Omnibus, for all.

It’s been a long time since I put an entry on here. It’s not that I’ve not been doing anything – quite the reverse! I’ve just not found, simultaneously, the time, energy and inspiration to do so.

It’s feeling like a long winter: a long, cold winter. For me there has been a considerable brightening from my lovely younger man, who is a real soulmate and constantly surprises and delights me – not so much with what he does as with what he thinks and how his mind and values work. He’s perhaps a tad less greenish than I am – a distressing tendency to leap in a car, albeit a small, shared and energy-efficient one, and drive to places; but then he lives out in the sticks where there is about one bus a fortnight which goes to within two miles, that’s what they call public transport out there. I don’t know I’m born, living here on a load of bus routes and with several more not two minutes walk away, that will take me to Newcastle, Blyth, Cramlington, Jarrow, Sunderland and many other places, not to mention the metro within four minutes if you run as I had to this morning!

And we’ve just had this report that says that global warming is a certainty, and they are 90% sure that it’s due to human activity. Personally I can’t see where the doubt comes from: we know how much oil we’ve burned and how much carbon dioxide that puts into the atmosphere, so what other reason could there possibly be for the alarming rise in CO2 concentration. Frederick Forsyth, on Question Time last Thursday, suggested that the evidence isn’t conclusive: just how irresponsible can you get! If we wait for the evidence to get even more conclusive, it will be too late: the planet will be on an irreversible course to destruction, and that means my grandchildren won’t live out their natural lifespans. It’s that close, believe me.

So I’m in two minds about signing the petition against road pricing: whilst I don’t want to be spied on, I do want people to be very seriously discouraged from motoring. Not that this is the main problem: I personally think that it’s air travel, with its untaxed fuel, that is growing at a rate so alarming that we need to recognise, now, that we’ll have to live with inconvenience. And I say that having just booked to fly to Vancouver this summer. When I can afford it, I’ll be putting money into more efficient stoves in Mexico to reduce carbon emissions by the amount, or more, that my share of my flights will cause – but will the rest of the passengers? I doubt it.

Later this week, I’m going to hear a talk from a friend who’s been to see relatives in New Zealand – by boat. I imagine he chose this means of travel partly, at least, for green reasons – but have you seen what it costs to cross the Atlantic by sea? It’s about the same as club class travel on a bad day. This reflects my own experience last November, when I had to go to London for a meeting and found the cheapest rail ticket home was around £70, even with a railcard. (I’d gone from Chesterfield, having been at another meeting all weekend in Derbyshire.) However, I found I could fly home on EasyJet from Stansted for a mere £20, including taxes, plus another tenner for the train fare out to the airport. So that was what I did: someone else was paying my expenses, and I couldn’t justify asking for over twice as much. The plane was no quicker – in fact it was slower, and arguably less convenient as it meant a load of security hassle at the airport, including having to take off my shoes and have them X-rayed – but it was almost full, so at least the fuel emissions weren’t wasted on just a few passengers. But how can it possibly be cheaper to travel by plane than by train? The answer is that it isn’t, but you pay less because of pricing structures. EasyJet have found a formula for filling planes, and it’s simple: the first seat is the cheapest and from then on it gets more and more expensive. When I booked to go to Vancouver, my seat was £2 more than my friend’s, because I booked second. I don’t doubt the plane will be full: at about £200 for a one way trip, it’s a snip (BA and KLM are both around £700 return, almost twice as much). By contrast, GNER have a pricing structure that doesn’t fill trains because they’d be full anyway: it just does a rather pointless distribution of the cost unevenly amongst the passengers. Last week I came home, same trip, from London for £10! Now in Belgium, where they apologise if the train is five minutes late – contrast to the UK where they proudly announce that most of their trains are no more than five minutes late! – there is one fare. The single is twice the return: First Class is 50% more than standard. Peak trains may cost a tad more, though as I don’t usually travel on them I can’t say for sure. But there is none of this advance purchase and SuperSaver stuff: there’s one price and that’s it. If we had the same here, the train fare could beat EasyJet into the ground.

All this rant points to one conclusion: if we are going to be serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we have to take radical steps to both improve and increase public transport. My experience of GNER is that most trains are full: that’s partly because I travel a lot at weekends as that is when my meetings are. But when I’ve gone midweek it’s not been very dissimilar. We need longer trains, then, to take more people – Virgin Cross-Country run little four or five coach units that are hopelessly small to take a lot of passengers, and hopelessly slow too. (How can it take longer to travel the 200 miles from Newcastle to Birmingham than the 300 from Newcastle to London?) We need cheaper trains, subsidised by taxing road travel more. Yes, there’ll be an outcry but people can become aware of what they do to the planet on the roads. And we need bus links to everywhere, not just the profitable routes. Buses should be a public service, not a commercial business.

Then, and only then, we might just have a chance of saving the planet.