No Confidence
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SENTIMENT will not preserve the London bus, except in a museum. A few people have put on record that the streets look drab without the familiar Splashes of red, but, what with free lifts and the staggering of hours, the .population have found not nearly so much difficulty as they expected. Whatever other effects the strike rfiay have, it has shown .that, for .a while at least, London `can do
without its buses. • • The enemies of the bus have taken heart. With -a moderation that may conceal worse things, to come, the Greater London area council of the National Chamber of Trade have almost welcomed the strike as " conclusive proof that a major cause of congestion in Central London is the presence of large numbers of buses. The council have sent the Minister of Transport a message, calling upon him to insist that London Transport should revisz their Central London. services.
It May not be long before somebody asks why Central London should be so favoured, and suggests. that buses be eliminated from the. whole of London, and of Greater London to boot. Sir John Elliot, London Transport's chairman, who writes about the French revolution in his spare time, will not need to be told the danger that the moderates soon give way to the less moderate, who are in
their turn replaced by extremists. . One or two previous strikes within the British. Transport Commission have similarly led the customer to discover thathe can get elsewhere the service he wants. Much of the goods traffic that the railways have had to give up in this way has been lost to them permanently. it may well happen that some London passengers, forced by the bus strike to find other means for travelling to work, will not go back to the buses again.
The staff of the Commission are not unaware of the danger.. What has emerged clearly from the recent troubles in the transport industry is a loss of confidence among the inhabitants of the Ivory Tower. They may appear to be saying much the same sort of thing as before, but the emphasis is subtly different Cutting One's Coat Thus, Sir Brian Robertson, chairman of the Commission, in his letter to the Minister setting out proposed economies, writes of "adjustments in the freight _services to correspond with the level, of freight traffic," which is Ivory Tower English for cutting one's coat according to the cloth.
Sir Brian adds later that "a comprehensive review of all railway services, passenger and freight, now in hand, will be pressed forward with a view to the speediest possible elimination of those of which the retention is unjustifiable."
In the summing up of a series of articles in British Transport Review, under-the general beading of "-Towards Fuller Employment," Mr. R. F. Harvey-, lately of British Railways central staff, has said that the railways "must be prepared to abandon some traffics to other forms of transport." Responsibility for this he lays upon the competitive economic climate introduced by the Transport Act, 1953. The aim should now be "to do a first-class job in a more limited field" than in the days of monopoly.
This sounds like the young man who decided to jilt his girl after she became engaged to somebody else. Traffic that the Commission are "prepared to abandon" may long ago have found another home. Unfortunately, the seepage is not as selective as the Commission would like. The goods the railways would prefer to carry desert them just as readily as the goods they have no wish to retain. There are even complaints about the growing tonnage of coal carried by road.
The Minister agrees that there must be some loss in passenger traffic if necessary economies are to be made in railway operation. In a reply to Sir Brian's letter, he offers the Government's support for proposals to reduce or withdraw unremunerative services, " where the demand for these is disappearing,'or o is likely to be met more economically by other forms of transport:"
On the other, hand, the Minister appears not to share the opinion that a fall in goods traffic is equally inevitable. More could be done, he says, "to convince industry that, if it wishes to have at its service a modern and efficient railway system, industry must play its part in seeing that where the railways offer a competitiVe service, full use is made of it."
GreaterShare of Traffic • • • Mr. Watkinson's 'offer of assistance on this point takes the form :of arranging a meeting with the leaders of the trade organizations. They will discuss how, as the railway modernization plan speeds up, the railways can attract a much greater -share of commercial traffic " of all kinds."
All this is in much the same strain as the Government's White Paper published in October, 1956, and consisting mainly Of a memorandum from the Commission,. explaining exactly how their modernization plan would enable them to break even for the first time in 1961 or 1962. The Minister gives no indication that he has noticed the more pessimistic turn of phrase in Sir Brian's letter, or in other recent statements from the Ivory Tower.
In his own letter, Mr. Watkinson has gone to the heart of the problem. The modernization programme will now cost at least £1,500m., and the Commission are being helped financially in other ways. They ought, therefore, the Government may think, to be equipping themselves to carry a good deal more passengers and goods than in the past.
This has been a fairly general assumption. The Commission have always been inclined to talk at length about some classes of goods traffic being more suitable for rail, and -others more suitable for road. When all the traffic had been properly reshuffled, one supposed that the railways would be left with a larger volume than before. To the observer accustomed to the climate of enlightened self-interest that Mr. Harvey finds so uncongenial, there seemed no point in the railways advocating a course that would be likely to have any other result.
It now turns out that their ambitions are more modest. They do not mind traffic and revenue falling, so long as the expenditure falls even more rapidly, and they are able at last to show a profit. Perhaps they never expected. anything better than this. In a sense, it shows a realistic outlook.
The Commission may feel that they ought to plan on the basis of. the most likely trends. This is not how the Government see the problem. They still think in terms of expansion, realizing, perhaps, more vividly than the Commission that the £1,500m., and the other loans and advances, to say nothing of the accumulating interest, must one day be repaid, either by the Cominission's customers or by the taxpayer. The likelihood that it will be the taxpayer increases as the number of customers diminishes.