Public transport can only ever fulfil a secondary role – the car will always be first choice

It won’t be very long before we take them for granted, despite their slightly larger fit on our creaky road system. Sadly, the arrival of five new vehicles, however smart and comfortable they might be, is unlikely to magically fill them with 61 appreciative passengers every trip, or prize the institutionally car-bound out of the convenience of their own four wheel transport – even if that were the intention. Despite frequent grumbles, car parking in town is easy and cheap, while alternatives for rural parish dwellers remain extremely limited. Welcome to the land of the proverbial ‘chicken and egg’.

The two routes to benefit from the new vehicles – namely the 1 and 15 – are already the most popular. They’re also the ones with the most frequent service. You won’t attract more people onto buses, the argument goes, until there are more of them running more frequently elsewhere, and until then, there will be no intention of giving up on the car.

Which poses the question: what are the strategic priorities for public transport in Jersey, as seen by those who hold the purse strings? Despite the frequent exhortations to leave the car at home, take the bus, or even embrace healthier options, no one can seriously advocate a universal move to public transport.

In theory, the more travellers on buses, the better. It meets the objectives of fewer vehicles on the road, more space, less pollution and higher ‘green’ credentials. But the theory has its limits. Demand is not constant. There are no benefits in sending buses out into the countryside on a regular, but empty basis. Indeed, there aren’t – nor ever will be – enough buses to achieve that.

It would be financial suicide for any operator ill-advised enough to try to saturate the market with vehicles. Look at London, whose public transport system is second to none. There, you’ll find buses on a fixed timetable, filled to capacity at rush hour but turned into lumbering mobile traffic jams between peaks, burning costly fuel and soaking up space and wages.

In the capital, of course, pretty well everyone uses public transport – the helpful TV ‘Location, Location’ gurus wouldn’t house you anywhere more than a couple of steps away from it. Here in Jersey, where we are neither city dwellers nor long distance commuters, public transport can only ever fulfil a secondary role – it is certainly not a door-to-door service on demand. So the car will always be first for convenience and emergency, particularly if taxis are prohibitively expensive and only sporadically available.

That being said, there’s a vital niche market to support, albeit one which demands sustained municipal support and funding, because except in a city context, the main ‘customers’ are non-revenue-paying concessionary ticket holders.

In the UK, shrouds are being vigorously waved about the potential loss of rural bus services as a result of government spending cuts, leading to the isolation of communities, to the particular disadvantage of older folk unable to make use of alternatives. There is no way passenger numbers will ever make an operating profit on lonely country routes. Given that, the operation represents an essential social service.

Wherever you are in the world, transport routes traditionally radiate from the capital, for obvious reasons. So the newly introduced Route 26, linking the Island’s northern parishes, is a bold attempt to break the mould that if you want to go anywhere, it must be via Liberation Station.

However, unless some economic catastrophe deprives the place of fuel supplies except for essential services, this will again only ever serve a limited, but grateful, section of the population. That’s not to say it should not be undertaken, nor that a robust public transport network will not provide an essential bedrock to complement the alternatives.

It could, of course, be argued that on any measure of democracy, a vehicle with 61 occupants as opposed to another carrying one , two, or – on rare occasions – four, should be accorded priority on all occasions. Indeed, the French highway code still requires this. The recognised ‘pinch points’ on our Island roads cry out for alternate working, both to facilitate bus passage and slow speeding out-of-towners. Where feasible, ‘Bus only’ lanes could be inserted to whisk passengers past the crawling commuters – think particularly of the aforementioned 15 route to the Airport. There’s little point in introducing posh new hardware, only to have it crawling at the convoy’s slowest speed.

Courtesy of our railway-building forebears, we already have a purpose-built track bed the length of St Aubin’s bay, which avoids the notorious chaos of Beaumont and skirts the inappropriately named ‘main road’ through St Aubin’s village, which has incrementally degenerated into a bottleneck littered with parked cars.

Of course, the romantics and the nosey will be hoping for the return of the ‘deckers’. Double deck travel does make sense for high capacity routes, though with new buses costing anything over £160 thousand pounds apiece and Jersey roads defying the twenty-first-century trend to spread in the middle, these would definitely be restricted to the Airport route.

Nevertheless, following the favourable public reaction to the trial last year, their introduction would certainly underline the substantial investment in ‘people moving’ we’re now experiencing from the current operator and Transport department indirectly footing the bill on our behalf.