Brit Buses: Limeys Losing Locals

[WhoozOn1st]

Bus cutbacks in England take their toll on village life

"Trains may whiz through the landscape, allowing harried urbanites and tourists to sigh nostalgically as they gaze out at sunlit tableaux of hills and dales. But buses connect the dots on the map, allowing a web of human activity and interaction that saves villages and their inhabitants from a stultifying isolation.

"Across England, more than 1,000 bus services outside metropolitan areas have been pared back or eliminated. Many more are on the chopping block, as 3 out of 4 local authorities are slashing their transport budgets because of sharp reductions in funding from the central government."

 

[DET63]

How many people were actually riding these buses that were saving villages from "stultifying isolation"? My guess is not many. People have cars, TVs, computers, cellphones, etc., that keep them in touch with the world, wherever they are. Let's also remember that the UK has about 60,000,000 people in a landmass (including Northern Ireland) the size of the state of Oregon (actually, slightly smaller), so that even the most isolated village is probably no more than an hour's drive from a rather sizable city (and no more than a few minutes' drive from another village). Given that England is quite a bit smaller than the entire UK, yet has the lion's share of the population, the image of a quaint, isolated community cut off from the rest of the world save for the local bus service becomes at best a fantasy.