Cheeeaaaarrrrrge!

What would you say, ask the posters all over Manchester, to a new fleet of buses? What would you say to train station upgrades and park-and-ride facilities? To a tramline from the town centre into Ashton-Under-Lyne? To that last one, most people would say something along the lines of “What? For real this time?”; I think it’s the third time such a project has been proposed, and last time it looked quite close to happening. They’d knocked down houses and everything. But then, at the last minute, funding was pulled and, it is widely suspected, diverted towards London’s Olympic bid. For a while after that, I thought of myself as more a Northern nationalist than anything else, held down by the Southern oppressor. But I digress. Another of the posters cuts to the chase:

Congestion Charge? Not until up to £3billion has been invested in public transport

As I say, lack of trust is a big issue, (and that “up to” isn’t helping), and maybe if they made the investments first then the congestion charge would have gone down a little better. Who knows? But it wouldn’t have been a lot better. It’s news to no-one that life in general and driving in particular is becoming more and more expensive anyway; the congestion charge comes on top of the pay freeze, the credit crunch, and the recession. And I don’t think anyone’s fooled by the current dip in petrol prices.

Now before I go off on one, I should make a few things clear. First of all, I have no patience for the motorist lobby and I second George Monbiot’s verdict on Jeremy Clarkson: the man should be shot (I paraphrase of course). Nor do I harbour any particular affection for car culture. In fact, I was Green before I was Red (I’m a strawberry!), and I hate cars and everything that comes with them. The point is, though, that I still use them. Going from Moss Side to Stalybridge on foot and public transport is an epic undertaking, especially compared to half an hour in the car. And if anyone was offering me a lift to work (oh yes, I have a job now, and the bitterness and self-loathing of the jobcentre has given way to the bitterness and self-loathing of the workplace), I’d be saying yes.

The car isn’t really a choice, any more than the call centre job is a choice; for many people it’s basically a necessity. This is especially true of the commute to and from work, which the congestion charge would target. No-one ever comes in and says “oh, what a lovely drive”; it’s a stressful and expensive way to get around, and that many people do go about that way is evidence of just how spectacularly we’ve been failed on public transport. No; “failed” is the wrong word, it implies that if the powers that have been had been bothered about public transport then they’d have done it right, but of course, they have been bothered. It’s well-known how the big car manufacturers colluded in a systematic attack on California’s tram system to make a market for themselves, and something similar appears to have happened over here. The stingy reluctance to link Manchester to Ashton is remarkable, when a century ago the old tram network was linking smaller and further-out towns like Mossley and Mottram; whatever happened to those old rails wasn’t an accident.

Driving individually in cars is, obviously, massively less efficient than going together in a bus; less efficient means more costly, and more costly always means more profitable to the supplier. A road full of car drivers – and car owners – is a market full of consumers to be exploited, and for all that capitalism is supposed to go straight for the most efficient solutions it didn’t hesitate to smash the old transport infrastructure when it meant people would have to buy a replacement. After all, the time wasted in traffic jams doesn’t cut into the working day, but into the free time before and after it. The cost, in other words, is borne by us. And I won’t labour the point but like I said, pushing people towards a quest for individual, private solutions to their transport needs is a political project as well as an economic one.

Anyway, if you’re going to make people reliant on their cars it’s a bit rich to then try and price them off the road. I would love to see an end to car ownership and, at least in the cities, I think this is perfectly feasible. But first we’re going to have to see an end to the need for car ownership; once the car is a luxury rather than a necessity well, forget pricing it off the road, we may as well just ban it. There might be little point anyway, if the buses were good enough then who would bother with a car?

The cost of transport is going through the roof, and that cost is currently borne by the individual, as is the stress and the responsibility. A collective answer to those costs would always have been a good thing, but it’s more urgent now than ever. This is the time for massive investment in public transport, and the programme tied into the CC proposal is a good start – the maps of Future Manchester’s transport network are tempting, there’s no doubt about it, but they’d still be woefully inadequate for most people’s needs. We need ten times that much. And let’s make it free while we’re at it. (The trams of Manchester are, like the bendy buses of London, effectively free anyway, and I’m always bemused that rather than make this situation official, and earn brownie points for their magnanimity, the authorities make token efforts to stamp it out and earn nought but derision for their ineffectuality).

Now comes the bit where they say aha, you do want public transport but you don’t want to pay for it, tut tut tsk tsk go back to Russia. Well let’s not pretend that car culture is any more cheap than it is cheerful; vast sums are spent on roads and car parks, and don’t let’s start on the social and environmental costs. Anyway I’ve nothing against a progressive income and wealth tax system; I’m not the one who’s giving out tax breaks to the rich, am I Gordon? But as it happens, ok, I don’t want to have to contribute one penny towards making this happen, not while the oil companies are making such ludicrous profits out of motorists (my internet connection and my subscription to Socialist Worker having yet to follow me to the new house, I don’t have the figures to hand. It’s a lot though, I’ll tell you that for free). A windfall tax, I say! Let’s look at the car manufacturers’ profits too, while we’re at it, and all those slimy gets who are forever lobbying to build more roads. We could make every road a tramline, and have change left for a chippy tea.

The campaign against the CC is mainly being led by the newspapers and lobbyists of the right. Why should goodhardworkingmiddleclassfamilies have to pay for the spongers, scallies and scruffs who use the bus? But I see no reason to leave the field to them. Every referendum on the European Constitution or its successors has been fought by the local equivalents of the Daily Mail and the BNP, but in both France and Ireland it was the arguments of the naysaying left that carried the day. We’re not opposed to public transport, and we make no fetish out of “motorists’ rights”, but we won’t accept this kind of stinginess. When the tramlines reach as far as Tintwistle and the bill is footed by BP and Shell, maybe we’ll talk. ‘Til then, vote no.