On Your Bike

The official Transport for London report shows the bike-hire scheme is used mainly by the affluent. The £140M bike-hire scheme is used mostly by rich, middle-aged white men, an official survey has revealed.

Six out of ten of those using the blue bikes enjoy an annual income of over £50,000, nine out of ten are white and seven out of ten come from the 25-44 age group. Only 5% of hire-bike users earn less than £20,000, even though 40% of Londoners are in that income bracket.

The London Mayor has decided to raise bus fares and reduce bus routes across the capital. Buses are used predominantly by those on lower incomes and disproportionately by old people, children and minority groups. Next year, the price of a single bus journey will go up from £1.20 to £1.30. Together with similar rises for Tube passengers, the new fares are set to bring in £125M, not far off the £140M the hire scheme will cost.

SOYMB can imagine in the field of transport that a “right to mobility” is available to everyone by means of a comprehensive and efficient free public transport system and access to free public vehicles. This could involve, in an urban context, a hydrogen-powered automatic transit system, flexible and demand-responsive public vehicles which are a hybrid between buses and taxis , supplemented by a fleet of public self-drive vehicles available without charge when needed for a specific journey or period. Under these circumstances, privately-owned vehicles for the exclusive use of one person or family would not be necessary and the congestion and pollution caused by present-day dependency on private cars for travel avoided.
All this would be in the overall context of a society where production would no longer be for sale on a market with a view to profit, but for use so that only good-quality, easy-to-repair products would be made and, as a society geared to serving human welfare, clean environmental practices would be adopted as a matter of course.