Social benefits of buses

Margaret Thatcher infamously announced that anyone over 30 who travelled by bus was a failure. Curiously, the government that believes in her eternal reverence has just released three documents constituting a study of the social benefits of bus travel (the reports are dated March but published today).

 ‘Social benefit’ is defined in narrow terms as follows -

‘...the value bus users enjoy from accessing particular services that they would not otherwise have had easy access to’.

Further, the value arrived at only applies to travellers ‘who would choose to not make the trip if bus was not available,’ so again it’s rather limited. But it’s a start, and the significance of the study is clearly that it acknowledges that society has a place for a service that is ‘public’.

It doesn't have to be about measuring the value of a chummy chat about the weather with a complete stranger as you're bumping along. But it might be handy to work out a way of assessing the value of being among fellow citizens in the public realm - and the costs that might be associated with the absence of that experience in certain lifestyles - because that seems to be dangerously under-valued at present.

Previously: On the buses

Comments

[busboy]

Kevin: here you go:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113176/science-loneliness-how-isolation-can-kill-you

“The Lethality of Loneliness,” by Judith Shulevitz; The New Republic, May 27, 2013, pp. 22-29.

[Kevin Harris]

Many thanks for this link Busboy - very striking stuff, and makes sense to me... 'loneliness, a social emotion, can reach into our bodies and rearrange our cells and genes... emotional impoverishment embeds itself in the body...'

At least at first reading, I think I reach a similar reading to Shulevitz, which would be around the malleability of the self in the social context. The policy contribution should be to stimulate collective encounters of whatever kind and to fully fund public space, for its benefits are inestimable.