50 years of Campaign for Better Transport
It’s February 1973, Sweet’s Blockbuster has been at number one in the charts for three weeks, Edward Heath is Prime Minister, Britain has just joined the European Economic Community (later the EU) and the Daily Telegraph gets wind of a secret Government plan to close half the railway.
The plans, which would’ve halved the British Rail Network from around 11,000 route miles to 5,000, were based on the prevailing attitude of the time that public transport was ‘old fashioned’ and that cars and motorways were the future. And not just motorways between cities, but motorways through cities.
It was in this anti public transport climate that Campaign for Better Transport was founded on 6 February 1973 – exactly 50 years ago today. They say that from tiny acorns grow mighty oaks and what began as a small group of like-minded individuals set up to tackle one specific issue, has grown into the country’s leading sustainable transport charity.
From our humble beginnings we now have more than more than 20,000 supporters who have helped us win many important battles over the last 50 years, including seeing off those plans to close half the rail network; helping to stop the ‘biggest road building programme since the Romans’; reforming company car taxation; helping get rid of the hated ‘pacer’ trains in the North of England; the Fair Fares Now campaign to stop double digit rail fare rises; the New Stations Fund; the introduction of the Local Sustainable Transport Fund; and gaining a long-overdue national strategy for buses.
Of course, 50 years ago carbon dioxide’s effect on our climate was still a relatively new theory and the realisation that we were rapidly approaching a climate emergency was yet to come. The political climate that favoured cars was based on misplaced ideas about the economic and social benefits of a car-based society, with no acknowledgment of the disastrous health and environmental consequences of too much road traffic.
I’m pleased to say that in many ways we have been able to step away from the precipice we were looking over half a decade ago that would not have just irrevocably changed the transport network in this country, it would’ve changed society too. Imagine a country even more dominated by cars than it currently is? Multiple four lane motorways running through the centre of our cities; a rail network less than half the size of today’s; and a bus network that only ran commercial routes for profit or not at all.
In many ways we now live in a very different world to that one that had people rushing out to buy Sweet EPs (remember those?) 50 years ago, but when it comes to transport, some things haven’t moved on as much as we might like.
We are still living in a country, and indeed a world, that favours the car over all other modes of transport, but at least policymakers now recognise that public transport has a crucial economic, social and environmental role within our transport network.
It’s for all these reasons that I’m proud to be heading up Campaign for Better Transport today as we enter our 51st year campaigning for sustainable transport. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, so we won’t be resting on our laurels any time soon. With a Blockbuster of campaigning activities planned for this year we’re hoping this is just the start of the next 50 years.
Image: Kimi Gill (https://twitter.com/khushticomms)
