Anarchy 44/Transport: the scope for citizen action

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Transport: the scope
for citizen action

JOE GARNETT

One of the ob­jec­tions raised to the point of view of anarch­ists and other de­central­ists is that they ig­nore the com­plex­it­ies of plan­ning for the so­cial needs of densely-pop­u­la­ted urban so­cieties like our own. Yet what stands out from a con­sider­a­tion of the trans­port muddle is that there is no plan: there are in­stead a vari­ety of of­fi­cial bodies, un­co-ordin­ated, work­ing in iso­la­tion and often in se­crecy, pro­du­cing muddle, con­fu­sion and waste on en enor­mous scale.

  Min­istries, na­tion­al­ised in­dus­tries, local au­thor­it­ies large and small are work­ing away with long-term and short-term plans, and put­ting schemes into oper­a­tion at enor­mous costs which turn out to have been ob­solete be­fore they left the draw­ing board. To rub the point home, let us item­ise just half-a-dozen cur­rent ex­amples from the press:

  1. When Brit­ish Euro­pean Air­ways makes a loss on its ser­vices, the gov­ern­ment de­cides that the ser­vices are to be kept going and the empty seats filled by re­du­cing the fares. When Brit­ish Rail­ways makes a loss on its ser­vices, trains with empty seats are dis­con­tinued, and fares on those re­main­ing are in­creased.

  2. Among the sta­tions closed on Sep­tem­ber 6th this year was Castle­thorpe, Bucks, on the main Euston-Crewe line, where vil­lagers sat down in front of the last train in pro­test. More than £40,000 had re­cently been spent on mod­ern­is­ing their sta­tion.

  3. At Stran­raer in the west of Scot­land, where the gov­ern­ment is sub­sid­is­ing new in­dus­trial enter­prise, Brit­ish Rail­ways re­cently put into ser­vice a new 3,500 ton ship, spe­cially de­signed for the Stran­raer-Larne ferry. But in Dr. Beech­ing’s plan, Stran­raer will not only lose all its spe­cial ex­press boat trains from London, New­castle and Glas­gow, but it will ac­tu­ally be­come al­most 60 miles dist­ant from the near­est pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing sta­tion.

  4. The London Traf­fic Man­age­ment Unit of the Min­is­try of Trans­port is at­tempt­ing to al­levi­ate traf­fic prob­lems in London by in­tro­du­cing large-scale <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: one-way traf­fic">one-way traf­fic sys­tems. Simul­tan­eously the London County Coun­cil is try­ing to do the same thing by large-scale round­abouts, like those in the Red Lion Square and St. Giles Cir­cus areas. The two meth­ods con­tra­dict and can­cel out each other.

  5. Batter­sea Coun­cil has had to aban­don a ma­jor part of its hous­ing pro­gramme, be­cause of pro­pos­als for a six-lane motor­way which no-one had told the Coun­cil about and of which it had never heard until plan­ning per­mis­sion for one of its hous­ing schemes was re­fused.

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  6. Doctor Beech­ing is pro­pos­ing to close the rail­way be­tween New­castle and Wash­ing­ton in County Dur­ham at the very mo­ment when a New Town is to be built there.

  What is the remedy for ab­surd­it­ies of this kind? The Labour Party (which can hardly blame “the jungle of pri­vate enter­prise” since it is pub­lic bodies which are in­volved in each of these in­stan­ces) pro­poses yet an­other gov­ern­ment de­part­ment to co-ordin­ate the activ­it­ies of all these bodies, and pro­duce what we so con­spic­u­ously lack: a plan for trans­port. In terms of prac­tical polit­ics and pro­ced­ure, the trouble with this kind of “over­lord” body is that in prac­tice it is never given the power it seeks—and is never strong enough to over­rule sec­tional in­ter­ests—this is the ex­peri­ence of “demo­cratic” coun­tries like Britain and the USA as much as that of “dic­tat­or­ships” like Nazi Ger­many and Stalin’s Russia.

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A citizens’ plan

  Our own ap­proach

s2

Citizens against Beeching

  One citi­zens’ ini­tiat­ive

s3

And for Buchanan

  Sim­ilar citi­zens’ groups

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A social situation

  An example of this