Tailor-made way to keep moving

8:34am Tuesday 6th May 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

It says a lot about our attachment to the private car that this week the buses appear to have been no busier than usual.

Forecourt prices of petrol and diesel are climbing steadily and there have been real worries that some filling stations in the North of England as well as Scotland could run out of fuel as a result of the Grangemouth strike.

So it could reasonably have been expected that motorists would be trying to save both money and the fuel they might need for vital trips by travelling by bus when they can (to work, for instance). But it doesn't seem to have been happening.

Surely there must be more than me who are reluctant to hand over their cash to profiteering, opportunist oil companies and are also trying to keep their tanks as full as possible for essential weekend errands on family business, the big trip to the supermarket, or leisure outings to places that aren't on bus or train routes?

So what's the problem? Convenience, perhaps? Buses don't always travel at the times you want them to, nor do they always go where you need to go. But by and large we're pretty well served in the Bradford area, particularly on the commuter routes. And more often than not, in my experience, they run more-or-less on time - which given the amount of traffic on the roads and the number of bottlenecks is remarkable.

Comfort? Admittedly they're not luxurious, and sometimes you find yourself travelling in close proximity to people who insist on talking loudly into their phones (or, worse, insist on talking loudly to you), or play the sort of tinny music you hate at an intrusive volume, or swear a lot to each other, or smell a bit. But regular travellers learn to shut themselves off in their private world as a way of coping.

Cost? Now that is a possible serious deterrent. At first glance, bus fares are expensive. My journey into town in a morning costs me £2.10. So if I had to pay to go home as well, instead of travelling for free after 9.30am on an over-60s pass, it would be £4.20 a day - more than the cost of the petrol to drive to and from work (I park for free in a street a ten-minute walk from the city centre).

However, I could get a day pass, which costs £2.80 (£2.60 after 9.30am) and would allow me to travel anywhere on First buses in Bradford throughout that day. Or a £15 week-long pass would give me seven days' travel around the district. And even better value is a £48 monthly pass, which even my limited mathematical skills can work out at £12 a week for an unlimited number of journeys - less than the cost of the petrol I'd need to put in my car.

So by and large, bus travel isn't a bad deal - and it's getting better with every penny a litre that's added to those forecourt prices.

What we need to adopt, I reckon, is a sort of individual integrated transport system geared to our personal needs and lifestyle, striking a balance between buses, trains and cars (not forgetting walking, which is the healthiest option if you're not in a hurry, and the cheapest of the lot).

Apart from anything else, it would help to clear some of the clutter from the roads and cut down the traffic noise and fumes.

Dangerous fantasy world

What sort of a barmy society have we become when the rush to buy a violent, expensive, cunningly-hyped new PlayStation game commands national headlines and prompts debate in the columns of otherwise sensible newspapers about its artistic merits?

So detached have we become from reality that in one serious-minded newspaper a woman writer was waxing lyrical about the realism of the graphics of Grand Theft Auto IV: the changing colours of the sky, the sound of footsteps in sand, the sight of an ocean so close to real life she could almost smell it.

Get a life! There are real skies, beaches and oceans out there to be enjoyed - and without the downside of gang warfare and cold-blooded murder that I understand are featured in this "game" which despite its "18" classification will undoubtedly be viewed and played by many much younger children.

You might well tell yourself that you can make sure your own child doesn't play it on his/her PlayStation. But unless you can keep as tight a control on what your child's friends do in their homes, you can bet that peer pressure will ensure that before long your protective efforts will have been in vain.

So another bit of childhood will have been lost, and another child will have ended up just a little more brutalised. And we wonder why they go off the rails and why our society finds itself cursed with deeply disturbed feral thugs like Ryan Herbert (16) and Brendan Harris (15), who kicked to death a young woman in a park simply because she was dressed as a Goth.

This week they were jailed for what is laughingly called life - meaning 16 years for one of them and 18 years for the other, which with their remission means they both could be free in their mid-twenties.

The growing evidence from other incidents is that there are many like them out there: young people who find it difficult to differentiate between reality and on-screen fantasy and are prepared to resort to violence without any apparent awareness of the consequences of their brutal behaviour.

With "games" like this one to increase their confusion and feed their darker instincts, and the law failing to provide any effective counter-balance, there are likely to be many, many more.