ABSTRACT
One of the most striking features of the political and professional debates about deregulation prior to the 1985 Transport Act in Britain was that rural areas were frequently used to depict locations which would suffer from the proposed changes. Part of the concern appeared to be opportunist, in that those who opposed deregulation on ideological or pragmatic grounds were casting their nets very widely for apparently logical arguments to employ against the government. In cases such as this, the newfound concern for rural areas and the people who resided there was always likely to be a short-lived campaign device, particularly given the wider lack of political concern for rural community issues to be found in British national politics (Cloke & Little, 1990). Alongside the pragmatists, however, there were those whose appreciation of the recent history of rural transport provision gave them genuine cause for concern. Analysts of this history (see, for example, Banister, 1980; and Moseley, 1979) have highlighted trends of route reduction, patronage reduction and fares increases in rural bus services. Even though significant government subsidies have been attracted to these services, the competition between public transport and private car ownership has been one-sided in favour of the latter. The rural transport ‘problem’ has thus changed from one of general access to one of securing access for residual but significant non-mobile groups living in the countryside. Given this history, there seem to have been legitimate grounds for concern that a new emphasis on competition and a new focus on the economic viability of particular services would merely hasten the already established demise of rural public transport in post-war Britain.
