ABSTRACT
As seen in Chapter 10, however, there has been a marked shift away from the public ownership model of delivery for public transport services, with the onus moving to a combination of private/ public or full private provision through regulation. Nevertheless, whilst past paradigms have assumed that public transport can pay for itself, a view no better encompassed than by Beeching in the 1960s and his search for the profitable railway, today there is a far more general overview taken of public transport and the role it plays in the wider economy and society in general. In its most extreme form this standpoint would be that rising patronage requires more subsidy not less. This is something that in part we saw in Chapter 2 in the case of London, which had experienced this apparent contradiction of rising patronage and rising subsidy levels.
