Plodding commentary
Is it possible to lumber gracefully? Yes: London buses do it all the time — the real ones, that is, with a platform at the rear, and a conductor. The only thing wrong with this delightful motion is that it is often directed against cyclists. There is something about the sight of a fragile mortal balanced on two wheels that makes any London bus driver want to wield his vehicle like a fly swat. But this is true whatever bus he drives, and the new, doored ones are inferior to their predeces- sors in almost every way. There are stuffy: one feels the air inside is passed from lung to lung till every passenger has had a share. They take more time to board and leave: the narrow channel past the driver's seat is always choked by someone fumbling with their change. They lurch as badly as the older ones, but they are far less well provided with handholds, while their stair- cases are more cramped and difficult to negotiate. Above all, they are a far less flexible means of travel, since you can only get on and off when the driver thinks fit. The idea of fixed bus stops, and of doors on buses, is ludicrously inappropriate in Central London, where any motorised journey is spent struggling in one vast slowly moving traffic jam that extends from Kensington to the City. The traffic does not flow, it oozes; and what's needed for public transport here is an open plat- form that trundles along slowly enough for people to get on and off more or less when they choose. This the old buses provide. The new ones do not. Nor can they save any significant sum in wages: they may have been designed for one man operation, but so long as a significant minority of the passengers expects to pay in cash on the bus for a journey, then a conductor is necessary. The new London Transport should stop the introduction of new buses, order as many old ones as it needs, and keep the conductors; a policy that would successfully combine reaction, full employ- , ment, and benefit to the passenger.
rr he Centre for Policy Studies this week
publishes Property and Poverty — an agenda for the mid-80s (CPS, 8 Wilfred Street, London SW1; £1.95) by Ferdinand Mount, literary editor of the Spectator, who from 1982-83 was head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit, and before that our political correspondent. A review of his pamphlet, in which he surveys the fate of the idea of property, at the hands of both Socialist and Conservative governments, since 1945, and proposes a set of goals for the next decade, ranging from zero infla- tion and no income tax on the poor to wider ownership of every kind of property and help for the long-term unemployed, ,should appear shortly.
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