modal shift part 2

It's not easy for me to get into a 1960s mind set. I was around at the time of course, but hardly engaging with the big outside world!

But in retrospect it looked like the 60s, and the attitude to rail, was 'it's finished. It has no future role, except perhaps to run commuters into were applied to roads serving smaller places. Even the lines that survived the Beeching cuts were run down - stations were closed or staffing reduced, buffets closed, lines were singled, the whole network began to look run down. It was almost as if the railways wanted passengers to desert them! Freight was switching from efficient and fast rail to inefficient and much slower roads.

In fact EVERYTHING was expected to use the roads. It really was as if oil would last forever. Extra lorries and buses flooded on to the roads as the parallel railways were closed, cyclists were expected to brave the traffic, you'd still find horse and carts, tractors, mobility scooters, milk floats - everything was thrown onto the roads.

You had ridiculous scenes like the congested A33 running alongside a closed cross country railway that should have been carrying most of the freight and many of the car drivers. A few railways were still closing as late as the 1980s.

The seventies were probably the most dour and depressing years for the railways, and oddly most people who don't use the railways seem to think they are still like that! You still get jokes about British Rail sandwiches for example.

And what of the roads? They have just got busier and busier, though they seem to be spluttering a bit now. Apparently a million people have given up driving in the last year - the reason 'high fuel costs'! Don't make me laugh, fuel is still ridiculously cheap. It will be 5 to 10 times as expensive in ten to twenty years' time. But something must be afoot, because it's no small decision to give up driving, however much most of us would love to. There are still far too many places unreachable by rail or even bus today. It's like a drawing in happening across the board, people are worrying about the cost of driving - they are going to be in for such a huge shock over the coming years! This is just the very beginning. The high cost of insurance makes it almost impossible for young people to be able to drive - driving test applications have fallen by 19% in the last year.

We are building a demographic that will probably never drive, but so far we're doing very little to put in process transport infrastructure that will enable them to get around cheaply and safely. That'll be the subject of the third and final part of this article!