Car Trouble

Well, here's a thing: car travel has been getting steadily cheaper over the past thirty years, while public transport fares have been rising. The Conservatives' privatisation resulted in commuters having to pay more for their railway fatalities, while governments have happily encouraged the building of more roads and the use of company cars to keep the roads from being under-used. Surprisingly enough, the trend has continued unabated under New Labour, whose Minister for Pandering to the Motor Industry, Jim Fitzpatrick, today broke the bad news. Over the past ten years, "the cost of running a car has fallen by 10 per cent, but the price of bus travel has increased by 13 per cent and train travel has become 6 per cent more expensive", and greenhouse gas emissions have risen in one out of every two years during the Vicar of Downing Street's ministry.

Fitzpatrick's shadow, Theresa Villiers, conceded that there is "a good environmental case for encouraging people out of their cars and onto public transport" and observed, rather brilliantly, that "the increasing divergence in the cost between the two is not the way to achieve that", while a spokesbeing for the Department of Gridlock entertained with some statistics: spending on "public transport" has increased by more than fifty per cent over the past ten years, and "public transport journeys have increased by 7 per cent since 2000" - a whole one per cent for almost every year New Labour has been in power.

The statistics also attracted comment from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the shadow Secretary for Talking about the Environment, the chair of the parliamentary all-party group on doing as little as possible about climate change, and a Liberal Democrat. The CBI, which has helped run Gordon Brown for the past ten years, apparently was not answering its telephone.