Miserable news on the buses

Two articles highlight our country’s increasingly benighted and impoverished thinking. First, we learn that bus journeys are 10% down since 2008, coinciding with a 55% increase in average fares and the virtual halving of public funding (Bus services ‘in crisis’ as number of journeys falls, 15 October).

Compare this miserable news with another report (How free buses are revolutionising one French city, 15 October), telling how Dunkirk has become the largest city in Europe to offer free public transport, joining 56 other European transport networks and 98 worldwide, in what is a rapidly expanding movement.

When I lived in West Germany 30 years ago, I was hugely impressed by the many sensible and positive developments in civic organisation and efficiency. Few seem to have dribbled through to Britain, and those that have are announced as if they were brand-new ideas. In our abandonment of manufacturing and pursuit of nanosecond profit-making and business-friendly taxation, we have turned into a broken nation of rich philistines who care not a jot, and a poor majority who haven’t got a jot.
Michael Green
Clun, Shropshire

• It is an indication of the present government’s incapacity for joined-up thinking and policy that just as Theresa May announced a minister for loneliness (Report, 15 October) there was a report on the crisis in bus services. What is the use of social prescribing or the bus pass if older people and those with disability have no means of transport to get to social activities? There are large numbers of older people (particularly women) who have no access to a car or who are unable to drive for health reasons. Community transport schemes try to compensate for lack of decent bus services, but many struggle financially and have difficulty in recruiting volunteer drivers. Regular bus services are a lifeline for older people and, if more widely available, would do away with the need for them to be prescribed social activities and depend on charity for their social contacts.
Ronald Walton
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

• As a 76-year-old non-driver, living in West Cornwall I have been using my senior’s bus pass for over 10 years. Now, although by no means affluent, I would be happy to participate if a scheme were to be devised – either by the bus operators and/or the local authority – whereby people like me could, on a voluntary basis, offer a token payment of, say, £1 each time we use our local buses. If such a small, freely given subsidy could help, even marginally, to maintain our bus services I, for one, would be more peaceful in mind.
Patrick Carroll
Helston, Cornwall

• It’s all very well having a free bus pass if you have buses or other public transport to use it on. Buses will only get used by more of us – free pass holders or paying passengers – when they run frequently (or at least reliably to a timetable) and on a route we want to travel. Cutting bus services encourages potential passengers to seek other transport methods. A recent holiday travel experience showed me that those of us who use London services probably won’t fully appreciate them till we try to use buses elsewhere.
Liz Bebington
Croydon, London

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