The World Socialist Web Site – which I have known for almost two decades since its exposé on the death of gridiron lineman Korey Stringer back in 2001 – has pointed out that even in less car-dependent Britain and Ireland, bus drivers have worked without personal protective equipment, arguing that this is untenable given that twenty-nine have died in the UK. Although I have not been allowed to ride a bus since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I have zero evidence that any protective equipment has been made available to drivers, let alone to passengers, for whom it would minimise or eliminate the risk of public transport travel during a pandemic if all vehicles were sanitised. Un-sanitised public transport vehicles are a highly plausible source of the new wave of COVID-19 infections beginning to his Victoria and certain to dwarf the state’s peak in late March and early April. This is further argument that some government funds must be redirected to sanitise public transport vehicles and provide protective equipment free of extra charge for passengers as well as drivers. In the case of trains this would be difficult with so many stations un-staffed, but it would be easy with trams if entry were limited only to the front door – highly feasible with patronage as low as it is now.
From the other side of politics, the rural Weekly Times argued last Wednesday (I actually discovered the article in the Coles at Caulfield Plaza) that public transport services should be at least temporarily cut to offset the heavy losses it is incurring with patronage down by 78 percent. The Times noted public transport was already making losses before COVID-19 hit.
With COVID-19 infections in Victoria certain to grow much faster in the next weeks and months than at the first peak in late March and early April, the public is bound to perceive public transport as unsafe to a much greater degree than even then. Patronage could well decline to not 22 percent, but 2.2 percent, of pre-pandemic levels. Under such conditions, calls for “temporary” service cuts would become much louder and extent more widely amongst the ruling class and small business owners who wish to be relieved of paying taxes for services they do not use. However, there is real danger, as the WSWS have noted and experience from the previous economic downturn in the early 1990s reveals, that these services cuts will be permanent or at the very least long-term.
The demands for service cuts from rural and suburban small business owners, from wealthy businessmen and from the frustrated lower middle class is in fact likely to be so great that Melbourne’s public transport as I have known it – and deplored it as an example of what is causing global warming even as it serves as an outlet for my own recreation and exploration – is almost certain to become a true “thing of the past”. The plain facts are that:
- politically influential groups are unlikely to accept paying for public transport under the long-term economic crisis caused by escalating COVID-19
- road capacity is far too large for public transport to pay its way even with the cheapest and most bare-bones service (at least outside of the most “captive” patronage of all, schoolchildren who are too young to drive) possible
- people who have given up on public transport due to COVID-19 are not likely to return to it even if restrictions are completely eliminated – a situation that even Premier Andrews admits is many years away as I write this
Given these things, public transport trips are certain to be a permanent casualty of COVID-19, even if it is not easy to see where Victoria really went so wrong, with the only possibilities being inadequate early testing and purchase of protective equipment to operate such essential services.
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