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Samizdata quote of the day
I am very optimistic it will quickly become an established form of transport
– Patrick Döring, deputy chairman of the German Free Democrats, discussing the fact that long distance bus travel may be about to be legalised in Germany.
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Gobsmacked, absolutely gobsmacked!
The country that invented Autobahns, have a law against long distance bus travel??
Surely there is an EU rule against this? Why hasn’t Germany been fined years ago? Or is it only us stupid fuckers in the UK that actually follow the bloody rules?
Well, there are lots of long distance bus services in the UK. If the UK follows the bloody rules in this case, good.
A lot of credit is due to the European regulators for deregulating air travel. One consequence of this is that foreign airlines (particularly Ryanair) fly a lot of domestic routes in both Italy and Germany, and neither of these markets would have ever been opened up by local governments. In addition, the EU insisted on deregulation of flights between the UK and the US, and once again the British government would have never done this by itself. It would seem that bus travel has probably been ignored by European regulators due to being too significant, I suspect.
I don’t actually share the reflexive anti-EU position that some people take on this blog, myself. The EU is a mixture of the good and the bad. The superstate, regulatory aspects of it, bad. The single market, deregulatory aspects of it (including above all the free movement of EU citizens aspects of it), good, as far as I am concerned.
(On Ryanair. State owned and state favoured airlines have often used the argument that “We are providing a public service by flying to remote and obscure locations. In order to provide this loss making public service, we need to be able to make money on our key routes, and therefore we must be protected from competition on our key routes”. This is always a specious argument – if a route must be flown on public service grounds, just give it a direct and transparent subsidy – but Ryanair has really destroyed it, by being able to make money flying routes far more obscure than the state owned and favoured carriers ever dreamed of. For this the have my thanks. Rant over).
What I meant Michael, as I’m sure you know, is that Britain never had a Law against long distance bus travel in the first place, so it didn’t need EU regulation to remove it.
Why would we need to invent a regulatorary body that now considers itself a State in it’s own right, with it’s own legislative and tax powers to do what we already did, or could do, for ourselves?
I am totally against the EU for that very fact.
Whatever benefits its bureaucrats bring to the table like free movement etc, we could have done for ourselves, indeed did for ourselves before the First World War?
And on the deficit side, well there are European Arrest Warrants and European Investigation Orders, which now compel our Plod to arrest and extradite to Athens etc, on no evidence whatsoever someone accused of shoplifting, when their Human Rights legislation doesn’t let us extradite terrorists back to their homeland in case they get a bit of a hard time!
We dont need the EU, pure and simple, but they need us. And unless we get out soon, the country I knew and loved, will cease to exist.
Rant over 😉
RAB is right.
As for the German regulation – a crazy one. But then so is the idea of government road building – it is in fact a subsidy against railways.
Road travel should not be taxed (no road tax etc), but also road travel should not be subsidized.
Ditto rail travel.
Not to contradict Paul Marks’ observation, but note that (in the US, anyway) railroads themselves were originally subsidized by the government (permitting massive takings of land for the construction of tracks), and in fact many of them (see Amtrak) are directly subsidized even today, so there is a certain ironic justice in their later competitors (motor transport) being “subsidized” in turn.
US federal gasoline taxes were originally intended for the construction and maintenance of the federal highways (in fact, we still have a nominal “Highway Trust Fund”, which has unfortunately become a slush fund for all sorts of non-highway-related projects). To the extent such taxes are used as intended it does seem to be one of the more appropriate taxes in existence, a direct charge against the users for the maintenance of the service. Not much different than toll roads, with the tolls collected indirectly.
This is why I said “ditto rail”.
No subsidies for rail companies either.