----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Stevens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 11:56 AM Subject: Re: [canals-list] Re: Proposed new car tax (OT)
> On Sunday, February 11, 2007 11:37 AM [GMT+1=CET], > Steve Haywood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I'm not unsympathetic to the argument of rural communities. When I was >> a kid I lived in a village with three connections an hour, six buses >> in total, to Leicester and Loughborough. They're down to one an hour >> in each direction now. I guess the only way kids manage to live in the >> place is by persuading mum and dad to take them places. > > Some villages near the Wiltshire town where I grew up in the 1940s & 50s > would have been glad of one bus each way per *day*. The most extreme > route > I came across had a bus in one direction on the second Tuesday of the > month > and the return trip a fortnight later. But there were plenty of routes > that > on ran on, for example, Wednesdays and Saturdays (which were market days > in > the town). So there's nothing recent about poor rural public transport. > And car ownership was much less widely disseminated then. But almost all > working-class people (a shorthand I'm not fond of) lived within walking or > cycling distance of their work. snipped > Mike Stevens > Walking distance was 5miles or more. How many would be prepared to walk with their shopping that distance now? Sue nb Nackered Navvy
