How do we provide a modern transport network?

I wish it were as simple as “ban cars”.

The problems with transport are a classic example of people preferring to sacrifice environmental quality rather than individual freedoms. In my experience the best transport systems usually occur, paradoxically, in the most degraded environments, where sheer lack of space forces mass transit on the population.

As with so many problems, the biggest part is finding the will to do something about it. Fortunately, once that’s achieved, some simple and practical principles get us a long way towards having an efficient, friendly and much more sustainable transport system:

Make polluters pay. The principal culprits are still car users, but air travellers are starting to press them close. Remove the stupid tax breaks, and make road users fund road building, and air travellers pay the full costs of airport expansion.
Raise the bar. Many drivers should not be on the roads. Get them off. With any other device of comparable hazard, a professional qualification would be required to operate it. This is impractical, but we can move in that direction. Disqualification should be for longer, and permanent in more cases; the driving licence should be harder to obtain, and retested every three years or so. Measures like this will improve road safety and decrease traffic levels.
Use technology. I bet that even now taxis are far less efficient than they could be. If travellers were bidding for journeys on a unified network, operators could increase the efficiency of vehicles many times, and users would benefit from lower costs (with admitted spikes in rural areas, where community-funded schemes might be appropriate). Similar ideas have been mooted for air travel; it ought to be easier to apply them to the much smaller granularity of taxis.
Set and implement ambitious national targets for public transport. At the moment it needs a helping hand; once well on the way users will appreciate what a boon it is when properly delivered and it will need much less of a push from central government, both in planning and funding.

Last updated 2004/12/21