Letters, November 9: Public pays high price for travel privatisation

From: ME Wright, Grove Road, Harrogate.

Your Editorial rightly points out that “passengers are invariably the losers” under the present public transport system (The Yorkshire Post, November 4).

We have been since deregulation, when privatisation hysteria decreed that our buses be flogged off, at bucket-shop prices.

Readers may recall the chaos which followed and the long-term decline and disappearance of all but the most profitable services, with increasing regression to the worst public transport in Europe.

We have had 30 years of rocketing fares, despite council tax subsidies.

Rural areas are increasingly isolated. Leeds, a major European city, continues to judder along in the 1960s, with no foreseeable prospect of major transport investment, making it possibly the worst of the worst.

All the commercial and social problems which this policy guarantees makes the idea of giving yet more millions to the rip-off privateers even more outrageous.

Your Editorial claims that the new Buses Bill can ‘narrow the North-South gap’; indeed it can, but will it?