Hurrah! Someone else recognising this degraded practice for what it is. Sick bastids the lot of them – flauting their lurid lycra outfits as if they had nothing to be ashamed of…

the country’s productive parts (London, bits of the Southeast whose prosperity is dependent on their proximity to London, and greater Birmingham) massively subsidise everywhere else – especially Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland).

Yep – and I’d just like to send a wee note of thanks to y’all down there in the productive part of the country for all the subsidies. Although they ain’t spending them very well on transport up here either. The Scottish Executive recently announced a scheme of tax-breaks for lycra cycling outfits. Meanwhile, Edinburgh and Glasgow remain joined by a dangerous dirt-track that they still insist on describing as an A road.

Personally, I favour a tracksuit and burberry tax as a means of raising extra revenue for transport. They’d carry a levy of 145% per item – and a special super-levy of 897% for white tracksuits. And in case anyone thinks I’m being classist, body-piercings, black trench coats and T-shirts of Kurt Kubain would be taxed at the same rate.

As to Oyster card, the point of the system is that it will reduce fraud and ticket-touting to very low levels, as well as taking the pressure off ticketing arrangments, and allowing people to move more quickly through the tube. If it works properly, then it ought to also allow them to get a better idea about the kinds of journeys people make, as well as potentially allowing them to correlate across modes of transport. And Oyster alleviates the problems of ticketing and freeriding on buses. The next step is to allow it to be used as a generic payment card, as in a number of other cities. MMM anonymous electronic cash.

I think it’s a speed thing – if you can get bus passengers to swipe a card across a pad rather than swapping change back and forth with the driver, you can save a little bit of time at each stop, which does add up.

Over at the Sharpener, John B has a post where he makes a Londoncentric plea for better public transport. I have to say, I find it hilarious when our friends from the capital start moaning about their transport system. Whenever I visit London, I’m am…

The first one is not just because I’m Welsh… You say that London is ‘massively neglected’ because ‘the country’s productive parts (London, bits of the Southeast whose prosperity is dependent on their proximity to London, and greater Birmingham) massively subsidise everywhere else – especially Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland)’. Well, isn’t this the whole point of a taxation system? The more productive bits subside the less productive? How else could a system work? We can argue about the balance of the current system, but the logical conclusion of this argument is that Kensington and Chelsea should get a lot more money than Newham.

Then there’s trains. The British have a strange view of the railways: totally sentimental about them in principle and yet seemingly genetically incapable of electing politicians who will spend money on them. But having worked several years on public transport issues, I’ve come to the conclusion that trains are, very crudely put, expensive ways of moving well-off people from one comfortable place to another. Poorer people are much, much less likely to use a train. They use buses, and here London shines over virtually any other city on the planet (most Paris bus routes, to take one example, shut down completely after 8pm). Elsewhere in the UK the situation is nowhere near as good.

That’s not necessarily an argument against investing in more trains: indeed, Crossrail and Thameslink 2000 seem good things. But, given the choice, I would rather that higher priority were given to those places outside London were bus services are patchy to non-existent, rather than to projects that use lots of tax money to make the lives of the already well-off even more pleasant, while ignoring the fact that most British people can only dream of the level of public transport provision that London already enjoys.

Particularly the Standard of course. Amusing to read the first 3 vox-pops in the Standard responding to the news “I’m all in favour..” “It’s a great idea…” “Yes a good idea…” headline-writers at odds with reporters, shock horror.

The tram scheme is getting nimby flak from every angle; ScotRail is now run by First (rather than National Express, under whom they were actually one of the best performing rail companies… something Londoners will be familiar with, of course); and, of course, the people who actually run transport in Scotland are completely incompetent (see recent Edinburgh road redevelopments).

We are getting more money than you, but our representatives find much more entertaining ways to waste it (Parliament building, anyone?). And at least our bus service is OK.