The Integrated Transport System on Mars

12 years ago, on the crest of a landslide wave, Labour swept to power and the John Prescott, as the new Transport Minister, boldly proclaimed that Britain would have an Integrated Transport System.

Like so much of the proclamations of the Government but especially John Prescott, it was a load of twaddle. A hard man of the left, he soon embraced the new concept of the 'Champagne Socialist', leaving behind his amateur boxing past almost completely, and indulged in the fruits of some hospitality, a cowboy suit and some free rides by bidders for the National Lottery. Later in his extensive but unglittering career, he even took up croquet in order to while away the time when he should have been working. But that was John 'Judge me by my results' Prescott and perhaps the most remarkable thing about him personally was that someone other than his wife found him attractive enough to go to bed with. It makes a shudder go down your spine.

Why the Sunday morning rant about a failed politician living off his autobiography and a TV program? Well, yesterday I did something really curious, I used public transport on a Saturday for almost a whole day and it was a real eye opener.

To explain, I had decided to add moral support to two Friends, Jamie West and Keith Lewis, who are undertaking an extraordinary marathon. After their wives Liz and Susan respectively along with two other 'Crazy girls from St Albans', Sian and Lisa, ran last year's London Marathon for various superb charitable causes, the boys decided to emulate the feat with a marathon of their own. I am sure they would not be upset if I said they were not superb specimens of athletes, so their original plan of wheeling a loaded trolley with beer around the course of the marathon was rejected as potentially too strenuous. They came up with a better idea - they would have a drink at the nearest drinking establishment to every tube station on the London Tube Map.

Take a look - there are some 270 stations and the whole effort has taken a full year and will end in a final day's drinking in Central London stations on 3 October. The whole marathon has been recorded on their excellent blog at http://www.tracksofmybeers.wordpress.com/ where Jamie and Keith have given details of each pub or bar visited, the price of the drink (which must be brewed or distilled in the UK) and what they saw and said. They have been joined at various times by guest stars, thankfully I have paid my dues yesterday along with Nick 'Shirt' Gray for the morning while others joined in the evening. Yesterday we solved crucial matters like the make up of the pack of the world's best players in the professional rugby era, but sort of got side tracked into the best villains in films, excluding James Bond ones - my favourite has always been Emperor Ming, for the record. We also got a bit carried away on the Argentinian front row forwards but agreed that a front row of Noriega, Pinochet with Thatcher as hooker would be hard to beat.

The boys had to start their journey at Uxbridge and work their way in to pick up stations along the west Central Line. None of us could drive, obviously, and we were not able to cadge lifts off our spouses who were all suitably otherwise engaged, so they took the 724 bus from St Albans at 10.20am (which originated in Harlow) and I joined them at Watford Junction at 10.52am for which the bus was fashionably late. The first nitpick was that my fare was exactly the same as theirs even though they had been on the bus for 32 minutes and around 15 miles - so I paid £7.50 for single to Uxbridge from Watford, the same as from St Albans. The bus wended its way to Uxbridge and we arrived some 15 minutes after we should have, but found the first bar was a pleasant brasserie called 'Baroosh' on the corner of the High St not 30 yards from the station's entrance.

After the drink we made for the station and I went to man at the window and asked for a ticket that would get me around all zones and then back to Watford Junction. It again cost £7.50 for zones 1 to 6 - it is worth noting the man had official clothing on and he confirmed that my ticket did what I had asked for - I did not notice if he was green or had a small aerial on his head.

Several interesting stations later, and mostly nice pubs (although The Swallow at Hillingdon was slightly dodgy), I bid my farewells at Greenford to go home. The young lady behind the bar recommended that I catch a bus at the station and go to Wembley Central and pick up the Silverlink Line to Watford from there. However, the TV told us there was current travel mayhem around Wembley as England were due to play a friendly football game against the might of Slovenia so I took the second option of a taxi which took ages via Kingsbury and cost £12 to get to Harrow & Wealdstone Station where I picked up a slow train to Watford.

Of course, my mistake was a) to have believed every word that John Prescott had said 12 years ago and believe that we have an integrated transport system and b) believe the offcial who sat at the window at Uxbridge Station and sold me my ticket. I actually believed I had paid the right amount of money to get back to Watford. I have travelled the system enough to know the stupid zone systems are infuriating and the 'extra fares' are just outright rip offs. But it did come as a surprise yesterday that I was held by an official at Watford and demanded I pay an extra £3.20 as I had travelled from Harrow & Wealdstone although he was initially keen to charge me from Euston. Thankfully, the lady behind me vouched for the fact I had got on at Harrow. I paid but made the stupid mistake of asking why I had to pay.

There came a short diatribe about there being 26 different franchises and each has their own tariffs, then there was Underground this and Overground that. I pointed out that I had bought my ticket from a man just like him at Uxbridge and he laughed, saying, 'Was he from Mars?'. I didn't seem to get the joke but I think he was illustrating the different franchises or something. He went on and I was amazed at the vast array of knowledge he had and how it sounded so logical that I should pay this money.

Perhaps it was the several halves of beer I had but I said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm a customer. All that is pretty irrelevant to the average traveller. I started my journey this morning from outside the station door and it has cost me £18.20 to get back here and I have travelled no more than 30 or so miles using 3 different forms of public transport at off peak times. It doesn't make sense. Why should customers have to memorise all 26 different franchises and do your job for you?'

My point having been made, I put the ticket he had just given me into the automatic turnstile and stepped through it. At that point, he said, 'Come back here, mate. I should have charged you £20 Penalty Fare. Come on, come back.'

'Why?' I asked. 'Because I don't have to take that from you - I only charged you £3.20, I should have charged you £20 - I was doing you a favour,' said the official and his colleague now joined in, gesticulating that I should come back through the barrier.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to play my trump card. 'I don't know what you are talking about,' I said. 'I just paid you personally for a valid ticket and went through the turnstiles, are you saying you did your job wrong like the spaceman at Uxbridge or in doing so did I do something illegal?' He was still trying to get the turnstile open when I turned and walked away. I had enough of the 'Integrated Transport System' for one day and got a taxi home for a further £9.

You could go on about the travel system for ages but the bit that really gets me about our system is that it is an immensely complex array of interconnected strands of private businesses and that the ticket counters you queue at are not actually part of. A for example, if you travel to London at off peak and return at peak, you are charged a surcharge. There is no option to buy a ticket that allows you to do this and so the first time it happened to me I was stung a £10 Penalty Charge and my address was taken. Some while later, the officials would only take the 'fare difference' off you as one someone had pointed out to the train companies that charging penalties for this was racketeering. The only way, according to rail staff, to pay the fare at the start is to buy a full peak travel ticket which defeats the purpose of going at non-rush hour time which is what people advise you to do.

The travel staff don't deserve idiots like me questioning how they do their jobs because they are not the problem although yesterday's behaviour was a little bizarre. The problem is that we have an even more disperate and non-connected system since Prescott's immortal brag 12 years ago. His answer to the public transport system was to lay on two jags for himself. Later he spawned a brand new Government Department, called the 'Office of the Deputy Prime Minister' - even that bureaucratic overloaded nightmare wasn't big enough for his ego.

So the news is - Uxbridge has been invaded by Martians and the price for a round trip from Watford to Uxbridge back to Watford has gone up accordingly.

Integrated Transport System

Back in 1997, John Prescott said that 'Britain would have an Integrated Transport System'. Of course, as with much of what Prescott said it was pure hot air. Sadly, nearly 12 years on, we are paying the price of those empty words and lack of action.

The CBI today says that our transport network is 'unreliable, congested and is undermining our competitiveness'. It echoes what most of us in business have felt for some time - the word they have missed off is 'expensive'. Remarkably, they rated train travel as satisfactory in terms of reliability and is considered to be improving. Clearly they have been using very different trains to most commuters.

Trains, Planes & Automobiles

Trains are a running joke in this country. While rolling stock is slowly being updated on the lucrative franchises handed out, the handling of rush hour remains appalling. If you commute into London then you will know what I am talking about. Fast trains at rush hour are the most expensive tickets on the network and you are subjected to densely packed carriages and no seat for the journey, made almost unbearable in Summer due to lack of ventilation. Nowadays, my wife and I will travel by car together as affording two tickets at such excessive cost each day is just ridiculous and with £9 for parking and £8 for congestion charge and around £10 for diesel it makes economic sense.

Of course, the answer that the Mayor and PM will have is to raise the price of the congestion charge or find some other tax to attempt to penalise you into taking the packed trains - or as Ken Livingston was planning, to actually charge a congestion charge for using the trains in rush hour. This stupid and illogical way of trying to manipulate behaviour comes from the long, historic belief of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman lineages that if you tax someone then they won't do it.

The idiot thing is that no one takes a rush hour train or car journey by choice. They do it because that's what business and working demands. Most people in this country have set hours of work and while flexi-hours are a great innovation, over 90% of businesses cannot afford such luxury for its employees simply because their customers demand service within normal business working hours and beyond. In order to be successful in business, you need to be delivering your products and services within working hours. And that means that any more costs heaped onto getting staff to work within those normal hours will just make the business less competitive.

The Burden of Transport

In my business, my biggest expense lines outside of payroll is travel. Taking out accommodation costs which I try to avoid if I can, a quick analysis reveals it is cheaper to use a car for internal travel in the UK than trains with the exception of the Underground in London. A cursory glance will tell you mile for mile it is cheaper to use planes than cars or trains. Yet a bus and a train has to be cheaper than a plane to buy, maintain and run, particularly with all the ancillary costs.

Most people commuting to their office cannot recharge that to their employer and so bear the cost themselves, so the hidden cost of transport in business is huge. This will eventually manifest itself in wages which need to remain competitive yet still provide enough to cover the employees' transport back and fore from work. If you look at the cost of specifically trains and buses over the last 11 years it is easy to see that their cost has risen well out of proportion with wage increases.

It is costing us more to work than ever before thanks to transport costs.

The State of The Union

Britain is not some backward nation on its uppers - well not yet anyway. In that last 11 years, we were told repeatedly that we had a super economy and we were well off as a nation. Of course that has proved to be complete rubbish but it does make you wonder why on earth we have not ploughed enough money into getting our transport system in line with the modern age. Ministers would tell you that it is because of lack of previous investment and it's a case of catch up. Well, that's no excuse to exacerbate the problem on their watch. Now we are talking mega-numbers, not quite in line with bank bail outs, naturally, in order to put it right.

And here is the rub. This has been a Government of missed opportunity which is a phrase I have used before. The real shame is that when a crisis came hundreds of billions of pounds were taken without a cursory thought as to how they would be used or spent by the people they gave it to just as a knee jerk reaction to the failing banking system. Heaven knows, if such money was available then, why were we not spending it on our future like transport infrastructure - and if it could have so easily have been conjured up, why did we not use it before?

Of course, tax is at the heart of the matter and we shall find out in years to come just how much it has cost to save the skins of a few bankers and keep a bunch of bank businesses many of which deserved to fail. What we will count the cost of at the same time is how much new infrastructure, new hospitals, schools and much more we could have spent our hard earned money on while we pay off the 'expense tabs' of the elite bankers, the very same people who now sit like vultures on the PM's shoulders telling him how much money he needs to spend to dig himself out of the mess he got us into.

You can be sure of one thing, not one of them will be telling him to hold back the cash for banks and spend it on transport or any other worthy cause. That does not pay a banker's wages or bonus - and that is the priority of this Government, make no mistake. This period of history will be the single biggest missed opportunity in Britain's economic history - and we will remain uncompetitive for years because of it.

Get Out of Your Cars And Use Public Transport

When New Labour swept to power, a certain blubber-mouth boasted we would have 'An integrated transport system'. Of course I am talking about John 'Judge me on my achievements' Prescott here and he is known for the odd word gaff - perhaps he meant 'disintegrated transport system'?

Trains - Don't You Just Love Them

OK, so you detect I have had a bad experience lately and that's true. I was one of those unfortunates who swept up to Preston yesterday having paid £195 (single) for a First Class Ticket to do some work. Not only was the power not available, the train some 45 minutes late and the 'breakfast' a sumptuous mixture of dried leather and glutinous Stilton between dry bread slices that tasted like a baby's nappy but I was comforted by the two people on the next table who bragged they always buy second class and sit in first because even if challenged they pretend to be foreign. Having arrived suitably late and angry so missing my connecting transport, I got to my meeting late and literally cheesed off.

No worries, I thought, the relaxing journey back, a snip at £76 (single) would ensure I arrived home content and unstressed as a celebrity in a rail advert. Not quite. The Pendalino ran out of juice at Milton Keynes, as had all other trains. I had been served exactly the same sandwich (probably re-packaged from the morning trip), a banana and a drink. At least the power worked - until we got to Milton Keynes, that is. It turned out that desperately close to my home, power line failure meant all trains had ground to a halt somewhere between North Wembley and Hemel Hempstead and we were stuck in the land of Concrete Cows.

Milton Keynes - The New Utopia

Maybe John Maynard Keynes was angry I had taken his name in vain recently and blighted me from beyond the grave but I was stuck in the town sharing his name - surely no coincidence when it comes to failed theories. They say that when the town planners were designing the layout for the New Town, they used the map as a table cloth and so wherever they put their tea cups down, Irish Navvis built a roundabout. It has a ring of truth to the story.

Having spent about an hour on the rapidly cooling train, I decided to seek advice and found helpful station staff shrugging their shoulders in a display of customer service worthy of Fawlty Towers. Having got to the message boards it became clear there were delays. After a further hour in the freezing station it became apparent that the trains were not going to move again and other transport would be laid on for the fairly quiet bunch of 200 or so commuters trapped in the Neverland that is Milton Keynes. Fortunately, I managed to get a family member to drive up to get me and my SAS survival training paid dividends when I found a nearby Indian Restaurant which allowed me to sit in their waiting area sipping a Cobra while I waited. When I left, still 200 slightly frozen commuters anxiously awaited their laid-on buses in the positively balmy temperature of minus 6 Centigrade.

Jokers Galore

Of course, it's not worth trying to claim back a penny as I haven't the energy or life expectancy to get an answer from the Complaints Dept at Virgin, so that's a total of £271 for a round trip of total dissatisfaction. And before you say it, Second Class would not have been much cheaper.

Tomorrow, as I often do, I will travel to London for £22.50 return plus £5.80 parking (plus annual price hikes) and have the privilege to stand for the 20 or so mile trip. Off to jail should I wait until 9.30am and get an off peak ticket and then travel back at the wrong time, even though there is no price option to do that. You get fined as you walk out at St Albans Station for the criminal you are.

Quite what makes any Government Minister think we are going to get people out of cars and into Public Transport at that level of price and service is beyond me. As Richard Branson laughs all the way to the Bank on his extortionate prices (they offered me a chance to go on an earlier train for a mere £120 extra one way) and the supposed 6% hike in prices are scorned on the nice-earning green belt servicing lines, and don't forget the car parks ramming up astronomically prices on pieces of land they pay peppercorn rents on, it turns out the commuting public are the jokers as we put up with it.

We will never solve the issues of carbon emissions and congestion this way. We have to somehow provide public transport at affordable prices and a good service, and join it all up. It can be done as others do it. I recently travelled from Verona to Milan - fully 220km - on a decent train, with a seat, in rush hour and all for €11.70. It was blissfully only 3 minutes late and arrived at one of the most magnificent buildings in Italy - Milan Central Station - complete with Christmas Market outside.

But we Brits love a moan and where would be without the railway, eh?