The Government’s proposal to dedicate a fleet of Transport Board buses to transport school children is a welcome and timely initiative that could attract public support.We believe that such a service should be independent of the public bus company, the Transport Board, which daily struggles to ferry adult passengers - a slender thread that sustains our productivity and competitiveness given the strong dependence of working men and women on the buses in ultramarine and gold. It need not be wholly state-owned: there is a significant non-profit sector that is waiting to be taken seriously as a viable alternative to the failure of market solutions for social problems.We have long argued that the market cannot support a growing nation’s transit needs, not without additional risk to life and limb by a private transit industry that has proved itself incapable of wrestling its greediest members to the ground. No advanced Western economy runs on an entirely or even mostly private and commercial transit system. None.
