Why ‘Uber for the countryside’ is a great idea

The disappearance of rural bus routes is one of the small tragedies of our time. It isn’t, alas, a very glamorous tragedy. It affects older people, poorer people, people who live in unfashionable parts of the country. You seldom see Twitter storms about rural bus routes. You don’t see footballers campaigning on the issue with moist eye, bent knee and clenched fist. Those awkward one-deck buses, trundling from village to village, debouching the odd person here and there at an unloved bus stop on a drizzly rural B-road: they will never occasion so plangently romantic an elegy as Flanders and Swann’s ‘The Slow Train’, which lamented in the 1960s the equivalent decline of the railways. 

But small tragedy it is. Rural bus routes are part of the network of capillaries that keep small communities alive, that bring just enough custom to keep the village pub or the local post office going. They help people who don’t have access to cars to get to work, to visit the doctor or – a good never measurable on official statistics – to visit one another.