Sharing cabs could be just the ticket for country folk
In Carnyorth, west Cornwall, near where I live, there are six buses a day on Sundays to the metropolis of Penzance. Miss the last one and you are trapped with the cows and the abandoned mine engines, watching the Land Rovers drive past to the restaurant at the Gurnard’s Head. Catch it, and you feel like a woman on the last helicopter out of Saigon, except you won’t get back to Saigon until morning, at which point my metaphor fails. Rather like the bus service. Even so, the elderly and car-less are left stranded, as if rural idylls are only for car-owners, and the rest can move to town.
Rural bus services are expensive – sometimes three times the price of London buses, which are subsidised – and rare. Rural bus mileage fell 6 per cent between 2011/12 and 2016/17, and local authority funding across Britain was cut last year for the eighth consecutive year. Drivers of the supermarket shuttle services are quick to spot your intention if you use them for lifts, rather than grocery shopping. Morally, it’s theft, so it follows that those who most need someone to drive them somewhere won’t do it. They wouldn’t have the nerve.
The Campaign for Better Transport is encouraging people to share minicabs as an alternative to a rural bus service that is either limited or does not exist. It suggests an online booking service could ease its passage, although the kind of people who can’t afford cars may not be able to afford computers either.
Still, it’s an excellent notion, if the British reserve that precludes sharing cars with strangers can be overcome.