I don’t have a car. It’s not that I don’t want to drive, nor that I have any particular objection to cars, simply that the cost of entry into the four-wheeler club is significantly beyond my means at the present moment. This puts me, clearly, in an awkward position vis-à-vis the thorny issue of ‘getting about the place’. When travelling from city to city, I actually find the train system in the UK, while not beyond reproach, is a quite suitable transport system which at times borders on being excellent. Contrary to popular image, I find trains generally tend to arrive on time, they are pretty inexpensive (if booked properly in advance) and as a passenger I am normally well informed and looked after in the event of a problem. Even with a small child and all the paraphernalia which a small child entails my average train journey could be deemed satisfactory.

As you may have guessed from the title of this piece, a monstrous misquote of Wendy Cope as it is, my charitable attitude towards public transport does not extend so readily towards the nation’s bus services, in as far as they deserve the title ’service’. Oh, it’s normally okay to get a bus around town, and generally won’t set you back a huge amount of money, but try using a bus as a replacement or extension of a train journey and you’ll suddenly find yourself, I’m certain even now, in a similar position of complete praise for the nation’s railways. To be fair, the train could probably be pulled along by six donkeys and leak asbestos from the ceiling and still compare favourably with the buses around Derbyshire. 

As a case in point, yesterday my wife and I took a day trip to Bakewell, the exceedingly pretty and historic market town 40 minutes drive away up the A6. The first bus we tried to get didn’t turn up. At all. Unlike at a train station, bus stops have no departure board, no ‘Due 11:03′ displayed prominently about the area, no tannoy system to tell us the service had broken down and wouldn’t be arriving. Just a queue of confused people and a hushed, half-heard rumour of a breakdown and a possible replacement service. So, thinketh we, we’ll just hop over to the ‘6.1′ local service and get that – it’s slower, but we’ll get there. As we find to our dismay, while the fast ‘TransPeak’ leaves at 5 minutes to each hour, the 6.1 leaves at 10 minutes to each hour. Honestly. You couldn’t make it up. Even in the timetable, you wait for about an hour for one, and then two turn up at once. They’re run by the exact same operator, for god’s sake.

So, wait an hour, try again. Today is a random Monday at midday. Instinctively, from our extensive train experience, we know that it’s a quiet time for public transport – a time when only students and other such vagrants are on the move. Not so today. The bus is packed and we’re turned away. We manage to squeeze on to the 6.1, though – running nearly 15 minutes late. After an hour and a half on a hot sticky bus with no more than 15 square millimeters of openable window, we lowly passengers poured out into the town with the steam visible above our heads, stumbling on in a blind heat haze.

As it happens, it’s hard not to have a good time in Bakewell on a sunny day. We took a gorgeous walk out over a nearby hill and down the Monsal Trail – the bitter irony heavy with each footstep we took down the former railway line. If anything, though, the bus journey home was even worse, and I was reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s thoughts on the TV industry: “a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason”. As I looked around at the skewed demographic of our fellow passengers, I realised that it is the government, once again, that is to blame for my woes. The niggling, if you’ll permit me to use the word, voice in the back of my head burst through to the forefront, and the explanation for this atrocious transport situation became blindingly obvious. It’s the old people, stupid. We never had any trouble going to Bakewell last year, but last year pensioners didn’t travel for free on all buses.

Now, I’ve got nothing against pensioners per se - some of my favourite grandparents are pensioners, after all – and I certainly wouldn’t resent them their ability to get about if they wish to, nor dispute that they have limited incomes. I will, however, happily stick my neck out and say that if pensioners wish to use buses to travel long distances, they should be considered low priority by drivers, behind those of use who have to pay. As it stands the automatic deference given to the older generation, while not in itself a bad thing, has the effect that not only are we non-pensioners the last to be seated (if we can get on the bus at all, which is a rarity), we also have to pay through the nose for the privilege of being treated as second-class citizens.

That’s the rub, really, isn’t it – surely age discrimination goes both ways. Taxes, and therefore the non-OAPs, pay for the bus journeys of the elderly folk, then we pay for our own bus journeys, and then we can’t get on the overcrowded buses, because they’re full of the old people that we’re paying for. It’s becoming rapidly clear that the policy of giving free bus travel to OAPs was not well thought through, and has not been subsequently well implemented. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know all of the details – perhaps the bus services will soon be incentivised to put more services on and ease the pressure, for instance. From the ground, though, the situation looks pretty poor.