogue is round my house and drops a canape.
That is the arse I can believe in. A hairy sweaty-arsed fucker “working” for BT Openreach is not. On so many levels.
They have been fucking around (tech term – sorry) with the cables round here for the best part of 2 years and my broadband is no faster. What have they been a doing? They might as well have depulcated in a yellow helmet and got it exhibited at Tate Modern.
There is a solution. Now a card I suspect BT would play is that my road is Grade II listed and (due to the aformentioned stuff on cable) they can’t dig. Well… we have their Cu on overhead anyway so why not run fibre on that? I recall Kieran Prendiville on “Tomorrow’s World” on the sodding BBC reporting on a very easy way to do that thirty cunting years ago.
So, essentially… Private is good but if you privatise in a way (and we have – rail, buses, telecoms, whatever…) and leave the essential management structures and culture intact then you do no good. Perhaps even harm.
As Bastiat pointed out in 1850, ‘despite’ the lack of state management “Paris gets fed”.
Rural busses?
Tell the Guardian about automobiles and pick-up trucks. They work very well here in Montana. Even the Indians on the (7) reservations here use them. If the Blackfeet, Chippewa, Crow, Sioux and the Cheyenne have figured this out, Cultural/Economic Leftists who went to Oxford and Cambridge and write for the Guardian have a shot at it. Well, maybe.
The roads are government owned and the railways (“Network Rail”) are government owned. And the whole thing is unionised – due to pro union statutes passed by governments going all the way back to 1875.
And the left blame “lack of regulation” for the transport mess.
It reminds me of the leftist effort to blame the Great Depression on “capitalism” – when it was government monetary policy (the credit-money expansion – the bubble blowing of the late 1920s) that was actually to blame.
Look leftists – the following is a reasonable suggestion……
If the government sells “Network” rail, and it sells the roads (which were Turnpike Trusts during the Industrial Revolution – i.e. private) and it gets pro union statutes and other regulations THEN AND ONLY THEN can you blame “the market” for a transport mess.
You can blame the “unregulated privately owned market place” when and if there actually is one.
Your point about a National Food Service is very well made. I often make it myself in arguments with state fetishists.
After all, food is the most essential requirement that we have. We do not eat, we die. So, in a planned economy all food production and distribution should be the sole of the state. We wouldn’t want to risk ‘waste’ caused by competition now, would we?
Unfortunately side-effect of this would mean the closure of all supermarkets, corner shops, restaurants, snack food bars, cafes, gloriously independent little coffee shops (profiteering capitalists the lot of them). This wouldn’t be a problem, as they would be replaced by state run supermarkets, corner shops, restaurants, snack food bars, cafes, and gloriously state-controlled little coffee shops.
I’m sure it would all work out marvellously.
I rather doubt that a decent bus service is a deciding factor for many oligarchs when they choose to deposit their dubiously gained money in a bricks and mortar piggy bank in central London.
At 57 I am just old enough to remember a time when only a minority of people owned a car. We lived in a rural area and I don’t recall there being an abundance of buses around. People coped with the lack of transport by just not going anywhere.
JohnK, when rail and other connections are built, making commuting easier, house prices typically rise. Property prices will often reflect ease of transport links.
@JohnK
But they don’t just come to London for the view. They come to London for the amenities London provides. Amenities require people & a lot of those people use buses. So oligarchs are as dependent on bus services as anyone else.
Busses are for bludgers. People in the country can ride (horses, bikes) or walk. The sooner we get rid of buses, put the train lines under tarseal, the easier it will be for people who need to to get around the country.
Ask yourself whether we would be better off in having food supplied by something such as Transport for London
I believe it’s called the DWP. Another thing that should be abolished.
The complaint is that rural bus usage has declined since 1986. Of course it has. Britons are much wealthier now, and far more of them can afford cars or motorcycles. Rural dwellers who were bus-dependent in 1986 have mostly died off or bought their own vehicles, so they don’t use buses.
Even when bus service is provided at a loss by the state, it is not as convenient or useful as one’s vehicle, which people prefer.
In the U.S., there are state-run bus services which spend more per passenger-trip than it would cost to pay for a taxi for the trip.
IIRC, the decline in buses did not start in 1986, it was happening long before that. What de-regulation did was – for a short time – increase bus use. The problem was that it was an industry in long-term decline. Privatisation can’t change that.
London appears to be thriving because London is different. London can even support a commuter-rail network.
If you think that government violence is such a good thing for buses, perhaps you should consider the Chilean example.
The horse market is fairly unregulated in terms of use for transport, but I don’t see many people going anywhere by horse except for leisure, this is a massive decline from previous usage.
I know of a few pony and traps used in Tyneside. This is a massive failure of the market. Why aren’t more people using horses? They only slightly pollute by belching at both ends, and leave some useful biodegradable deposits at random intervals.
Why are horse owners selfishly holding their horses, when there is a public need for cheap, environmentally-friendly transport?
Is this state of affairs not elitist? When did you last see a disadvantaged, socially-excluded woman from an ethnic minority on a horse in the UK? Are horses institutionally racist?
[from horse’s mouth]
Fewer people are travelling by bus in rural areas, so obviously this is because the buses are not state-owned.
Clearly, no other explanation is possible.
Johnathan P & Bloke in Spain:
The comparison made was between central London and Norfolk or Yorkshire.
The fact is that the central London property market is quite distinct from the rest of the UK. Much of the property is owned by foreign “investors” who do not even live in it. The property is simply used as a way of storing their wealth in a way which does not attract too much interest from the authorities. The merits or otherwise of public transport do not come into it.
I doubt Owen Jones was even around when it happened. The problem with Owen is that like most lefties, they decide the answer and then go looking for facts to defend it.
Some things make sense to be run by the state, the common resources. You really can’t do road planning or street lighting any other way but with the government running it. And we might say that there’s some stuff that we have to get the state to do for social value, like making sure that kids, regardless of income can get to school and that old people can go to the big town, where we are addressing what the market can’t provide.
But really, why does the government need to be running buses? Isn’t it pretty much a market service, of entrepreneurs seeing an opportunity, putting on a service and experimenting with it? If we’re all so concerned about global warming, don’t we want to see people taking a risk on a bus that maybe someone else doesn’t think is worth it? And for that same reason, do we want buses that don’t pay for themselves instead of say, people paying for a taxi? Why should some bloke who wants to get home from the midnight Star Wars showing have a bus laid on for him by everyone else, instead of him paying for a taxi?
Let’s not also forget that TFL gets £3bn of subsidy a year, and they still seem to be incapable of putting their staff through charm school.
And please, I wish people would stop talking about European public transport like it’s some unicorn that shits gold. Go to a provincial town in France or the Netherlands and the buses are no better than ours.
‘I just can’t get a bus‘ (well almost) by Depêche Mode, sing along now.
Trouble is, they all think of bus service in terms of 30 years ago.
In 2016, any attempt at successful rural transportation is going to look a whole lot more like Uber than it does like this
https://www.(type in you tube here).com/watch?v=D7TfAUI50C4
llater,
llamas
The fact is that the central London property market is quite distinct from the rest of the UK. Much of the property is owned by foreign “investors” who do not even live in it. The property is simply used as a way of storing their wealth in a way which does not attract too much interest from the authorities. The merits or otherwise of public transport do not come into it.
Foreigners own about 6 per cent of London’s housing stock (source: Savills). So the idea that all those evil rich bastards from abroad are the main reason for why London is effing expensive, without other factors such as zoning, planning controls, and its transport links (Tube, trains, airports, etc), is over-egging it, to be mild about it. Transport, as others have said, does play a part in keeping London’s prices higher, as does its proximity to Europe, the time-zone, the City, etc, etc. London is easy to reach, and when you live in it, it is easy to get around. Those Russian property investors benefit from the fact that builders, office workers and so on can easily get there to do the stuff they need to have done. Try encouraging a Russian mobster to invest in the wilds of Scotland. That is why Russians, or Middle Eastern folk (well, before the price of crude oil sank) liked the idea of buying in London because there was already a busy city for them to move into. Part of that vibrancy was linked to transport.
And the point of transport having a boosting effect on property prices stands. When the Great Eastern line from Liverpool Street to Norwich was electrified in the 1980s, it pushed up prices of houses in commutable towns such as Diss, Stowmarket, Marks Tey, Manningtree, Colchester, Ingatestone, etc. I lived through this period and can vouch for the effect.
But I guess it is easier to make a crack about foreigners.
Nobody has mentioned London’s Congestion charge. Basically a tax on using your car in central London. It has been effective in reducing central London traffic, but as London has copious amounts of public transport, both bus and tube, it is no wonder that its usage has increased is it? Owen Jones… Genius in Chief to Corbyn.
I haven’t been on a bus in, oh 40 years…?
…because they are shit.
Johnathan:
I don’t know how much I’d trust a bunch of property boosters like Savills when it comes to figures; you may have met a trustworthy estate agent in your time, but still…
But seriously, I wasn’t particularly having a pop at the Russian oligarchs and corrupt Chinese civil servants who park their money in central London property, beyond pointing out that the price of a bus ticket has not got much to do with it.
I quoted the Savikks figures because they are one of the few available sets of figures. There is a great deal of hype about foreigners inflating the London market; it pays to apply caution.
Savills, even.