Saturday 6 February 2016

Bus Wankers

From the BBC

In Witney, Oxfordshire, represented in Parliament by David Cameron, the 213 and 214 services are among those under threat as part of county-wide cuts to bus subsidies.
Martin Hallam, a retired former senior probation officer who lives in the village of Milton-under-Wychwood, a few miles from Witney, is fearful there will soon be "no service worth the name", adding that provision has declined in recent years.
"The way the bus runs, if we want to get to the dentist, we have to leave our house before 10:00 and be on the bus back by 11:30, or it simply won't happen by public transport," he says.
"We don't have any buses on two days of the week, so on those days we aren't even allowed to get toothache."

Move to fucking Swindon, then. You choose to live in a pretty, expensive, remote village where almost no-one uses a bus, where you don't have the population density using it, you don't get it. Why the fuck should poorer people subsidise you having a bus?

(the best place for people to retire to is small towns in Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset like Salisbury, Sherborne and Taunton, which now have agglomeration effects of old people, like they have butchers and bakers)

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Harsh but fair.

Tim Almond said...

I'm at the "harsh" stage with people like this. They've gentrified villages, driven out new development, destroyed the local shops by not using them, then they demand buses to get to town. They've done everything they could to make it hard to either a) have local facilities b) driven out the population that could support buses, and now plead the "retired people" card.

Bayard said...

I wouldn't call Salisbury or Taunton a small town, quite apart from the fact that Salisbury is a city. Crewkerne is a small town, Taunton is not.
Otherwise agreed. FBRI wanker, he's probably an ex-Londoner and thinks Milton-under-Wychwood should be a rural version of London. Posy Simmons did a very funny cartoon on this misapprehension.

Tim Almond said...

Bayard,

You're right. I really mean something more like sleepy than small.

Some places are really geared up for old people. I live near a village with tons of them. You get on the bus at 10 and it's full. All old people off to town. It's also got a big GP surgery, a couple of "metro" supermarkets, a butcher, a couple of cafes.