Shall we look at the bad news first or the good news? Perhaps that should read "the less bad news" instead of "the good news", but don't let us be too pedantic about it.
Anyone who had to fill their car up this weekend will have been left in no doubt what the bad news is - the soaring cost of petrol.
For a tourist town like Brighton, which relies to some extent on day visitors, it could be bad news if the cost of visiting the town, plus the high cost of parking, continued to rise.
The benefits of car travel, as opposed to train, are several-fold. You can get your picnic, your beach comforts, your children's travel needs (and anyone who has ever travelled farther than the end of their road with children will know that they are many and totally unrelated to a day at the seaside), your mother and your mother-in-law, all under one roof so to speak, always assuming you are prepared to mop up the blood at the end of the day.
With petrol at its present level it is still an expensive game, but even now it is not as expensive as coming by train and infinitely more convenient. If park and ride schemes are set up on the edge of town how are you going to get all that lot to the seafront, especially if you have very young children requiring pushchairs? Not to mention the older generation and those who are less mobile. Apart from the fact that the trains are not the most reliable form of transport these days, there is the nightmare of trying to fight your way on board, loaded down with the aforementioned categories of people and equipment.
Cars are here to stay, I'm afraid, and those in charge of transport plans (now there's a contradiction in terms) will have to put up with them. What the Government and the local authorities should be doing is getting the smelly, badly maintained vehicles off the road if they want to get any credibility in the environmental stakes. They are a worse source of pollution than mere petrol fumes. Drive up one of Brighton's hills behind a badly maintained bus or car and you really suffer.
Often it's older people who own older vehicles, but generally speaking they look after their cars because they have had to work hard to keep them. If there is much more of a rise in petrol prices it is the older and less able who will suffer.
The rise in prices is linked to the "good news". Country dwellers are going to be worse hit than anyone with the rise in transport costs and with the expected closure of rural post offices and banks which can lead to the slow death of a village.
The outcry which ensued when it became clear that post offices were likely to lose a large slice of their income through the direct payment of pensions into bank accounts has sent warning signals to the Government and now there are plans for a social banking system linked to the Post Office.
This will make life easier for the country folk who were facing very real difficulties involving lengthy car journeys to the nearest town for the simplest money transaction. There is to be a Government grant to cover start-up costs for the estimated 3.5 million people who have no bank account. Almost "good news", but don't get too excited.
Many folk want their pension in cash, probably to pay for their petrol. Watch this space.
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