ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to analyze the interplay of comparatively consistent economic and technological criteria in the face of rapidly changing social, commercial and economic conditions. Society has become committed to the car, or more broadly, road transport. This has been a cardinal factor in the re-emergence at intervals of what has been termed the ‘transport problem’ and particularly the ‘urban transport problem’. The immediate postwar Labour Government’s Transport Act, 1947, saw integration through complete technological monopoly with it being achieved presumably only by common ownership, that is state ownership. Transport has an extremely high profile, forcing its internal and external activities into the public arena, hence the high level of state interest and intervention. The individual consumer of public transport is obviously vulnerable to what has become an increasingly oligopolistic or even monopolistic sector of the economy.
