STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

The long and winding road out of a Devon village, and the peculiar business of being free in a country that assumes everybody drives.

Britain talks endlessly about growth, opportunity and levelling things up. It has think tanks, roundtables, consultations, strategies, taskforces, delivery boards and a remarkable number of people who can put the word mobility in a PowerPoint without once having to get the bus. Meanwhile, if you live in the wrong bit of the countryside and don't own a car, you may discover that leaving your house is a moderately complex logistical operation. Quick question: what are we fucking doing?

This little online rag exists, in part, because your editor is terminally ill. Not so terminally ill that he can't think, nor so cosmically unwell that he doesn't ‘deserve’ his Personal Independence Payment, before we start all that nonsense. Cancer has deprived him of several things which we won't go into here, but while he's diligently following all the same tired advice — be a warrior, be a fighter, have a mantra, and his personal favourite, ‘you got this’ — he's also a little bit stuck.

Never a fan of the random game of trust-the-stranger that takes place whenever you enter a roundabout, he is now, merciful heaven, prohibited from driving. Of all the things good old Big C saw fit to deprive him of, driving is the one he'll miss the least. He lives with his lovely family in a quiet village in Devon, having spent long enough in the land of the £11 latte up the motorway to know that it's better when there are cows on the horizon than planes.

Living in what urbanites call ‘the sticks’ has several downsides, of course. The main one is that everybody has quietly decided access to the rest of the country is your own silly problem.

Consider Buckland Brewer, where the hills are lovely, the air is clean and the public transport timetable appears to have been written by somebody with a grudge against movement. Barnstaple, our nearest railway station, is about half an hour away by car. Half an hour. That's not a great expedition. You wouldn't normally pack sandwiches. By public transport, the journey is an entirely different proposition.

First you need a bus to Bideford. In the current timetable there is an outward service from the village on Monday and Friday, and a corresponding return that grants you a couple of hours in town over lunch. A spectacularly limited sort of freedom, but freedom nonetheless, provided your idea of a fully lived life occurs between the opening and closing of a small window on a weekday. From Bideford you take another bus, roughly 25 minutes to Barnstaple station, and only then are you in a position to wait for a train to Exeter.

There used to be a bus out of the village at 7.40 each morning. Useful, that, especially if you were one of those famously frivolous people who wanted to attend college. It went. It isn't coming back merely because we point out that young people occasionally need to travel somewhere before lunchtime.

And before anyone writes in — ‘well, you chose to live there’ — yes. Thank you. People also choose to have children, get older, accept jobs, marry people, care for relatives and become ill. Circumstances have a way of occurring after the decision. A transport system that only works for the exact person you were when you bought your house isn't much of a system.

The curious thing is how cheaply we sometimes define freedom. We can pay for another strategy about rural inclusion, appoint a commissioner, launch a pilot involving an electric minibus that must be summoned via a smartphone and publish a lovely PDF explaining how transformative it all is. Or we could put the bloody bus back.

The car is a marvellous invention. We're not campaigning to confiscate everybody's Ford Focus and make them ride a communal llama. We're asking why it has become the admission ticket to participation. Work, education, shopping, a drink at the pub, a medical appointment, visiting someone you love: all of these are ordinary things. In certain parts of Britain they're not ordinary things at all. They're favours you need someone else to do you, journeys you pay handsomely to improvise, or ambitions you quietly abandon.

That last one matters. If you can't reliably get to a course, you don't enrol. If the bus won't get you home after a shift, you don't apply. If visiting a friend requires three changes and a lift, you don't bother. We tend to count passenger journeys, but we don't count the journeys that never happened. The jobs not taken. The evenings out never proposed. The independence gradually edited out of a life.

There's a nasty circularity to this. A route becomes less useful, so fewer people take it. The dwindling passenger numbers become evidence that nobody wants it. Frequencies are cut again, so the remaining passengers find another way or stay home. Eventually an accountant can point to a spreadsheet and announce that the bus was never viable, which is a bit like removing half the stairs from a staircase and claiming people simply prefer not to go upstairs.

Of course rural services cost money. Of course you can't have a bus every seven minutes up every farm track. The point isn't to deny arithmetic. It's to ask what arithmetic we're using. Roads are subsidised by public investment. So are railways, schools and hospitals. Their value isn't exhausted by the price of a ticket, a lesson or an appointment. Sometimes the public benefit is that people can do things without asking for permission.

My ideal transport revolution would be so unremarkable that nobody could build a conference around it. A printed timetable. A bus in each direction at useful hours, every day. Connections that leave enough time to change. A fare you can pay without having to buy a new phone. Repeat next Monday, then Tuesday, and keep going until people believe you.

There's a great big country out there. At present, rather a lot of us can see it perfectly well from the window. Getting into it is another matter.

---